#660 — October 26, 2023
JavaScript Weekly
Transformers.js 2.7: ML for the Web, Now with Text-to-Speech — Transformers.js provides access to machine learning models directly in the browser for all sorts of tasks and v2.7 introduces audio generation (live demo.) The Web Speech API remains the natural choice for this task for now, but the ML approach will only continue to offer greater opportunities over time.
Joshua Lochner
🔥 Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework — It’s a spicy opinion piece but I think Jake has earned the right after his fantastic posts on CRDTs in which he focused on using vanilla JS web components rather than a system like React. Here, he explains why.
Jake Lazaroff
🗣 Jake’s post fuelled an extensive Hacker News discussion touching on everything from MDX and htmx‘s role, to state management and the ‘shallow’ nature of the Web Components API as-is.
Production Ready Postgres at Your Fingertips — Deploy a faster and more reliable Postgres cluster. Run in the cloud of your choice with management, backups, and production features handled for you. Get started with less than 5 minutes. Try it today.
Crunchy Bridge sponsor
Yarn 4.0 Released — Starting life as an npm alternative that resolved several of its major pain points, Yarn remains a popular choice and v4 introduces a new ‘hardened mode’ to protect you from various security issues, boasts an improved constraints engine, and has performance (almost) on par with pnpm.
Maël Nison
Node v21.1 (Current) Released with ESM Detection Feature — “The new flag –experimental-detect-module can be used to automatically run ES modules when their syntax can be detected. … We hope to make detection enabled by default in a future version..”
Michaël Zasso
🐦 The React team has announced the much anticipated Server Actions and Client Actions features are now available in React Canary.
📣 The Angular team is cooking up something big with Angular 17. Minko Gechev has teased a long, forthcoming release post and they’re encouraging us all to set a notification for Nov 6’s ▶️ live streamed ‘Special Angular Event’ on YouTube.
🎨 Photopea is a neat online image editor, but there’s now Vectorpea, a browser-based vector editor, a la Illustrator.
🤗 If you want to take initial steps into contributing to open source JavaScript projects on GitHub, verto.sh has curated a collection of projects to check out.
RELEASES:
p5.js 1.8 – Processing-inspired creative coding environment. v1.8 has some WebGL related improvements.
Node v20.9.0 (LTS) – Node v20 finally becomes the newest ‘active LTS’ release and has the codename ‘Iron.’
Billboard.js 3.10 – Rich charting library.
📒 Articles & Tutorials
Svelte by Example: A Gentle Introduction — A succinct, gentle, and code-focused introduction to Svelte and SvelteKit.
Sebastian De Deyne
‘Why I Won’t Use Next.js’ — From the perspective of web standards to concerns about increasing complexity, Kent C. Dodds shares his opinions on why he won’t use Next.js. It’s spicy and opinionated, but always thoughtful. (In other Kent news, he’s just launched Epic Web, his new full-stack webapp development course.)
Kent C. Dodds
Product for Engineers: A Newsletter Helping Flex Your Product Muscle — Subscribe to get curated advice on building great products, lessons from PostHog, and best practices of top startups.
PostHog sponsor
Goodbye, Node.js Buffer — Given Sindre’s gigantic number of libraries, he could possibly migrate half the ecosystem solo.. 😏 but he sets out a case for discouraging the use of Buffer in favor of the cross-platform Uint8Array, and explains how to make the move.
Sindre Sorhus
Changing Colors in an SVG Element with CSS and JavaScript — Almost everything inside an inline SVG image is up for modification using CSS and JS.
Kirupa Chinnathambi
ES Module Imports in Node.js and the Browser — Just a quick example/handy recap of the basic setup.
Eli Bendersky
Playing with the Gamepad API — One developer’s attempt to get JavaScript games ready to use controllers in the browser.
Alvaro Montoro
Using Cloudflare’s AI Workers to Add Translations to PDFs
Raymond Camden
▶ My Problem with Using TypeScript in 2023
James Q Quick
▶ Vue 3 for Beginners — A mega three hour workshop on YouTube.
Allan Jeremy
🛠 Code & Tools
Radix Vue 1.0: Unstyled, Accessible Components for Vue.js — An unofficial Vue port of the popular Radix UI component library. GitHub repo.
zernonia et al.
React Magic Motion: Automagical Animation for Components — Built on top of Framer Motion so you get all of its features, but with opinionated, default transitions for child components.
Etesam Ansari
No-Code Machine Learning on the Simplest Development Platform ‑ Catalyst
QuickML – Catalyst by Zoho sponsor
background-removal: Remove Image Backgrounds in JS — Wipe away backgrounds in both Node and the browser (so there’s a live demo) without relying on third party services. It does use a large pre-trained model to do this, however, and is GPL licensed, so your mileage may vary.
img․ly
Wireit: Makes npm/Yarn Scripts Smarter, More Efficient — Working with npm run and not replacing it, Wireit extends your scripts with features like result caching, parallelization, and re-running on changes.
📈 Perspective 2.6 – Data visualization and analytics component, suited for streaming or large dataset use cases, with a mildly hypnotic, rapidly updating homepage (above) – GitHub repo.
📋 Clipboardy 4.0 – Access the system clipboard from Node and browsers.
npm-publish 3.0 – GitHub Action to publish packages to npm.
http-fake-backend 5.0 – Build a fake backend by providing JSON.
Opal 1.8 – Ruby to JavaScript transpiler.
Never Stop Learning and Work #LikeABosch — At Bosch, you always keep growing. Upskill yourself into countless new roles, positions and opportunities. Learn more.
Bosch sponsor
MDX 3.0 – Use JSX in Markdown documents.
Size Limit 10 – Performance budget tool for JavaScript.
Jotai 2.5 – Atomic global React state management.
Protobuf-ES 1.4 – Protocol Buffers for JS/TS.
NodeBB 3.5 – Node.js-powered forum system.
QUOTABLE:
“There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.”
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Tony Hoare, inventor of the quicksort algorithm.