#446 — July 19, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Smashtest: A Language for Describing Test Cases — A Cucumber-esque way to write end to end tests in a more natural way but which essentially boil down to JavaScript powered tests. The examples on the homepage do a good job of selling the idea IMHO.

Smashtest

Introducing Osgood: A New V8-Based Platform for Building HTTP Servers — Built using Rust and the V8 JavaScript engine, Osgood is a new platform (a la Node) focused around building secure HTTP services. Security comes by demanding that I/O requirements are specified and enabled ahead of time. GitHub repo.

Thomas Hunter II

Triggering Trusted CI Jobs on Untrusted Forks — In this post, we discuss how to use Git itself as a means for marking code as trusted and we walk through a full demonstration of how these concepts can be applied to a specific repository host (GitHub) and CI provider (CircleCI).

CircleCI sponsor

▶  JavaScript, JavaScript…. Rocks You! — A fun, musically-packed look at how to recreate the sounds of effects pedals in JavaScript to play with audio in real time via the Web Audio API.

Vitalii Bobrov

Quark: A Software 'Sketchbook' for Node, HTML and CSS Experiments — Built in Electron but currently for Windows and Linux only, Quark is a Jupyter Notebook/Glitch-esque development environment for quickly creating HTML, CSS and JavaScript-based apps, complete with access to Node’s APIs and Electron’s native features.

Nishkal Kashyap

Google Explains the JavaScript SEO Basics — Did you know that when Googlebot is crawling the Web, it runs a version of Chromium behind the scenes and actually runs your JavaScript? This means there are some things to be aware of.

Google Developers

💻 Jobs

Frontend Engineer at Goodreads (Amazon) — Join Goodreads to build the frontend of a highly ambitious product that supports reading activities of more than 80 million readers.

Goodreads

Front End Engineer / TrackVia (Denver, CO) — TrackVia powers drag-n-drop creation of sophisticated enterprise apps. Join our fun & fast-pace team in beautiful downtown Denver.

TrackVia

Land a New Dev Job on Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials, Opinions, and Videos

Tetris Turns 35, so Let's Build a Tetris Clone — A guide to what’s involved in putting together your own Tetris clone with a nifty visual twist.

JavaScript Teacher

Is postMessage Slow? — A fantastic deep dive into performance issues and concerns around postMessage, a method used to send messages into a Web Worker.

Surma

Async Await Error Handling in JavaScript — Attempts to clear up some confusion caused when handling errors in async/await scenarios.

Valeri Karpov

Comprehensive Image & Video Management with Our JavaScript SDK — Upload, manipulate, optimize, & deliver rich media with code that integrates seamlessly. Try Cloudinary for free.

Cloudinary sponsor

A Look at Private Class Fields, a Proposed JavaScript Feature — A few weeks ago Axel covered public class fields, but private fields are part of the proposal too (currently at stage 3).

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

A 'Falling Sand'-Style Image Transition Effect in 16 Lines of JS — This is a lot neater than I was expecting.

Slicker

Reverse Engineering, or How YOU Can Build a Testing Library in JavaScript — The goal here is not to add another testing library to the giant pile of existing ones, but to learn more about how they work by building your own.

Chris Noring

Finally... A Post on finally in Promises — A quick explanation of when finally will fire when using a promise.

Sarah Drasner

Node.js 12: The Future of Server-Side JavaScript — Node.js 12 introduced several exciting improvements like ES6 module support, better application security, and quicker startup times.

Paige Niedringhaus

Angular Architecture Patterns and Best Practices (That Help to Scale)

Bartosz Pietrucha

Web Unleashed - The Front-End Developer Event in Toronto, Sept 13-14 — Networking, sessions, workshops and more. Save 20% on tickets to #WEBU19 with code JAVASCRIPTWEEKLY

FITC sponsor

Learn Svelte 3 by Building a Todo List App — A practical introduction to Svelte, a build-time UI framework that’s been getting a lot of love recently.

Ayo Isaiah

The Web Can't Survive a Monoculture — You have the power to prevent the Web becoming a Chrome-dominated monoculture, says Mike.

Mike Pennisi

🔧 Code and Tools

Color Thief: Grab Color Palettes from Images — Given an image, this uses canvas to return a list of the dominant colors.

Lokesh Dhakar

Polly.js: Record, Replay, and Stub HTTP Interactions — Working with both Node and in the browser, Polly taps into HTTP APIs and adds the ability to record and replay requests plus even slow down or speed up time.

Netflix, Inc.

MongoDB Atlas is a Powerful and Reliable Cloud Database. Try Now

MongoDB sponsor

Airtable.js: A JavaScript Client for Airtable — Airtable is a popular cloud-based spreadsheet-meets-database service. We use it at Cooperpress so it’s great to see a well maintained official library.

Airtable

SurveyJS: A JavaScript Survey and Form Library — Here’s a live demo.

Devsoft Baltic OÜ

jest-puppeteer: Run Your Tests using Jest and Puppeteer

Smooth Code

P.S. Did you know we're on Twitter as well? Follow us @JavaScriptDaily

#445 — July 12, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

QuickJS: A New, Small, Embeddable JavaScript Engine — Fabrice, the genius behind FFMPEG and JSLinux, is back with another project.. a complete JS engine (supporting the ES2019 spec!) built in a relatively tiny amount of C. Will this replace V8? No, it’s a small and relatively slow implementation, but perfect for embedded use or even for compiling down to WebAssembly as demonstrated in this live demo.

