Plus V8 9.0, the much maligned ternary operator, and is Ember a beacon of JavaScript productivity? |

#530 — March 19, 2021

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JavaScript Weekly

Rethinking JavaScript's Ternary Operatorternary ? "yes" : "no" … A lot of developers regard the ternary operator “with suspicion”, says James. Does its brevity help or hinder readability? Is it something you can “trust”? James also looks at a future possible alternative coming to the language.

James Sinclair

Comparing Svelte and React — After spending an extended period of time working with both, the author identifies his preference based on first hand observations supported with real-world examples.

Jack Franklin

Learn Dynamic Image Resizing Without Using an Image Processing Server — Forget manual resizing, Learn a new way to manipulate images with ImageKit.io; Resize & adapt images to fit the page layout by changing just the URL parameters. Learn Face crop, watermarking, text overlay, network-based optimization & more.

ImageKit.io sponsor

Ember.js in 2021 – A Beacon of Productivity? — Ember is almost ten years old and many of its users swear by its opinionated "batteries included" approach. Here the author makes the case for Ember in 2021 and explains why he considers the framework a beacon of productivity in the middle of a "roaring sea of complexity."

Marco Otte-Witte

V8 Release v9.0 — The next major version of the V8 JavaScript engine (as used in Chrome, Node, and elsewhere) adds a feature to regex matching (the /d flag for returning indices of matches), faster super property access, and a significant WebAssembly optimization for JS-to-WASM calls.

Ingvar Stepanyan

Quick Bits

Quick Releases

Node 15.12.0 — The runtime, the CLI, the legend.
Ora 5.4.0 — Elegant terminal spinners.
esbuild 0.9.4 — Ultra-fast JS bundler.
Rollup 2.42.0 — ES module bundler.
ApexCharts.js 3.26.0 — Interactive SVG-based charts.
Ghost 4.0 — Node.js-based blogging tool.

📖 Articles, Opinion & Tutorials

▶  Using Deno and the Slack API to Pick Contest Winners — Three books were being given away to random members of a Slack community and rather than pick the names out of a hat, why not write a Deno script to do the job?

The Changelog

Seven Ways to Debug Jest Tests at the Terminal — (Almost) all the ways you can debug a Jest test in the command line.

Nikola Đuza

A Tip to Familiarize Yourself with New JS Codebases — Getting thrown into a new codebase is difficult. But with tools for architecture analysis you can make your journey at your next job’s JavaScript or TypeScript codebase a breeze.

Kevin Peters

Best Practices for Building Better Angular Forms — Learn best practices for creating high-quality, accessible, and SEO-friendly Angular Forms. Read the guide on our blog.

Progress Kendo UI sponsor

Object Plus Array Is Not Zero — Exploring a common Javascript misconception with Chrome and ASTExplorer.

Evin Sellin

▶  Non-Blocking I/O and How Node Uses It (in Friendly Terms) — Short (8-minutes), sweet, and includes lots of useful animated diagrams to explain the concepts.

Studying with Alex

How to Generate an RSS Feed for Your Blog — The long forgotten RSS feed seems to making a comeback (thank you!), and this post offers a unique solution to generate this at runtime rather than build time using a Netlify Function.

Salma Alam-Naylor

An Engineering Leader’s Guide to OpenTelemetry

Lightstep sponsor

Tropical Particles Rain Animation with Three.js — A WebGL particle rain animation resulting in an interesting image effect made with Three.js. Here’s the demo.

Yuriy Artyukh

🛠 Code & Tools

React95 3.7: Windows 95-Style UI Components for React — A fun set of Windows 95 themed UI components for React apps and built with styled-components. The latest release includes a bunch of new themes. Enjoy their very retro homepage.

Artur Bień

Lite YouTube Embed: A Faster Youtube Embed — Faster than the official one, at least. There’s a live demo here and you can really feel it.

Paul Irish

Clio: A Functional Language That Compiles to JS — It’s early days for this language (whose compiler is, itself, implemented in JavaScript) but is the sort of thing you might like to play with.

Eghbali, Franke, Luiz, et al.

The Definitive Guide to Feature Management — A feature management platform like LaunchDarkly fills the gaps of conventional feature toggles. Learn the ins & outs of feature management today.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

jsonld.js: A JSON-LD Processor and API Implementation — JSON-LD is a spec for a JSON-based format used to represent objects on the Web in a way that’s easy for code to read.

Digital Bazaar, Inc.

sql.js 1.5: A Library to Run SQLite on the Web — This brings things up to SQLite 3.35.0 standards (a pretty big release in its own right).

SQL.JS

Spectacle 7: A React and JSX-Based Presentation Library — Got a presentation coming up? Build your decks with JSX? A good way to get a feel for it is via the deck on its home page.

Formidable

💻 Jobs

Wanted: Curious Software Engineers with ❤ — Stagnating? Carbon Five has new projects, tech and challenges perfectly paired with kind, supportive, brilliant people. Join us.

Carbon Five

Wynter Is Looking for Developers to Join Its Research Panel — Give feedback on digital products and landing pages, get paid $15-$50 per survey. Low-key commitment, 10-15 mins per survey.

Wynter Research Panels

Find Your Next Job Through 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

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