Turbopack: A Rust-Powered 'Successor' to Webpack — With over 3 billion downloads, webpack is the current champion of the bundlers (though Vite has been rapidly advancing). Vercel found it too slow and has funded work on Turbopack. It's a project to keep an eye on and boasts huge performance boosts over webpack or even Vite, but there are some limitations to take into account:

• It's arguable if it's a "successor" to webpack, as Turbopack can't do much of what Webpack can yet, and while they share a creator, webpack is an active project with maintainers of its own.
• It's very connected to React and Next.js 13 (also released this week – more on that next) – Vue and Svelte support is to follow.
• The similarly Rust-powered SWC is used to transpile JS/TS.
• Vite's Evan You 🐦 casts some doubt on the perf difference claims. He also has 🐦 a thread with his thoughts on Turbopack generally.
• TLDR: Unless you're big into Next.js, stick with your existing tools.

Koppers and Palmer (Vercel)

Implement JavaScript Developer Solutions for Every Project — Get dependency-free, fast, flexible, true JavaScript components that enable you to build basic websites, full enterprise applications, Excel-like spreadsheet tools, and reports for your organization. Empower your JavaScript developers today.

GrapeCity sponsor

Node 18 Becomes Active LTS with v18.12.0 — Formerly a ‘current’ release getting all the newest features, version 18 (now codenamed Hydrogen) is now the active ‘Long Term Support’ release and will remain so until October 2023.

Ruy Adorno and Rafael Gonzaga

Next.js 13 Unveiled at Next.js Conf — Next.js Conf 22 took place earlier this week and as well as Turborepo (above), Vercel unveiled the latest version of the site framework that has become 'inextricably linked' to React. It gains:

• Support for an app/ directory to improve routing, layouts, and Server Components support – can coexist with existing approaches.
• A new image component with on-demand optimization and the ability to display images without layout shift.
• A brand new font system.

Vercel

JetBrains JavaScript Day 2022: An Event You Won’t Want to Miss — Join JetBrains JavaScript Day 2022 to catch up on the latest trends and connect with other like-minded professionals.

JetBrains sponsor

Which Serverless Edge Platform Has the Fastest Git Deployments? — The team behind Deno have tested some popular serverless edge computing providers (including their own Deno Deploy) to see which has the fastest git deployment time. As always with benchmarks, read the results with a cynical eye and repeat for yourself.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

How We Improved React Loading Times by 70% with Next.js — By replacing Create React App with Next.js, business planning platform Causal significantly improved their user experience by reducing load times. How? Well, just a little SSR can get you a long way.

Causal Engineers

How to Build a Blog with Fresh and Deno — In other Deno news, if you’ve felt like giving Deno a go for something but been unsure as to what, how about spinning up a simple blog atop the Fresh Web framework? Then deploy it really quickly to Deno Deploy ;-)

Andy Jiang (Deno)

The Fastest Way to Learn JavaScript / TypeScript — With 2M+ downloads world-wide, Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring and testing JavaScript/TypeScript without leaving your editor.

Wallaby.js sponsor

How to Write Your First Unit Test in JavaScript — If you’re a prolific tester, scroll on. If not, this is a very light primer.

Chip Verek

Detect a System Theme Preference Change from JS — window.matchMedia and addEventListener to the rescue.

David Walsh

npoint: Simple JSON Storage Bins with Schema Validation — You can use this as a lightweight backend as you prototype an app/site or play with a new library. You can even let other people make changes to the data, if you wish.

Alex Zirbel

Satori: Convert HTML and CSS to SVG — React and JSX are the preferred route in to this, but it’ll work without those. It powers Vercel's new 'social card' image generation feature.

Vercel

Don’t DIY Your Notifications: Send SMS, Email, and Push with One Call

Courier.com sponsor

Downshift 7.0: Primitives to Build Accessible React Components — You get hooks that provide the stateful logic needed to create autocomplete, combo-box and ‘select’ dropdown components which you can then lean on for WAI-ARIA compliant goodness.

PayPal

🎉  Canvas Confetti: An On-Demand Confetti Shower — Ready to let off some fireworks in your browser? Do it in style with confetti. Plenty of demos to check out. GitHub repo.

Kiril Vatev

Creepyface: Makes Images of Faces 'Follow' the Pointer — This is an effect we’ve seen mostly on ‘about us’ pages where faces of team members follow your pointer around. If you want to recreate that, here you go.. and in a timely Halloween edition too. (React user? There's a component for that.)

Alejandro Tardín