Industry News

#420 — January 18, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Exploring JavaScript Modules: From IIFEs to CommonJS to ES6 Modules — A commonly 'under-learned' aspect of JavaScript is the module system, but given its unusual and varied history, that might not be a surprise. In this post (which also comes in video form), Tyler McGinnis provides a useful refresher of module approaches, both past and present.

Tyler McGinnis

Porting 30K Lines of Code From Flow to TypeScript — The story of how MemSQL ported 30 thousand lines of JavaScript from using the Flow static type checker to TypeScript. In related news, the Jest project (which is owned by Facebook, as is Flow) is also planning a switch to TypeScript.

David Gomes

Swift and Straightforward Bug Fixes for Your JavaScript Apps — Automatically detect & diagnose JavaScript errors impacting your users with Bugsnag. Get comprehensive diagnostic reports, know immediately which errors are worth fixing, & debug in a fraction of the time compared to traditional tools. Try it free.

Bugsnag sponsor

Why I've Stopped Exporting Defaults From My Modules — The creator of ESLint says that after years of fighting with default exports, he’s taking a different approach. He makes a compelling argument.

Nicholas C. Zakas

Animating URLs with JavaScript and Emojis — Half fantastic and half terrifying, this is a cute look at a technique to make your location bar a lot more memorable in a variety of ways..

Matthew Rayfield

💻 Jobs

UI Engineer, Design Systems (San Francisco) — As a UI Platform Engineer at Uber, you'll be building Base UI, Uber's design language for all web applications at Uber and beyond.

Uber

Senior Frontend Engineer - Redwood City, CA — Build the platform that empowers researchers to develop high-performance materials and chemicals faster than ever before.

Citrine Informatics

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in developer roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials and Opinions

How to Start a Node Project — Short and sweet but there are a few neat tidbits here I wasn’t familiar with.

Phil Nash

Build an App with Everything New and Noteworthy in Angular 7

Matt Raible

Being Type Strict Without Writing TypeScript — Explains how you can write typed JSDoc annotations in comments and have type safety checked in the IDE. An interesting compromise that may suit some setups or if you want to 'try out' static typing without going all in.

Kevin Nuut

Handling Time Zones in JavaScript

Dong Woo Kim

State Management in Angular Using Firebase and RxJS — A rather extensive and practical tutorial.

Joaquin Cid

Blazing Fast GraphQL PIM & Ecommerce Service — GraphQL backend for your ecommerce with subscription management?

Crystallize sponsor

Reverse Engineering GoDaddy's Tracking Script — A developer found that GoDaddy was injecting JavaScript into sites hosted by them in order to collect metrics for performance reasons.

Joshua Small

Why GraphQL is Taking Over APIs — GraphQL continues to eat the world and is a key technology to watch in 2019.

Azat Mardan

🔧 Code and Tools

Code to Graph: Visualize JavaScript Code as a Network Diagram — Certainly an interesting idea and fun to play with. Source here.

Vincent Lecrubier

NS:IDE: A JS IDE for Accessing a Phone/Tablet's Native Runtime — Uses NativeScript’s bindings to access native functionality.

Jamie Birch

✅ ZingGrid: Web Component-Based JavaScript Data Grid & Table Library — Make responsive data grids and tables with CRUD functionality, built-in layout modes, column types and more with ZingGrid.

ZingGrid sponsor

wpk: A Friendly, Intuitive, and Unofficial CLI for webpack

Sam Gluck

jsdiff: A JavaScript Text Diffing Implementation — Can compare strings for differences in various ways including creating patches for such changes. The library is quite mature but just reached version 4.0.

Kevin Decker

AlaSQL: A JavaScript SQL Database for Browser and Node.js — Handles both traditional relational tables and nested JSON data (NoSQL). Export, store, and import data from localStorage, IndexedDB, or Excel.

Andrey Gershun

Build Enterprise-Grade Apps for Free with Ext JS Community Edition

Sencha, Inc. sponsor

Shiny: Shiny Reflections for Mobile Websites — Add shiny reflections to page elements on devices that support DeviceMotion.

Rik Schennink

SurveyJS: A JavaScript Survey and Form Builder — Can integrate with Angular, jQuery, Knockout, React and Vue.js. Live demo here.

Devsoft Baltic

Sockette: A Tiny WebSocket Wrapper — A 348 byte wrapper around WebSocket that auto reconnects when necessary.

