Plus MS brings more JavaScript to Excel, a tool for comparing performnce of JS snippets, and more. |

#​563 — November 5, 2021

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JavaScript Weekly

Chrome's New Feature to Record and Replay User Flows — It’s only a preview feature in Canary builds right now, but Chrome is adding a new Recorder panel to its DevTools which lets you record and replay a string of actions on a page (including under simulated slow network conditions). You can also measure the flow and get a performance trace for analysis.

Jecelyn Yeen (Google)

Angular 13 Released — Despite sentiment on social media, Angular continues to be a hugely popular framework, particularly in enterprise situations and v13 continues to push things forward with more of the Ivy related improvements coming through.

Mark Thompson

Another Bug Bites the Dust — AppSignal is an easy-to-use error and performance monitoring tool. We support the most popular Node.js frameworks and packages out-of-the-box. All features are included in all plans. Start a trial and send us your address for a box of Dutch cookies.

AppSignal sponsor

Microsoft Brings (More) JavaScript to Excel — At its latest Ignite conference, Microsoft unveiled an Excel update (currently in ‘preview’) that introduces a new JavaScript API for creating custom data types and functions based on them. More details here.

TechCrunch

Announcing TypeScript 4.5 RC — The first release candidate of TypeScript 4.5 is here with no changes now expected before the final release. We’ll focus more on the final release but a big change with this RC is deferring the promised ESM support for Node.js.

Daniel Rosenwasser and the TypeScript Team

QUICK BITS:

  • The V8 team has created the V8 v9.7 branch which introduces two new Array methods (findLast and findLastIndex) without needing a flag.

  • Two more npm packages have had malicious code injected by hijackers, this time it's coa and rc, both of which get millions of downloads per week.

  • Jeremy Wagner has written and now published, with A Book Apart, a new book called Responsible JavaScript.

  • Nat Friedman, who has been a fantastic steward and CEO for GitHub since its acquisition by Microsoft, is moving on and handing the reins over to Thomas Dohmke.

  • Talking of GitHub, if you fancy building a game in JavaScript consider joining their Game Off 2021 event – you get till December 1 to submit an entry.

RELEASES:

Visual Studio Code (October) – Light on JS updates this time.
axios-hooks 3.0 – React hooks for Axios.
Recoil 0.5.0 – Experimental React state management library.
Marked 4.0 – Markdown parser and compiler.
jqGrid 5.6 – jQuery tabular data grid plugin.
Rollup 2.59.0 – ES module bundler.
Puppeteer 11 – Headless Chrome Node.js API.

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on long-term projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.
X-Team

Software Engineer — Join our "kick ass" team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we're always looking for more exceptional engineers.
Sticker Mule

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.
Hired

📖 Tutorials, Opinions & Stories

▶  Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? — The creator of frontend framework Svelte talks about the criticisms lodged towards single-page apps and how ‘transitional apps’ may be the way forward. Lots of good insights here that will probably make you feel a bit smarter afterward too.

Rich Harris

Developer Tools Secrets That Shouldn’t Be Secrets — An Edge-focused look at console power tips, how to use browser developer tools outside the browser, and more.

Christian Heilmann

Visualizing Time Series Data with the Highcharts Library and InfluxDB — Learn how to use Highcharts library to understand and act on IoT data in this hands-on tutorial.

InfluxData sponsor

Creating the Effect of Transparent Glass and Plastic with Three.js — The effects you can pull off in the browser nowadays continue to impress me as someone who grew up on 8-bit graphics(!) ;-)

Kelly Milligan

How to Show/Hide Elements in Vue — How to use v-if, v-show and :class to show/hide elements in Vue.

Dmitri Pavlutin

▶  What is Astro? — Drew McLellan talks to developer Matthew Phillips about the modern static site builder.

Smashing Podcast podcast

Best Practices for Embedding Third-Party Web Widgets
Ravidu Perera

Proxying Third-Party JavaScript as First-Party JavaScript (and the Potential Effect on Analytics)
Chris Coyier

How to Deploy a Vue.js 3 App on Azure Static Web Apps
Obinna Odirionye

🛠 Code & Tools

Hasty: A JavaScript Snippet Perfomance Comparison Tool — A quick, easy-to-use online tool that lets you test variations of a particular snippet to see which one performs best. A bit like jsPerf from the old day, or other tools like perf.link and jsBench.

Mads Cordes

Coding Font: A 'Game' to Find Your New Favorite Code Font — This is a fun idea. It throws over 25 popular developer-oriented fonts into a ‘tournament’ and you then pick your favorites until you’re left with a winner. (It was JetBrains Mono for me.)

Typogram

Dynamic Charts Based on Data Selection in Angular — Ever had users asking to be able to generate their own charts? This tutorial shows you how easy it can be with Kendo UI for Angular.

Progress Kendo UI for Angular sponsor

History: An API to Manage Session History with JavaScript — The getting started docs give a great look at why and where you’d use this.

Remix

Depp: Check npm Modules for Unused and Duplicate Dependencies Fast — A new Go-powered tool you run from your JavaScript/TypeScript project’s folder to look for unused dependencies.

Rahul Tarak

Prisma 3.4.0 Released: The Popular 'Next Gen' ORM and Toolset — PostgreSQL 14 support is a key feature, plus support for using orderBy with aggregate groups in MongoDB, as well as the usual tweaks and bug fixes.

Prisma

Smooth Scrollbar: Flexible, Customizable Scrollbars — I quite like that it advises you not to use it unless “you know what you are doing” – good advice considering how it can make navigating a page ‘feel’ different. Try the demo page.

Daofeng Wu

Catch Errors in Your Complex Regular Expressions with SonarLint

SonarLint sponsor

A Script to Export Photoshop Layers to Individual Files Fast — This caught my interest as I’ve done some scripting in Adobe apps before. It uses an unusual dialect of ECMAScript called ‘ExtendScript’ (hence the confusing .jsx extension on the scripts) but you can get a lot done with it, as demonstrated here.

Hanna

Detox: 'Gray Box' End-to-End Testing and Automation Framework for Mobile Apps — Tests your mobile app while it’s running in a real device/simulator, interacting with it just like a real user – you write the scripts in JavaScript.

Wix

CachedLookup: A Simple Package to Cache and Save on Expensive API Calls
Kartik

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