Modern web development involves a complicated toolchain for managing dependencies. One part of this toolchain is the bundler, a tool that puts all your code and dependencies together into static asset files. The most popular bundler is webpack, which was originally released in 2012, before browsers widely supported ES Modules.

Today, every major browser supports the ES Module system, which improves the efficiency of JavaScript dependency management. Snowpack is a system for managing dependencies that takes advantage of the browser support for ES Modules. Snowpack is made by Pika, a company that is developing a set of web technologies including a CDN, a package catalog, and a package code editor.

Fred Schott is the founder of Pika and the creator of Snowpack. Fred joins the show to talk about his goals with Pika, and the ways in which modern web development is changing.