Luke Edwards

P.S. Next Tuesday (22nd), a long-time reader and friend of JavaScript Weekly, Brian Rinaldi, is hosting two great talks in an online event called JavaScript for Enterprise Development. It's free and no strings attached so check it out.

#419 — January 11, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

FromJS: An Experimental Data-Flow Analysis Tool for Front-End JS — An interesting tool that shows you where each value in the DOM comes from - very useful for looking at how other pages work or for certain types of debugging. There’s also a blog post and video about how it works. Note: Requires Node 9 or under for now.

Matt Zeunert

New ES2018 Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know — ES2018 wasn’t as huge a leap forward as ES6, but this post is packed with interesting examples of spread properties within object literals, asynchronous iterators and asynchronous iterables, Promise.prototype.finally, and other new features.

Faraz Kelhini

Frontiers 2019: Explore New Ways to Build Apps on Slack — Frontiers is a Slack conference exploring the future of work. In the developer track, you'll get immersive training on new functionality and hands-on workshops for app builders at all development stages. Register today for early bird pricing.

Slack sponsor

Node and JavaScript Testing Best Practices — A well presented collection of 30 best practices for better JavaScript testing, continuous integration, and overall quality.

Yoni Goldberg

2018 JavaScript Rising Stars — An annual roundup of which JavaScript projects did well in terms of GitHub stars over the prior year in various categories. It’s a bit of a popularity contest but it’s nice to get a feel for what’s going on.

Michael Rambeau

Anime.js 3.0: A JS Animation Library for the Web — A mature and powerful animation library takes another step forward with a new site, new documentation and examples, new easings, new callbacks, and more.

Julian Garnier

GitHub Announces Unlimited Free Private Repos — A late Christmas present comes from GitHub in the shape of their free offering now including unlimited private repositories (something that previously cost $7/mo) with a limit of three collaborators per repo. For balance, GitLab’s CEO had a response.

GitHub

💻 Jobs

Senior Web Developer at Dr. Bill (Remote OK) — Dr. Bill helps Canadian doctors save time by streamlining their billing. Help lead our team into the next phase of growth.

Dr. Bill

JavaScript/Node Developer - Brighton UK — Growing new-product team, modern JavaScript tools and data-driven innovation. Flexible working and a fierce commitment to L&D.

Madgex

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery matches top tech talent with growing companies. Create your profile to get started.

Vettery

📘 News, Tutorials and Opinions

Defensive JavaScript — “How to write code that doesn’t do what it oughtn’t”

Mike Samuel (Google)

How Do Top Developers Deliver Video? - Download the 2018 Video Report — Hundreds of developers around the world reveal their preferred video streaming solutions.

Bitmovin sponsor

Setting a React Project From Scratch Using Babel and Webpack

Anshul Goyal

A Look at TypeScript 2.8's Conditional Types — An intro to conditional types, a powerful addition to the type system introduced in TypeScript 2.8.

Marius Schulz

10 Best Tips for Learning Vue from Vue Masters — 6 Vue experts talk about what they wish they would have known when first starting out.

Gregg Pollack

So Many Ways to Learn Kotlin - Which Is Right for You?

Big Nerd Ranch sponsor

Things Dan Abramov Doesn’t Know — React core team member and the creator of Redux wants you to realize that “even your favorite developers may not know many things that you know” and shares his own list of blind spots.

Dan Abramov

Aurelia 2018 Year in Review — Not just a look back but a look at what’s happening this year too with the component-oriented client framework.

Rob Eisenberg

🔧 Code and Tools

DoneJS 3 Released — DoneJS is a framework for building high performance, real-time web and mobile apps and version 3 aims to provide ‘best in class server-side rendering’.

Matthew Phillips

Libraries To Help You Work with WebGL — Working with WebGL directly can get very verbose and technical quickly, but luckily there are libraries and toolkits to make it easier.

Arek Nawo

A Much Faster Way to Debug Code Than with Breakpoints or console.log — Wallaby catches errors in your tests and displays the results of expressions right in your editor as you type.

Wallaby.js sponsor

music-fns: Music Notation-Related JavaScript Functions — For things like working with note names, octaves, frequency, intervals, and scales.

madewithlove

Karin: A Promise Based HTTP Client That Uses Template Literals — Currently an experiment/work in progress. Uses the Fetch API under the hood.

