#622 — January 20, 2023
JavaScript Weekly
Why Not document.write()? — Many moons ago, document.write was a mainstay of client-side JavaScript code, but it’s long been considered a bad practice – why? Harry digs in, noting that it “guarantees both a blocking fetch and a blocking execution, which holds up the parser for far longer than necessary”.
Harry Roberts
New: The WebAssembly JavaScript Promise Integration API — A technical explanation from the V8 team on a new API to let WebAssembly apps bridge the synchronous / asynchronous gap of expectations around external functionality (consider that many apps are written synchronously, but modern Web APIs are usually asynchronous). JSPI helps bridge both worlds and can be tested via a flag in Chrome.
McCabe, Michaud, Rezvov, Dahl / V8 Team
Break the Programming Mold with Dependency Injection — Keep your code on the cutting edge with dependency injection in JavaScript. Check out Snyk’s guide that gives a breakdown of what dependency injection is, when you should use it, and what popular JavaScript frameworks it’s implemented.
Snyk sponsor
Why Is My Jest Suite So Slow? — Jest is known for its speed and simplicity so the author was surprised at how quickly his team’s test suite was slowing down. This is a write up of the ensuing investigation along with the improvements that slashed test running time.
Steven Lemon
Bun v0.5 Released — Bun is another JavaScript runtime taking the world by storm and a level of Node compatibility has been baked in from the start. v0.5 adds support for node:readline, workspaces, a node:dns shim, and network socket creation support such that more Node.js-based database libraries work out of the box.
Ashcon Partovi
IN BRIEF:
The ▶️ latest episode of the JS Party podcast tackles ‘the rise and fall’ of JavaScript frameworks and the modern trend towards smaller ones.
The folks at NodeSource have put together a top 10 list of Node open-source projects ‘to keep an eye on’ in 2023.
RELEASES:
⭐️ esbuild 0.17.0
↳ Popular bundler. Note that this is a key release with backwards incompatible changes.
Inertia.js 1.0
↳ Build SPAs for any backend.
Remix 1.10.0
↳ Popular full stack framework.
📒 Articles & Tutorials
🎨 Building an Accessible Theme Picker — An attractively presented, easy to follow tutorial for a handy site feature.
Sarah L. Fossheim
Fixing a Memory Leak in a Production Node.js App — Kent encountered a variety of weird memory and CPU usage spikes in his Node-powered app and decided to figure out what was going on. This post walks through his complete journey, with plenty of side problems encountered along the way, before discovering the root cause was where he least expected it.
Kent C Dodds
Build a Mobile-Responsive Telehealth Pager App Using Stream’s Chat API — Build a responsive chat app with emojis/reactions, built-in GIF support, ability to edit/delete messages, direct & group chat, and more.
Stream sponsor
📊 A Beginner’s Guide to Chrome Tracing — For when you want to go deeper than the Performance tab. With tracing, you can record what a browser is up to far behind the scenes.
Nolan Lawson
Handling Errors Like a Pro in TypeScript — “Learn the design pattern I use to handle errors and write cleaner code.”
Kolby Sisk
A Beginner’s Guide to async/await with Examples
James Hibbard
10 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting with Vue 3
Fotis Adamakis
🛠 Code & Tools
RoughNotation: Cute Animated ‘Rough’ Text Annotations — Uses Rough.js (itself a project worth checking out) to get a hand-drawn look. Lots of nice interactive examples on the page showing a variety of annotation styles (boxes, underlines, circles..)
Preet Shihn
Free Website Speed Test: Does Your Site Meet Google’s Core Web Vitals? — Get an in-depth technical analysis of your site and learn how to make it fast. Rank higher in Google & deliver great UX.
DebugBear sponsor
Modern Errors: Handle Errors in a Simple, Stable, Consistent Way — Create error classes, wrap or aggregate errors, or use one of several plugins to do things like print bug reporting info, print stack traces, or more. Happy in both Node and the browser.
ehmicky
Shifty: A Small, Fast Tweening Engine — All it does is tweening. It’s a low level animation solution that you can integrate into any rendering mechanism of your choice. The examples here demonstrate it well as it can be used for ‘animating’ things in an unconventional sense. GitHub repo.
Jeremy Kahn
Barba.js: For Smooth Visual Transitions Between Pages — You certainly can’t say the project’s homepage doesn’t show off all of its features! For such a dramatic set of effects, things feel smooth and.. surprisingly tolerable 😁 GitHub repo.
De Rosa, Michel, et al.
Rete.js 1.5: A Framework for Visual Programming — Create a node-based editor in the browser and apply logic. Check out these demos on CodePen. GitHub repo.
Vitaliy Stoliarov
Don’t Let Your Issue Tracker Be a Four-Letter Word. Use Shortcut
Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io) sponsor
gpu-io: GPU-Accelerated Computing Library — for physics simulations and other mathematical calculations. A neat look at the power of WebGL. Several examples.
Amanda Ghassaei
Chart.js 4.2
↳ Simple Canvas-based charts. (Samples.)
Serialize JavaScript 6.0.1
↳ Serialize JS to a JSON superset.
axios-retry 3.4
↳ Axios plugin that retries failed requests.
Axios 1.2.3 – Popular HTTP client library.
Commander.js 10.0 – Node.js CLIs made easy.
Mineflayer 4.7 – JS API for Minecraft bots.
Wretch 2.4 – Fetch API wrapper with niceties.
💻 Jobs
Developer Relations Manager — Join the CKEditor team to build community around an Open Source project used by millions of users around the world 🚀
CKEditor
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