#484 — April 17, 2020

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???? If you're bored this weekend at all, consider joining the latest Ludum Dare — it's an online game jam that's been taking place for 18 years and more JavaScript entries are appreciated against all the Unity crowd ????

JavaScript Weekly

Writing an 'Emulator' in JavaScript (and Interfacing with Multiple UIs) — This is really neat. Tania built a Chip-8 interpreter in JavaScript and has gone into quite a bit of detail about what was involved here. Lots of neat bits and pieces to pick up from this.

Tania Rascia

jQuery 3.5.0 Released — I know many of you will groan, but I’m delighted when I see a new jQuery release. It’s still so heavily used. No headline features though, this is a security fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability, plus some tweaks and fixes in preparation for jQuery 4.0 (yes!)

Timmy Willison (jQuery Foundation)

Build a Game of Battleship with TypeScript & Java. Free Course — Join over 2000 developers creating a game of Battleship with TypeScript, Spring Cloud Stream (Java), and PubSub+. This free 30-minute course is a great way to learn the basics of messaging and event-driven architecture with the Aurelia framework.

Solace sponsor

Profiling React.js Performance — Goes into detail on aspects of the React Profiler API, React’s new experimental Interaction Tracing API, and measuring custom metrics using the User Timing API.

Addy Osmani

Userscripts are Fun and Still Very Much Relevant — ‘Userscripts’ are basically JavaScript programs that run in the context of other Web pages so you can add your own features. They were really popular for a while but still exist and are still a neat use case for using JavaScript to improve your Web experience.

Eldad Bercovici

Another Look at What's New in ECMAScript 2020 — We linked to Dr Axel’s roundup recently, but here’s another take, looking at dynamic imports, nullish coalescing, optional chaining, BigInt, and more.

Ianis T.

???? Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Senior JavaScript Developer (Warsaw, Relocation Package) — Open source rich text editor used by millions of users around the world. Strong focus on code quality. Join us.

CKEditor

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Tutorials

How To Create a Particle Trail Animation in JavaScript — Particle animations are particularly (sorry) striking.. and in this article, Anna Prenzel shows how to easily create your own such effects with Anime.js.

Smashing Magazine

Strategies for Migrating to TypeScript — A quick overview of some strategies for migrating code bases from JavaScript over to TypeScript.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Developing in a Monorepo While Still Using Webpack — Second part in a series discussing things the team at Etsy learned during the migration of a home-grown, Require.js-based build system to webpack, which took over a year.

Salem Hilal

A More Productive Way to Build Your JavaScript Apps — Write better code, debug it, and test it – all in one place. Try WebStorm. No configuration required.

WebStorm sponsor

▶  Let's Build a Digital Circuit Simulator in JavaScript — A special episode of the Low Level JavaScript series takes us on a brief journey into the world of digital logic.

Low Level JavaScript

How To Set Up an Express API Backend Project with PostgreSQL — A pretty extensive walkthrough of creating an HTTP API using Express with Node.js and Postgres on the backend, then deploying it all on Heroku.

Chidi Orji

Speed Up Your Angular App: 14 Optimization Tips — Tips on how to make your Angular app smaller, faster, and more responsive.

Marcelo Ricardo de Oliveira

Class-Related Types in TypeScript

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

????▶ A Fireside Chat on the State of Microservices on April 21 — We recently helped The Software House with a developer survey (thanks to those who took it!) and now they’re doing a live chat on the state of microservices next Tuesday featuring Yan Cui, Alessando Vozza, and others.

The Software House

???? Code & Tools

Puppeteer 3.0: It Now Supports Firefox — Best known for as a way to headlessly control Chrome from Node, Puppeteer has recently seen some competition in the form of the cross-browser Playwright recently. But, no fear, Puppeteer is stepping up and can now work cross-browser too. We also learn Puppeteer is migrating to TypeScript.

Mathias Bynens

Open-Source Serverless CMS Powered by React, Node.js and GraphQL API — Build dynamic websites and apps with Webiny. 100% powered by JavaScript. Deploy your sites to AWS Lambda.