Vahe

HotKeys.js: A Robust Library for Capturing Keyboard Input

Kenny Wong

Vue Glide: A Vue Component for the Glide.js Slider/Carousel

Anton Reshetov

#418 — January 4, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

RunJS: A JavaScript 'Scratchpad' Tool for macOS — Write and run JavaScript instantly. Useful for learning, experimenting, or perhaps even creating screencasts, tweets, or similar educational content.

Luke Haas

FBT: An Internationalization Framework from Facebook — Facebook has open sourced an internationalization framework that they’ve used internally till now. The goal is to be ‘both powerful and intuitive’. GitHub repo. Or see example usage code.

Facebook

Top JavaScript Frameworks and Topics to Learn in 2019 — We see a lot of ‘top X’ posts when editing JavaScript Weekly but this annual review of the JavaScript tech ecosystem by none other than Eric Elliott is always a crowd pleaser.

Eric Elliott

Make Magic with Creative Coding in Canvas & WebGL 🎩✨ — Use JavaScript to create generative art, interactive animations, 3D graphics with ThreeJS, and custom shaders in GLSL. ✨You'll learn the fundamentals for creative coding jobs like games, advertising, AR/VR and installation artwork!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Electron 4.0 Released — Electron is a popular project from GitHub that’s heavily used to create desktop apps with modern Web technologies. 4.0 introduces some new features but notably bumps up the underlying dependencies to Chromium 69, Node 10.11, and V8 6.9.

Michelle Tilley

Artificial Intelligence in JS with TensorFlow.js — A brief, high level explanation of one of the problems a system like TensorFlow.js can solve: the recognition of written numbers. (Note: This is one of the always great JavaScript January series that runs each year.)

Seth Juarez

What Happened with Node.js in 2018 — This week’s Node Weekly was dedicated to a month by month runthrough of the biggest things that happened in the world of Node.js. We also did a best frontend links of 2018 in Frontend Focus.

Node Weekly

💻 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

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery matches top tech talent with growing companies. Create your profile to get started.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials and Opinions

Fancy Function Parameters — The process behind making an opaque function call easier to understand using objects and optional arguments.

Jake Dohm

Creating and Filling Arrays of Arbitrary Lengths in JavaScript

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Creating a Reusable Accordion Component That Works Anywhere — How to make a web component using Angular Elements which can now be used with any or no framework.

Priyesh Patel

Read Now: the Ultimate Guide to Npm — Everything you need to know to know to use the npm CLI, from basic building blocks to time-saving tips and tricks.

NodeSource sponsor

Running Node.js 11 on AWS Lambda — With Lambda’s new Layers feature and custom runtimes you can now build your own custom artifacts, enabling you to share and manage common code between serverless functions.

Adnan Rahic

The Chronicles of JavaScript Objects — A back to basics tour of what objects are in JavaScript and how they behave.

Arfat Salman

Create Your First Custom Angular CLI Schematic with Nx — Nx is a toolkit for people building enterprise-grade Angular apps.

Sam Julien

Storing and Using the Last Known Route in Vue — How to keep a reference to the last known route a user visited in Vue. Also a good excuse to check out the all-new CSS Tricks redesign!

Mateusz Rybczonek

The Developer’s Guide to Not Losing the Metrics You Need

InfluxData sponsor

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

Adam Neary

Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With 'Full Stack' — Thoughts I think a lot of us may have had but hadn’t put into words yet.

Heydon Pickering

🔧 Code and Tools

AVA 1.0: A Powerful Test Runner for Node — AVA is a test runner with a concise API, detailed error output, and process isolation that let you write tests more effectively. You may find the README more useful than these release notes if you aren’t familiar with it yet though.

Mark Wubben and Sindre Sorhus

Take the Pain Out of Acceptance Testing with Gauge by Thoughtworks

Gauge sponsor

Rollup.js 1.0: A Module Bundler for JavaScript

Low.js: A Node Port for Embedded Devices — Has far lower system requirements than standard Node and can now be flashed on to ESP32-WROVER boards. Here’s how.

neonious GmbH

string-similarity: Finds Degree of Similarity Between Two Strings — Uses the Sørensen–Dice coefficient which is better than Levenshtein distance for many use cases.

Akash K

Magic Grid: A Simple Library for Dynamic Grid Layouts — This has a slightly different use case than CSS Grids may be useful for as explained in this article

Emmanuel Olaojo

Brain.js: A Neural Network Library — If you’re looking for an excuse to play with neural networks, there’s an interactive 19 part course on using Brain.js to do just that.

Robert Plummer