806: The King of Drag and Drop: Alex Reardon

Scott and Wes talk with Alex Reardon from Atlassian about developing drag-and-drop libraries, specifically the challenges with creating efficient and accessible drag-and-drop functionalities for the web. They also explore what it takes to build and implement a system that works seamlessly across various frameworks. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:18 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 01:51 What Alex does at Atlassian react-beautiful-dnd

Pragmatic drag and drop

04:38 What makes drag and drop tricky. 06:38 Use-cases. 10:54 What security is in place? 12:30 How to make it feel native. 19:20 Is the drag and drop spec ongoing? 20:03 How do you build this headless? 21:33 How does drag and drop work with frameworks? 23:48 Making drag and drop feel the same across mobile and desktop. 26:09 What’s the key to really good drag performance? 29:58 How do you make drag and drop accessible? 34:57 Pragmatic drag and drop code vs application code. Shoelace

shadcn

40:00 How does testing work? Playwright

Cypress

43:15 Internal adoption at Atlassian. 44:27 Working on high-impact projects. 49:15 Versioning and internal adoption at Atlassian. 51:29 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Alex: Coffee, James Hoffmann YouTube Channel. Shameless Plugs Alex: Dom Events. Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads