Plus a fascinating OpenAI demo, Node 16.9.0, and Prettier 2.4. |

#​555 — September 10, 2021

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✍️ The hardest time of the year for putting a strong issue together is usually August, but this year the lull has moved to early September :-) No big news or releases this week, but lots of bits and pieces you'll hopefully find useful.
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Peter Cooper, your editor.

JavaScript Weekly

Bundling Non-JavaScript Resources — Learn how to import and bundle various types of assets from JavaScript in a way that works both with browsers and bundlers.

Ingvar Stepanyan (Google)

What’s New With DevTools: Cross-Browser Edition — Learn what’s new with the developer tools not just in Chrome, but in Firefox, Safari, and Edge too. One of those areas where just a little time spent becoming aware of the possibilities could shave off hours when it comes to debugging(!)

Patrick Brosset

Locate and Resolve JavaScript Errors Instantly with Datadog — Troubleshoot user-facing incidents and resolve frontend JavaScript errors in context with the ability to correlate error logs with individual user sessions with one click. Try it yourself with a free Datadog trial.

Datadog sponsor

Crafting Organic Patterns with Voronoi Tessellations — A fun look at creating interesting organic generative patterns inspired by the natural world. Generative art is such a fun use case for JavaScript.

George Francis

Automatically Find jQuery Calls and Generate Vanilla JS Alternatives — The aim here is to provide a tool to help you remove jQuery as a dependency in projects by finding jQuery related methods and offering up ‘vanilla’ alternatives. I’m not entirely convinced, but it’s an interesting idea. Alternatively, you could switch to a lighter, modern jQuery alternative like Cash.

Sachin Neravath

Node v16.9.0 Adds Package Manager Manager (sic) — A big addition is Corepack, a new experimental tool for managing package managers directly within the Node distribution itself (Yarn and pnpm are supported in addition to npm). V8 9.3 also makes an appearance.

Michaël Zasso

QUICK BITS:

  • The V8 9.4 branch has been created, but it's a relatively minor release with only static initialization blocks for classes being available by default as a new developer facing feature.

  • The folks at Amazon have launched the AWS Developers Podcast – a weekly conversation about all things AWS, such as AWS Amplify with Ali Spittel.

  • Run npx matrix-rain for a nice terminal-based surprise. Code here (found via @boyney123).

  • The creator of Ruby on Rails has recorded a 15 minute screencast showing off how the popular backend framework will handle JavaScript in its next major version.

  • A fascinating OpenAI demo on using their system to write code from your directions. The first demo is in Python but jump to 13 minutes in and they build a basic game in JavaScript just by describing it.

Compete in 20 Hacking Challenges | Win Prizes | Free SnykCon CTF

Snyk.io sponsor

RELEASES:

Prettier 2.4 – The opinionated code formatter.
React Router 5.3 – Declarative routing for React.
Acorn 8.5 – Small JS-powered JavaScript parser.
Flicking 4.3 – Flexible carousel component.
ember-simple-auth 4.0 – Auth for Ember.js apps.
Ember 3.28 and 4.0 beta – Popular batteries included framework.

💻 Jobs

Senior Backend Engineer (Berlin / Remote) — Want to join a small startup with a big growing potential (we double every year)? Feather is looking for a backend engineer.
Feather

Senior Software Engineer at Decisiv (ReactJS / Ruby on Rails) — Join our remote-first UI development team to help craft a modern platform that is revolutionizing an industry.
Decisiv, Inc.

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

Exploring the CSS Paint API: Blob Animation — A fun effect currently supported only on Chrome (and Edge) for getting gooey/blobby shapes going with CSS enhanced by JavaScript via the Paint API.

Temani Afif

What's New in Node.js Core? — Node updates so often that unless you’re keeping a close eye on it (such as via our Node newsletter!) you can miss what new features got added. Simon shares a handful of useful additions here.

Simon Plenderleith

[Guide] Ship Fast. Stay Ahead of the Competition — Intuit & Atlassian don't let process stand in their way. Learn their strategies to ship faster, safer & stay ahead.

LaunchDarkly sponsor

Using Neovim and Tmux for JavaScript Development — Are you a Vim user who, perhaps, migrated to VS Code but still feel a bit of an itch for the old days? Neovim, a fork of Vim, has really won Elijah over and here he demonstrates its value for JavaScript developers.

Elijah Manor

How An npm Package with 3M Weekly Downloads Had a Severe Vulnerability — Security researcher Ax Sharma has put together a good story about a significant vulnerability in pac-resolver.

Ars Technica

Threats of Using Regular Expressions in JavaScript — This is very elementary, but if you’re unaware of what ‘catastrophic backtracking’ is, it could be illuminating.

Dulanka Karunasena

unknown vs any in TypeScript
Dmitri Pavlutin

🛠 Code & Tools

Shoelace: 'A Forward-Thinking Library of Web Components' — A collection of well designed every day UI components (buttons, drawers, inputs, menus, color pickers, and more) built in a framework agnostic way (though there are React wrappers available).

Cory LaViska

Harlem 2.0: Simple Extensible State Management for Vue 3 — Provides a simple functional API for creating, reading, and mutating state - and it’s only 1.5KB minified.

Andrew Courtice

Tried. Tested. Trusted. Studio 3T - Power Tools for MongoDB — Intuitive IntelliShell. Generate JavaScript from queries. Reshape data with Reschema. Try Studio 3T free for 30 days.

Studio 3T sponsor

Renamer 4.0: Rename Files in Bulk — A Node powered CLI tool but with the interesting addition that you can write a replace function in JavaScript to perform more complex renames.

Lloyd Brookes

Dannjs: A Neural Network Library for JavaScript — The aim is ease of use so it’s good to use for experimentation and playing around.

Matias Vazquez-Levi

gron: Make JSON Greppable — A tool written in Go that transforms JSON into more easily greppable assignments, so you can use grep and see the context/path of the result. Useful.

Tom Hudson

PrimeVue: A Vue UI Component Library — This is the Vue version of PrimeFaces, which also includes a React version. You can check out the Vue components here.

primefaces

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