Podcast Awesome 🎙️ Rage Coding, Headless Web Components, and the Future of DX with Burton Smith
Have you ever rage-coded your way into building a developer tool that actually fixes things? Burton Smith has. And we’re here for it.
In this episode of Podcast Awesome, Matt and Web Awesome's boss, Cory Laviska chat with Burton Smith. Burton is an open source wizard and creator of the Web Components Toolkit, and he tells us about the gap between the promise of Web Components and the messy reality devs often face.
💻 Burton’s toolkit bridges that gap like Gandalf on a DX bender.
In this episode we dive into:
⚙️ Developer experience pain points
🧩 Custom Elements Manifests (CEMs) and real-world tooling
🎯 Form-associated custom elements, declarative shadow DOM, and why they still have rough edges
🚀 Why frameworks finally (mostly) play nice with Web Components
📦 How open source tools can fix the stuff we all silently suffer through
🧠 And why making components “just work” should be table stakes
This one’s for devs who are tired of wiring up wrappers, fighting with VS Code autocomplete, or wondering why their component still doesn’t show up right in Storybook.
✨ Bonus: We get a little spicy about SSR, headless UI, and whether a global design system is even a thing we want.
⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 – Welcome to Podcast Awesome
02:00 – Meet Burton Smith: The Stuff Breaker
04:00 – Why Web Components Tooling is (Still) a Pain
06:00 – Closing the Gap Between DX and Dev Reality
12:00 – CEMs, ASTs, and Metadata Magic
20:00 – Form-associated Custom Elements (and the Weird Gaps)
24:00 – Declarative Shadow DOM: Blessing or Band-Aid?
28:00 – SSR, Frameworks, and the Next Frontier
34:00 – Global Design Systems, Gatekeeping, and Interop
42:00 – Headless UI vs. Useless DX
44:00 – How to Support Burton + Where to Find the Toolkit
🔗 Links & Resources
🌐 Burton’s Toolkit: https://wc-toolkit.com
🧙♂️ Follow Burton on GitHub: https://github.com/Breakstuff
🐦 Burton on Social: @StuffBreaker
📄 Learn more about Custom Elements Manifest: https://github.com/webcomponents/custom-elements-manifest
🛠️ Web Awesome: https://webawesome.dev
🧡 Shoutout to all you open sourcers building magic after hours
🎶 The Font Awesome Theme Song – Composed by Ronnie Martin
🎸 Music Interstitials by Zach Malm
🎬 Produced and edited by Matt Johnson with some extra help from Isaac Chase
Stay up to date on all the Font Awesomeness!