Plus a new idea for safer assignments in JavaScript, how someone won a contest with JavaScript, and Puppeteer's Firefox support. |

#​700 — August 15, 2024

Read on the Web

👋 Wow, issue 700! We're back after a week away. Technically I'm still on vacation, but I didn't want to leave you in the lurch for too long.. ;-)
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Together with  WorkOS

JavaScript Weekly

ECMAScript Safe Assignment Operator Proposal — We often feature ECMAScript proposals that are in their later stages, but how about a brand new one you could get involved with? This one proposes an interesting additional bit of language syntax (?=) that returns a [error, value] tuple from an assignment.

Arthur Fiorette

Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers — We always love Frank’s dives into how he produces neat JavaScript experiments and, in this case, a complete game in just 13KB — and if it inspires you, the latest js13kGames game development competition has just started.

Frank Force

WorkOS: The Modern Identity Platform for B2B SaaS — WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible and easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and RBAC in minutes instead of months. It's trusted by hundreds of high-growth startups such as Perplexity, Vercel, Drata, and Webflow.

WorkOS sponsor

Google's Angular Lead Sees Convergence in JavaScript Frameworks“When picking a framework, don’t overthink it. It will end up being the same technology anyway with a different facade.” Minko Gechev talks about leading the way in converging Google’s Angular and Wiz frameworks.

Loraine Lawson (The New Stack)

Announcing Official Puppeteer Support for Firefox — As of version 23, Google’s originally Chrome-only Puppeteer browser automation library now has first-class support for Firefox too.

Mozilla Hacks

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Patterns for Memory Efficient DOM Manipulation — Marc shares a solid look at the best practices to employ in order to avoid excess memory usage when managing/updating the DOM, all with a hope to make your apps faster. A good overview of the core principles behind DOM manipulation and optimization.

Marc Grabanski

'How I Won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a Can of WD-40' — This is far from a technical JavaScript article, but it’s a fun story, involves some code and statistics, and ultimately might make you laugh.

Dave Kiss

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, jest, node:test, and more. Huge changes are coming in Wallaby 2.0! Stay tuned. 🚀

Wallaby Team sponsor

Common Causes of Memory Leaks in JavaScript — Filled with basic examples oriented around V8-based runtimes like Node.js and Deno.

Trevor Indrek Lasn

Learn Web Components — If you’re looking to scrub on your Web Components know-how, this road map should prove useful. It’s a collection of good third party articles covering a wide range of knowledge.

Andrico Karoulla

A Tale of Evading JavaScript Anti-Debugging Techniques — When debugging code written by a third party, there could be some traps thrown in your way to prevent your usual debugging techniques. What to do? Revisiting a popular article from 2023.

Veritas

Fine-Grained Reactivity in Svelte 5 — Taking a close look at Svelte’s new so-called fine-grained reactivity.

Adam Rackis

📄 Tips for Using React Testing Library to Write Unit Tests Pavan Policherla

📄 45 VS Code Shortcuts for Boosting Your Productivity Shahed Nasser

🛠 Code & Tools

Volta 2.0: Install and Run JavaScript Tools Quickly — A long-standing Rust powered tool for installing and switching JavaScript related tools (like Node, TypeScript, Yarn, etc.) … “no matter the package manager, Node runtime, or OS.” GitHub repo.

Volta

Floating UI: Positioning for Tooltips, Popovers, Dropdowns, etc. — A library to create ‘floating’ elements such as tooltips, popovers, and dropdowns. Essentially a next-gen Popper which it now officially succeeds.

atomiks

😘 Kiss Bugs Goodbye — Get 80% automated E2E web and mobile app coverage in under four months with QA Wolf . With QA cycles complete in minutes (not days), bugs don’t stand a chance. Schedule a demo.

QA Wolf sponsor

React Figma: Use Components as a Source for Figma Designs — A lot of folks use Figma to mock up designs for their React components, but what about the other way around? Use React components as a source for your designs in Figma! GitHub repo.

Ilya Lesik

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