Developer tools influence daily software development, with the best tools often fading into the background when successful. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either cause friction and endless debates or seamlessly eliminate certain workflow issues. Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has experienced both as it rapidly grew and increased in complexity.
Prettier arose as a solution to the unexpectedly human problem of engineers spending too much time discussing code style rather than building software. It provides a deterministic, opinionated formatter that normalized automation in daily development.
James Long, a design and product engineer who has worked at Mozilla and Stripe, created Prettier. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to discuss the origins of Prettier, why formatting debates are emotionally charged, the technical challenges of building formatters, maintaining popular open-source tools, and the ongoing evolution of the JavaScript tooling ecosystem.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full-time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects improving TypeScript development, particularly typescript-eslint, which enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh contributes regularly to ecosystem projects like ESLint and TypeScript. He’s a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of “Learning TypeScript” (O’Reilly), a valuable resource for developers learning TypeScript without prior experience outside JavaScript. Josh frequently presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups, sharing knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and frontend and web development. [Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.](http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/SED1906-Pretter.txt)
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