Webiny Serverless CMS sponsor

Rome: An Experimental JavaScript Toolchain — A compiler, linter, formatter, bundler, testing framework and more. Started by Sebastian McKenzie (of Babel and Yarn fame), Rome is now a project from the React Native team at Facebook. Related repo.

Facebook

Vime: A New, Modern Media / Video Player for the Web — Aims to be a ‘modern alternative to Video.js and Plyr’: “The idea behind Vime is we want you to control the player, not the other way around.” Modular, tree-shakable, and with potential for a plugin ecosystem. GitHub repo.

Rahim Alwer

Vuln Cost: An Open Source Security Scanner for VS Code — Free Snyk-powered VS Code extension that finds security vulnerabilities in npm packages, providing feedback in-line with your code, such as how many vulnerabilities a package has.

snyk

ip-num: A Library to Work with ASN, IPv4, and IPv6 Numbers — Happy in both Node and the browser.

dadepo

Flip: Animated Flip Counter Plugin to Add a Countdown to a Website — Adds an animated dynamic countdown timer to a page. No dependencies, responsive and mobile friendly, and fits any language, locale, or time zone.

Rik Schennink

The Perfect Partner to MongoDB Atlas. Try It for Free

Studio 3T sponsor

A JavaScript API for Controlling 'Simpsons: Hit & Run' — Including this as a bit of fun if you fancy noodling on something odd. Remote controlling games from JS seems neat, although I suspect just getting this running would take a while..

Tavis Ormandy

#485 — April 24, 2020

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JavaScript Weekly

Introducing Crank.js: A New JSX-Driven Framework — A new framework for creating JSX-driven components with functions, promises and generators. If you haven’t got time to read the creator’s lengthy (but well worth reading!) rationale for creating another framework, check out the GitHub repo or jump straight into a CodeSandbox example. I hope to see a lot more about this in the near future.

Brian Kim

The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks — Using data from the HTTP Archive, Tim explores the performance cost of using various popular frameworks as a starting point. Some good analysis here.

Tim Kadlec

You Hacked the Gibson? Yeah, They Built Their Own Login — Don't let Crash Override pwn your app. FusionAuth adds secure login, registration and user management to your app in minutes not months. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Node.js 14 Released — v14 now becomes the current ‘release’ line with it becoming a LTS (Long Term Support) release in October. Diagnostic reports are now a stable feature, it now uses V8 8.1, there's an experimental Async Local Storage API, and more.

Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs

Vidact: A Compiler to Convert React-like Apps to Vanilla JS — Compiles pure React-compatible JavaScript (JSX) to vanilla JavaScript with no virtual DOM.. think similar to Svelte, but without introducing a new syntax. A curious idea.

Mohamad Mohebifar

Highlight.js 10.0: The Web Syntax Highlighter Library — I always laugh when I see a big release of a popular library and saw we last linked it 5 years ago ???? Nonetheless, this is a big release and Highlight.js continues to be a fantastic library for syntax highlighting code.

highlight.js

???? Jobs

Senior Full-stack Developer (Malmö/Sweden) — Every day is different from the next. Join our upbeat Team and work on exciting, major projects using a modern JavaScript stack.

Ortelius AB

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Tutorials

▶  React: The Basics in 20 Minutes — A well presented, up to date (yep, it covers hooks) tutorial that doesn’t hang around, whether you’re new to React or just want a refresher.

Devistry

Creating Web Apps via TypeScript and webpack — The example app doesn’t use any front-end framework, just vanilla DOM APIs. Some knowledge of TypeScript, webpack, and npm are required, but this is a neat way to bring together a bunch of tools.

Axel Rauschmayer

What Is The toJSON() Function? — If an object has a toJSON function, JSON.stringify() calls toJSON() and serializes the return value from toJSON() instead.

Valeri Karpov

A Much Faster Way to Debug Code Than with Breakpoints or console.log — Move forward and backwards through your code to understand what led to a specific bug, view runtime values, edit-and-continue, and more.

Wallaby.js sponsor

How Does TypeScript Work? A Bird’s Eye View — Dr. Axel goes into depth on the structure of a typical TypeScript project, what gets compiled, and how can an IDE be used to write TypeScript. Aimed at people who haven’t yet picked TypeScript up.