Fabrice Bellard

Improve Your JavaScript Knowledge By Reading Source Code — 👍 Reading other people’s source code is a great way to both learn a language and increase your confidence that your own code isn’t that much different. Indeed, if I get stuck with a language feature, I’ll often look at how other developers use it to work my way out of the problem.

Carl Mungazi

Instantly Know When JavaScript Errors Occur and How to Fix Them — With JavaScript error tracking from Rollbar you get exception and crash reports in real-time. Track and debug bugs in record time. Start monitoring and fixing errors in minutes - Try Rollbar for free.

Rollbar sponsor

How Do JavaScript’s Global Variables Really Work? — Great to see Dr. Axel blogging again. Here he digs into a variety of concepts around global variables and the global object (which is commonly considered ‘a mistake’).

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Hermes: A New JS Engine Optimized for React Native — You don’t get a new JavaScript engine for years, and then this week we get two! Hermes is a new engine released by Facebook that aims to dramatically speed up React Native apps on Android by introducing optimized build-time bytecode generation. Interested in the tech? Nadav Rotem shares some analysis.

Facebook

Why Every Vue Developer Should Be Excited by Quasar 1.0 — Quasar is a framework built on top of Vue.js, webpack, and Node for building a wide variety of things like SSR apps, SPAs, and even Electron apps. 1.0 came out just last week. GitHub repo.

Razvan Stoenescu

▶  Blazor: A Framework for Browser-Based .NET Apps — It’s been fun watching the development of Blazor, a framework from the ASP.NET team that brings .NET into the browser via WebAssembly and can interoperate with JavaScript. It’s worth being aware of this work even if you prefer JavaScript.

Steve Sanderson

💻 Jobs

Software Engineer Frontend (f/m/d) - Germany/Hamburg — We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer Frontend (React) (f/m/d) to join our international team.

collect Artificial Intelligence GmbH

Front-End Engineer - Jobox (Palo Alto, CA) — We're on a mission to shape the future of on-demand work. Join our team as we create a better future for our community of service providers.

Jobox

Land a New Dev Job on Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials, Opinions, and Videos

Modern Script Loading — You want to serve modern code to modern browsers, legacy code to the older browsers.. but how?

Jason Miller

▶  'I Didn't Know That!' – Random Facts About JavaScript — A 10 minute lightning talk that’s a veritable grab-bag of JavaScript tips. You could probably turn some of these into blog posts of their own!

Stefan Judis

Build Your JavaScript Skills with Manning — Want to make your JS skills reach new heights? We're offering an exclusive 40% off your order at manning.com. Just use the code jsweekly40 at checkout.

Manning Publications sponsor

How To Build A Sketch Plugin with JavaScript — Sketch is a popular (but commercial) vector graphics editor for macOS and you can dynamically extend it with our favorite language.

Smashing Magazine

Implementing an Efficient LRU Cache in JavaScript — Using typed arrays to design a low-cost pointer system for fixed-capacity data structures.

Guillaume Plique

An Overview of What's New in Node 12 — The ‘current’ Node 12.x branch is almost three months old but Adam Polak has brought together several features of note in one article with examples.

Adam Polak

How To Build a Minesweeper Game with JavaScript — I love fun tutorials like this. It’s not perfect JavaScript, it uses jQuery, and you might pick other holes in it, but you’ll learn something, have fun, and it works!

Mitchum

Weak References and Finalizers — WeakRefs can be a little tricky to get your head around (though don’t stress, you’re unlikely to need to use them).. but if you want to try.. 😄

Sathya Gunasekaran and Mathias Bynens

The Many Ways to Include CSS in JavaScript Apps — A look at the ways in which CSS can be handled within a JavaScript application — something of a controversial topic in the land of frontend development. I like option 1.

Dominic Magnifico

Webinar: Node.js Best Practices - Error Handling

NodeSource sponsor

Using TypeScript to Make Invalid States Irrepresentable — An interesting experiment based upon some ideas from Haskell.

Javier Casas

▶  A Deep Dive into React-Redux — A must watch if you use Redux with React and want to keep up with what’s new. Also make sure you’re getting our React newsletter for more like this.

Mark Erikson

🔧 Code and Tools

abcjs: Render Textual Music Notation into Visual Sheet Music — ABC is a plain-text form of musical notation and this library renders it into more typical graphical notation.

Paul Rosen and Gregory Dyke

26 VS Code Tools for JavaScript Developers — VS Code user? Worried you might be missing yet another useful extension to make your JS development life better? Binge on this list.

JSManifest

Next.js 9 Released: The Popular Server-Side React Framework — 9.0 introduces a lot of features like zero-config TypeScript support and ‘API routes’, a new way to build back-end APIs.

ZEIT

Get Live Runtime Feedback in Your Editor While Coding JS/TS — Quokka.js is available for VS Code, IntelliJ, Atom, and now Sublime Text. Community edition is free to use forever.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Marked: A Fast Markdown Parser and Compiler — Works in the browser or server-side. Demo here.

Christopher Jeffrey

jest-dom: Custom Jest Matchers to Test the State of the DOM — So you want to use jest to write tests that assert various things about the state of a DOM..

Testing Library

HumanizeDuration.js: Turn Milliseconds into Natural Language — So 97320000 becomes ‘1 day, 3 hours, 2 minutes’

Evan Hahn

Geodesy Functions Implemented in JavaScript — Geodesy is the science of measuring the earth, its shape, distances, etc. If you have a need to work with such concepts, these examples will be useful.

Chris Veness

Player.js: Work with Embedded Vimeo Players from JS — Note that this is only for Vimeo playback.

Vimeo

React Native 0.60 Released — If you target Android, take note of the breaking changes.

Ryan Turner

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