#437 — May 17, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Faster, Smarter JavaScript Debugging in Firefox DevTools — If you haven’t tried out Firefox for a while, now’s a great time as the JavaScript debugging tools in the developer edition have had some huge improvements, such as support for setting breakpoints within a line, logpoints, and the ability to debug Web Workers.

Mozilla Hacks

A Faster Script Loading Future with BinaryAST? — BinaryAST is an over-the-wire format for JavaScript (backed by both Mozilla and Cloudflare) that aims to speed up parsing while keeping JavaScript’s semantics intact. Here’s how it works, what the benefits might be, and how Cloudflare are hoping to lean on BinaryAST in its goal to make the Web faster.

Ingvar Stepanyan (Cloudflare)

Join a Community of 3.5 Million Developers — Learn how to build highly-available web apps. Get started on the simplest cloud platform with a $50 credit.

DigitalOcean sponsor

GitHub Gets Its Own npm-Supporting Package Registry — npm packages are one of a few types of package that can be hosted and this will certainly shake up the JavaScript packaging ecosystem. NodeSource has a list of the pros and cons of this development for Node developers.

GitHub

Elegant Error Handling with the 'Either' Monad — Looking for an alternative to try…catch? This goes into a lot of detail, is illustrated, and might even help you finally get your head around monads if you’ve struggled so far.

James Sinclair

What's New in V8 Release V7.5 — The latest branch of the V8 JavaScript engine has been unveiled, giving us the usual view of what’s coming to Node and Chrome soon. Numeric separators are the main syntax tweak this time (e.g. 1_000_000 instead of 1000000) but WebAssembly and script streaming also pick up some improvements.

Dan Elphick (V8 Team)

In, JavaScript's Earliest Version == Was Like === Now — A neat bit of JavaScript (then called Mocha) trivia here.

Brendan Eich on Twitter

💻 Jobs

Product-Focused & Driven Frontend Engineers in Stockholm — Join our 30-person team of A-players, solve problems at global scale & help us become the most trustworthy online health company.

Diet Doctor Sweden AB

Find A JavaScript Job on Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials, Opinions, and Videos

Getting Started with Svelte 3 — We wrote about Svelte 3 a few weeks ago - it’s an intriguing UI framework that runs at build time and compiles down to efficient code. If you were waiting for a basic tutorial to follow, here you go.

Alligator

A Practical Guide to ES6 Proxy — Proxies, as introduced in ES6, open up interesting opportunities for metaprogramming in JavaScript, as examined in several examples here.

Thomas Barrasso

Boosting JavaScript: From MongoDB's Shell to Node.js — Moving a script from MongoDB’s JavaScript-powered shell to Node.js offers a chance to get to use an enormous range of tools and libraries.

MongoDB sponsor

Making the Move from jQuery to Vue — A long time jQuery user discusses the migration to Vue, providing a guide for those who “may be coming from years of jQuery experience and want to see how things can be done with Vue”.

Raymond Camden

JavaScript Engines: How Do They Even Work? — A whirlwind tour covering concepts like the call stack, memory, event loop, and callback queue.

Valentino Gagliardi

Functional-ish JavaScript — Baby steps you might want to consider when making your JavaScript code more functional in nature.

Daniel Brain (PayPal)

An Application Study in Serverless and Azure — An interesting walkthrough of the process behind creating an app that uses TypeScript and Vue.js on the frontend, C# in the back, and running on Azure.

Burke Holland

Kotlin Certified: Using Kotlin to Build Android Apps (7-Day Bootcamp)

Big Nerd Ranch sponsor

TypeScript 3.0's unknown Type, a Type-Safe Counterpart to any

Marius Schulz

🔧 Code and Tools

Announcing TypeScript 3.5 Release Candidate — Faster (in both type checking and incremental builds), a new Omit helper type, smarter union type checking, and more.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Reakit 1.0: A Toolkit for Creating Rich, Accessible React UIs — WAI-ARIA 1.1 compliant components including cards, popovers, headings, lists, labels, etc.

Diego Haz

Get Reliable JavaScript Tests with Gauge and Taiko — New open source test automation framework by ThoughtWorks.

Gauge sponsor

Ola.js: A Library for Smoothly Animating Values — Smooth tweening between values, ideal for live visualizations.

Francisco Presencia

page.js: A Tiny, Express-Inspired Client-Side Router — Continues to get frequent updates years on.

Matthew Phillips

Delighters.js: Trigger CSS Animations as a Page is Scrolled

Q42