Axel Rauschmayer

10 Lesser Known Angular Features You've Probably Never Used

W3Radar

You Might Not Need switch — Using an object of outcomes instead of switch suits many use cases, though take care over readability.

Valentino Gagliardi

???? Code & Tools

Phelia: A Reactive Slack Application Framework — If you think Slack apps were all about text bots, think again.. you can now create apps complete with in-app UIs. Phelia brings the React approach to the task.

Max Chehab

Marked.js 1.0: A Fast Markdown Parser and Compiler — Got Markdown to render? Marked.js to the rescue. While the project is years old, 1.0 has dropped just this week. Here’s a live demo.

Christopher Jeffrey

Stream Chat API & JavaScript SDK for Custom Chat Apps — Build real-time chat in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure.

Stream sponsor

Alpine.js: A Minimal Framework for Composing JS Behavior in Your Markup — We only gave Alpine a brief link when it first dropped but with new versions coming out thick and fast, we think it’s well worth a look. Billed as “like Tailwind for JavaScript”, Alpine lets you keep the HTML you know and love and just pepper it with JavaScript as and where appropriate.

Alpine.js

enroute: A React Router with a Small Footprint for Modern Browsers

TJ Holowaychuk

Rosetta: A General Purpose Internationalization Library in 292 Bytes — Less than 300 bytes, but does have a few dependencies. Aims to be very simple and is targeted at basic string use cases.

Luke Edwards

NAB 2020 May Be Canceled, But The Full Bitmovin Experience Is Not

Bitmovin Inc. sponsor

Hotkey 1.4: Trigger an Action on an Element When a 'Hotkey' is Pressed — Use Hotkey, set the data-hotkey attribute on your elements, and you get keyboard shortcuts. GitHub built and uses it (look for the data-hotkey attributes on their pages).

GitHub

web-worker: Consistent Web Workers for the Browser and Node — In Node it works as a web-compatible Worker implementation atop worker_threads. In the browser it’s an alias for Worker.

Jason Miller

#486 — May 1, 2020

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JavaScript Weekly

???? I18n Ally: An All-in-One i18n Extension for VS Code — Got some internationalization work to do? I18n Ally gives you inline annotations, automated translations via Google Translate (which you can review), progress indication, etc. Supports React, Angular, Vue and other frameworks.

Anthony Fu

How a Few Lines of Code Broke Lots of Packages — Just under a week ago, people were reporting that create-react-app was broken. The culprit? A tiny change in a tiny dependency: is-promise. Luckily a fix was out very quickly and the creator of is-promise reflects on what happened here. Liran Tal also has some analysis of the situation.

Forbes Lindesay

Identify Front-End Issues Like JavaScript or Network Errors Fast — Datadog’s algorithmic alerts will proactively alert on any client-side issues such as JavaScript and network errors. Optimize the load time of your front-end resources, and detect any UI issues that affect critical user journeys. Try it free with Datadog Synthetics.

Datadog sponsor

Q: A JavaScript 'Quantum Circuit' Simulator — Bring quantum computing to your browser with this JavaScript simulation. If you were never quite sure what your JavaScript code was going to do, now you can formally explore the concept ????

Stewart Smith

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Senior Full-Stack Developer (Malmö/Sweden) — Every day is different from the next. Join our upbeat Team and work on exciting, major projects using a modern JavaScript stack.

Ortelius AB

???? Tutorials

A Guide to window.location — A breakdown that covers most of the methods and properties available on the DOM’s window.location object.

samantha ming

Implementing Dark Mode in React Apps Using styled-components

Blessing Krofegha

▶  Let's Build a Financial Dashboard App with React (Webinar On‑Demand) — Join TJ VanToll as he walks you through building a responsive Bootstrap-themed Stocks Portfolio app. Check it out today.

Progress KendoReact sponsor

Getting Started with NuxtJS — Learn how to create Vue.js-powered server-side rendered apps with NuxtJS including configuring an app and deploying it on Heroku.

