#530 — March 19, 2021
JavaScript Weekly
Rethinking JavaScript's Ternary Operator — ternary ? "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
- Tailwind CSS user? It's getting a new just-in-time compiler to make the development process smoother.
- Did you know NASA are using JavaScript as part of their latest mission control system? The code is here.
- The Storybook component workshop has gotten a big update for Svelte users.
- AWS S3 has a new feature called Object Lambda that allows you to write code that wraps S3 object requests and transform data on the fly.
- It's not every day you get to see a non-minified JavaScript file first created in 2001 and updated since then. I'm feeling nostalgic.
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ドル-50ドル 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