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.

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806: The King of Drag and Drop: Alex Reardon