Timi Omoyeni

▶  Learn Svelte: A 16-Part Course on Learning the Popular UI Framework — The course centers around building a chatbot, which is a nice change from the todos and other overused tutorial examples.

noah kaufman

10 Practical JavaScript Tricks — These kinds of lists are usually pretty run of the mill, but this one actually contains some lesser-known quick tips that you may not have seen before.

zander shirley

Moving TinyMCE to Modern JavaScript — The creators of TinyMCE (a popular WYSIWYG HTML editor) have been refactoring its rather legacy JavaScript (the first version came out 17 years ago!) to modern practices.

Joakim Lindkvist

7 JavaScript Design Patterns Every Developer Should Know — This is sort of like a (very) mini version of Addy Osmani’s 2017 book on JS design patterns (which is referenced at the end of the post).

deven rathore

▶  An Introduction to State Machines Using XState — XState is a neat way to work with state machines in JavaScript, Kyle is a neat teacher, and Egghead is a neat platform for unlocking these videos for us too.

Kyle Shevlin

Ride Down Into JavaScript Dependency Hell

AppSignal sponsor

A Collection of Challenging TypeScript Exercises — “The goal: Let everyone play with many different TypeScript features and get an overview of TypeScript capabilities and principles.”

Marat Dulin

A Visual Guide to React Mental Models — Different people learn in different ways but good mental models are always valuable and can be helpful if you need to juggle all of the pieces involved in a framework like React.

Obed Parlapiano

Turning Vue Components Into Reusable npm Packages — Outlines how you can reuse Vue components across your projects by automating your process to bundle, test, document, and publish your components.

Sjoerd de voorhoede

???? Code & Tools

jExcel v4: A Vanilla JS Interactive Table / Spreadsheet Control — 4.0 adds support for tabs/workbooks, updating a remote data source with JSON, formula support in a sheet footer, and more. There are lots of demos and examples on the official homepage.

Paul Hodel

Will It CORS? — A handy online tool/wizard for establishing how your (potential) use case will (or won’t!) operate alongside CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

HTTP Toolkit

Get Great Visual Feedback & Bug Reports, Even from Non-Technical Folk — Simply click a page element to pin visual feedback with screenshots & metadata. BugHerd = fast and easy bug tracking.

BugHerd sponsor

utfu: Replace Busted Characters From Legacy Text with UTF-8 — Useful when old content contains characters like “— in place of a single quote, and similar legacy text issues.

Daniel Sieradski

Middy 1.0: A Node Middleware Framework for AWS Lambda — Middy’s aim is to make writing serverless functions (hosted on AWS Lambda) easier by providing a familiar middleware abstraction to Node developers.

Luciano Mammino

useWorker() 3.0: A React Hook for Blocking-Free Background Tasks — Makes it easier to throw tasks off to a Web Worker in React.

Alessio Koci

webpack-blocks: Configure webpack using Functional Feature Blocks

Andy Wermke

JZZ: A MIDI Library for Node and the Browser — Send, receive and play MIDI messages from both Node and the browser on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Sema

MDX 1.6: Use JSX in Markdown Documents — This version introduces initial Vue support.

Compositor and Vercel

#487 — May 8, 2020

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JavaScript Weekly

Jest 26 Released: The Popular Testing Framework — Jest is a popular testing framework that works with pretty much everything. This release focuses on getting the dependency count and install size down (this causes some breaking changes, unsurprisingly), adds a new fake timer implementation, drops Node 8 support, and initial, experimental ESM support to play with.

Christoph Nakazawa

1LOC: A Collection of One-Line JS Snippets — A neat little collection of vanilla JavaScript one-liners divided into various categories (arrays, date/time, checking objects, DOM work, etc.) You can submit your own for inclusion too.

Nguyen Huu Phuoc

Hardcore Functional Programming in JavaScript — Brian Lonsdorf teaches you functional programming concepts in JavaScript such as pure functions, currying, composition, functors, monads and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Debug Anything: The Basics — A six part series (all ready to read now) on debugging your JavaScript and TypeScript code with the debugger built into Visual Studio Code.

