#507 — September 25, 2020

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⏪ In case you missed it, last week we covered the release of Vue 3.0, a major update on the Moment.js project, and a big new Deno release. Now on to this week..

JavaScript Weekly

Feature Watch: ECMAScript 2021 — Dr. Axel always keeps tabs on the new features coming to future versions of ECMAScript and he’s now started to do the same for the forthcoming ES2021.

Related to this TC39 has advanced a number of proposals this week (though they're not all guaranteed for ES2021 by any means):

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

billboard.js 2.1.0: A D3-Based Chart Library — Supporting over 10 different chart types or a combination of such, Billboard is a powerful option for rendering attractive charts – check out the demos here. v2.1 increases performance for larger datasets both during rendering and resizing – there’s a new theme available too.

Jae Sung Park

Scout APM - A Developer’s Best Friend — Scout’s intuitive UI helps you quickly track down issues so you can get back to building your product. Rest easy knowing that Scout is tracking your app’s performance and hunting down small issues before they become large issues. Get started for free.

Scout APM sponsor

Vime: A Customizable Media Player Built with Web Components — If you need to put together a standards compliant media player and just want a single API to worry about while supporting numerous video providers, this is for you. Frameworks like React, Vue, Angular and Svelte have also been thought about and it integrates with them too.

Rahim Alwer

V8 Release 8.6 — The latest version of the V8 JavaScript engine is now in beta until its eventual release with Chrome 86 (and, eventually, a future version of Node). The codebase is now more respectful, there are speedups in Number.prototype.toString, and a JavaScript fuzzer called js-fuzzer has been open sourced.

Ingvar Stepanyan (V8 Team)

⚡️ Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

Senior Software Engineer (Remote within U.S.) — Understand and enjoy working on the full stack? If you've got a proven track record of building user-oriented software we want to hear from you.

Reforge

Find a Job Through Vettery — Create a profile on Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Vettery

📚 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

How to Visualize Data Structures in VS Code — VSCode Debug Visualizer is a handy VS Code extension for visualizing data structures – we’ve linked it before, but Addy does a great job of showing off the benefits here. JavaScript and related languages have the best support.

Addy Osmani

▶  Building a Netflix Clone with React, Styled Components and Firebase — A rather epic 10 hour tutorial covering almost everything you’d need to know to build the frontend for your own Netflix-a-like.

Karl Hadwen

Decreasing Bundle Sizes with ES Modules in Angular 10 — Does your module formatting choice affect bundling size, CommonJS, and ES modules? Get answers in this review.

Wijmo by GrapeCity, Inc. sponsor

A Look at Textures.js, a Way to Add Textured Styles to d3 Visualizations — It’s nice that it’s so simple, but beware that adding such features to charts can sometimes impede usability(!) GitHub repo.

Brady Dowling

VS Code Tips for Power Users — I remember when Vim tutorials were all the rage, but now it’s Visual Studio Code, so here are some tips and techniques to help you make the most of it.

Boris Yordanov

▶  Discussing TypeScript and Svelte — Orta Therox, who works on the TypeScript compiler, talks about how TypeScript works with Svelte, what the latest news is, and more. Definitely worth a listen if you’re exploring Svelte.

Real Talk JavaScript Podcast podcast

Learn How Devs are Helping 👨🏾‍🎨👩🏻‍🔧👨🏽‍🌾 Adapt to 2020

Square UnBoxed - Free Virtual Event sponsor

Running Go in the Browser with WASM and Web Workers — Qvault (interactive coding courses in the browser) started using Web Workers and WASM in order to stream output from a program. This post shows off the JavaScript needed to bring it all together.

Lane Wagner

Learn date-fns: A Lightweight JavaScript Date Library

James Hibbard

🔧 Code & Tools

urlcat: A URL Builder Library for JavaScript“makes building URLs very convenient and prevents common mistakes.”

Botond Balázs

fflate: High Performance Compression and Decompression in 8KB — The README has a comparison table against pako, tiny-inflate, and UZIP.js and promises to offer the best of all worlds across performance, size, and ES module support.

Arjun Barrett

Stream Chat API & JavaScript SDK for Custom Chat Apps — Build real-time chat in less time. Rapidly ship in-app messaging with our highly reliable chat infrastructure.

Stream sponsor

big.js: A Small Library for Arbitrary-Precision Decimal Arithmetic — 0.1 + 0.2 doesn’t equal 0.306-00000000000004 here. v6.0 just came out.

Michael M

Crossfilter: Fast N-Dimensional Filtering and Grouping of Records — For exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Supports fast (<30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records.

Square and the community

Importabular: A 5KB JavaScript Spreadsheet Component — There are certainly lots of options available for an Excel-like JS component but this super light alternative, which is mobile friendly, might also be worth a look. GitHub repo.

Renan Le Caro

tinyhttp 0.4: A Lightweight and Modular Express-Like Web Framework — Written in TypeScript and claims to be faster than Express but with full Express middleware support. GitHub repo and 0.4 release notes.

Paul Losev

11 Top Node ORMs, Query Builders and Database Libraries in 2020 — A roundup of the most popular options including Mongoose, Knex.js, Sequelize and, yes, Prisma.

Prisma

ts-sql: A SQL 'Database' Implemented Purely in TypeScript Type Annotations — Last week we saw a spell checker built with TypeScript types and the tomfoolery continues here!

codemix