Dev Diary #12

2024 Year-End Meteor Community Update

As we wrap up 2024, I’m proud to have maintained my dev diary series throughout the year. This consistency demonstrates the value of long-term commitment in open source development.

December Highlights

Tailwind Integration Simplified

My biggest contribution this month is the Tailwind PR. After experiencing the inconvenient setup process of Tailwind in a Meteor project – which felt more like configuring a standard Node.js application – I decided to streamline the integration. After one night of tinkering, I simplified the process considerably. Now you just need to:

  1. Install the NPM package
  2. Set up the tailwind.config.js file And you’re ready to go!

Package Maintenance and Improvements

  • Following the successful merging of the underscore PRs, I’ve revived the check package PR, which improves utility usage across Meteor packages
  • Started a discussion about potentially removing CoffeeScript, continuing our modernization efforts
  • Helped set up CI for meteor-collection-helpers to ensure thorough testing of future PRs
  • Seeking community input on including Meteor-useraccounts-suite in MCP – join the discussion

Major 2024 Achievement: New Tutorial Series

The highlight of my year has been launching “Your First Meteor Application”. With the departure of the old Meteor team, there was a clear need for updated tutorials. The timing couldn’t have been better:

  • Released after Meteor 3.1 landed
  • Most packages have stabilized
  • Community has provided positive feedback I’m particularly interested in hearing from newcomers who use the tutorial to learn Meteor – all feedback, positive or negative, is welcome!

Looking Ahead to 2025

I’ve kicked off the new year by tackling jQuery removal from Blaze, starting with parseHTML. While it’s an ambitious goal, our success with underscore gives me confidence. We’re not trying to replicate React/Remix and fall for the zoomer sirens – rather, many jQuery utilities used in Blaze have modern alternatives, making jQuery increasingly obsolete. Rest assured that we’re taking backward compatibility very seriously, so there’s no need to worry about breaking changes.

Thank you all for your continued support throughout 2024. Here’s to another year of improving the Meteor ecosystem!