Charles Szilagyi

Comparing Ember Octane and React — This is about as detailed a comparison as you could hope for and a demonstration of just how much Ember contributes to the JavaScript ecosystem. Octane really kicks things up a notch for Ember, too.

Chris Garrett

Deno 1.0 is Due Next Week: Here's What You Need to Know — In 2018 Node's creator Ryan Dahl told us 10 Things I Regret About Node.js and revealed a prototype of Deno, a new V8-based runtime, and here's what you need to know about it. Short of time? This two-minute video sums up the biggest wins quickly.

David Else

???? Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Tutorials

How To Build a Vue Survey App Using Firebase — A step-by-step guide to building a functional survey app using Vue.js and Firebase for both authentication and as a database.

David Atanda

A Brief Look at ES2020's Promise.any — When you need to know when at least 1 promise got resolved among an iterable of Promise objects, Promise.any() is the solution.

Marios Fakiolas

ES2020: Everything You Need to Know — An ES2020 roundup!

Martin McKeaveney

Building a Crossword Puzzle Generator — As a NY Times crossword addict, I love a good crossword, but if you’d rather figure out how to make your computer solve them, be my guest ???? This post guides you on how to approach the problem.

Mitchum

Git Best Practices for SOC 2 Compliance Quick Wins — Get quick wins for your SOC 2 compliance audit, and raise developer productivity at the same time.

Datree.io sponsor

Getting Started with Sapper and Svelte — Sapper is a Svelte-powered framework.

Chris Boakes

A ES2015+ Cheatsheet — A one-page guide to ES2015+ features based around brief example snippets.

Devhints.io

How to Fix ESLint Errors Upon Save in VS Code — A quick-fire tip.

David Walsh

How to Build a Blog with Next 9.3, Netlify, and Markdown — Learn how to build a Next.js-powered Markdown blog and deploy it to the Netlify platform.

Cassidy Williams

A Canvas Engine Comparison: PixiJS vs Two.js vs Paper.js — A benchmark of three popular 2D rendering engines/drawing APIs. Note: This will tax your system.

SlayLines

???? BTW, if you like videos, we need to shout out Florin Pop's YouTube channel as he's just passed 20k subscribers by posting neat JavaScript videos and live streams nearly every day for the past six months! ???? Lots of great stuff on there for JavaScript developers of all skill levels.

???? Code & Tools

Selecto.js: Make Elements Selectable Within an Area — Let’s say you have a number of elements that represent choices, data, whatever, and you want users to be able to select a subset of them by clicking/pointing and dragging. That’s what this does. Live examples here.

Daybrush (Younkue Choi)

Visual Studio Code April 2020 Released — Probably the most widely used editor in the JavaScript space now and April brings some neat new features like being able to work on GitHub issues within the editor.

Microsoft

Stream Chat API & JavaScript SDK for Custom Chat Apps — Build real-time chat in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure.

Stream sponsor

Majestic 1.7: A Zero Config GUI for Jest — A tool to help make your JavaScript testing life a little easier. Run npx majestic in the folder of any project that uses Jest to give it a quick try.

Raathi Kugarajan

Pico: Take Browser Screenshots Client-Side with JavaScript — Different from capturing a webpage using Puppeteer or a similar tool in that the screenshot taking happens entirely client side.

Gripeless

React Flow: A Library for Rendering Interactive Graphs — If you have a need to lay out graphs in a visual way and be able to smoothly pan and zoom around such graphs, this is an interesting new library. Live demo here.

Moritz Klack

MongoDB Is Easy. Now Make It Powerful. Free Download for 30 Days.

Studio 3T sponsor

NeutralinoJS: Build Cross-Platform Apps Using JS, HTML and CSS — Sounds just like Electron, right? Not quite. NeutralinoJS use less memory and are smaller as they don’t ship a full browser inside. 1.4.0 just dropped.

Neutralinojs

Slugify 1.0: Simply Turns Strings into URL/Filename-Friendly 'Slugs' — e.g. ‘I ♥ Dogs’ becomes ‘i-love-dogs’

Sindre Sorhus

RxJS Primitives: A Set of Libraries That Provide Operators for RxJS

Tane Piper