Psst… You’ve found it. This is the JavaScript meetup for 🥼 mad science, 🧙‍♂️ hacking, and 🧪 experiments. Hang out virtually on Friday at 4pm Pacific Time each week.

Jerod assembles a team of WebRTC experts (Suz, Feross, Mikeal) for a deep, deep dive on this practically-ubiquitous yet still-complicated web API.

We review its history, share really cool applications using the tech, provide an excellent primer on what you need to know about it, and details some production gotchas. ALSO we celebrate how Feross single-handedly “upgraded the internet”! 🙌

Did you know Feross taught Web Security at Stanford last Fall? On this episode, Divya and Nick enroll in his security school to learn about XSS, CSP, ambient authority, and a whole lot more.

We take a listener request this week and discuss how we evolve alongside (or opt out of) the ever changing JavaScript syntax. Arrow functions and variable declarations take center stage, but a wide range of new(ish) JS syntax and features are discussed.

Then Feross shares his new app, Nick talks fiction books, and Jerod switches coding fonts.

Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers.

Here’s how it works:


1. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat
2. You’re given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes!
3. The only rule is: no small talk!

Small talk is the worst and I’m on a mission to eradicate it. I’ve expertly crafted over 200 questions designed to stimulate good conversation and skip past the boring introductions.

Here are a few samples:

• When in your life have you been the happiest?
• What would you be willing to die for?
• What is the biggest lie you’ve told without getting caught?
• What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?
• What human emotion do you fear the most?
• If a family member murdered someone, would you report them to the police?
• What absolutely excites you right now?

I hope you use Virus Cafe to meet a new friend and make a deep connection today.

There are a variety of new projects working to create a healthier Web: from fighting censorship in oppressive countries, to solving pressing issues of privacy, to creating a Web entirely run by users. Come enjoy two days of immersive, hands-on workshops where you get to try out some of the latest decentralized web technologies for yourself.

And it’s free!

This week Feross and Emma chat with Segun Adebayo about Chakra UI, a modular React component library that’s changing the game for design systems and app development.

Hey folks! Feross from JS Party here. I taught a course on web security last quarter at Stanford. All the course materials, slides, and videos are freely available online and I wanted to share with the broader community, in case anyone is interested in learning more about secure web programming.

The course goal is to build an understanding of the most common web attacks and their countermeasures. Given the pervasive insecurity of the modern web landscape, there is a pressing need for programmers and system designers improve their understanding of web security issues. We’ll be covering the fundamentals as well as the state-of-the-art in web security.

We are a party-themed podcast, so FUN is at the heart of every episode. One way we keep things fun is by mixing it up and trying new things.

We play games like JS Jeopardy… (clip from episode #112)

debate hot topics like should websites work without JS… (clip from episode #87)

discuss and analyze the news… (clip from episode #94)

share wisdom we’ve collected over the years… (clip from episode #106)

interview amazing devs like John Resig and Amelia Wattenberger… and a whole lot more.

Oh, and did I mention we record the show live? You can be part of the hijinx each and every Thursday at changelog.com/live.

This is JS Party! Please listen to a recent episode that piques your interest and subscribe today. We’d love to have you with us.

KBall, Divya, Mikeal, and Feross dig deep into refactoring. When to do it, best practices, things to watch out for, and the difference between a refactor and a rewrite. We then close out with some key pro tips.

KBall, Divya, Feross, and Jerod get together to discuss tips and tricks for communicating with other coders, project stakeholders, and users.

With the jumping off point of KBall’s question: “What are best practices for organizing a Node project?” Mikeal and Feross drop an incredible amount of wisdom about Node, organizing using modules, release management, deployment approaches, how to adopt change, and more.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Feross Aboukhadijeh. Feross is the creator and maintainer of 100’s of open source projects which have been downloaded 100’s of million of times each month — projects like StandardJS, BitMidi, and WebTorrent to name a few. This episode with Feross continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

Adam adds a twist to our YepNope format this week. Instead of 2v2, it’s 1v1v1 with Mikeal reppin’ team Yep, Divya on team Nope, and Feross sitting in the middle on team It Depends. You don’t want to miss this excellent debate/discussion all about JS tooling complexity.

Many packages
New frameworks built all the time
Config hell. Webpack

Jerod, Feross, and Nick discuss the latest npm security fiasco, opine on the strengths and weaknesses of spreadsheets, explain CORS like they’re 5 (sorta), and give shout outs to deserving purveyors of fine software.

We’re trying a brand new segment called YepNope, wherein your intrepid panelists engage in a lively debate around a premise. In this debate, Feross and KBall argue that websites should work without requiring JS and Divya and Chris say, “Nah!”

Please let us know if you like this style episode! We had fun recording it, but that doesn’t matter much if y’all don’t enjoy listening to it.

Jerod, Mikeal, and Feross welcome Antoni Kepinski to the show to discuss his open source pizza ordering management web app. We talk about learning programming at a young age, how overwhelming web development can be these days, how Antoni decided which technologies to use, and more. This is a super fun conversation with many insights and takeaways for developers at every stage of their career.

The video of Feross’s talk “What I Learned from WebTorrent” from the Data Terra Nemo conference was just released.

In the talk, Feross shares behind-the-scenes details about how WebTorrent was built, he reflects on hard-won lessons, and shares advice for other projects in the P2P and decentralized web space.

Suz, Feross, and Emma have an honest conversation about burnout. They ask questions like — How do developers deal with burnout? What is burnout? What are examples of burnout in open source? Plus they close the show by sharing tips for avoiding burnout and also how to manage burnout if/when it happens.

JS Party panelist, Feross Aboukhadijeh:

In the days of Geocities and Angelfire, a quirky HTML tag called ⟨bgsound⟩ enabled sound files to play in the background of webpages. Usually, these files were in the MIDI format. What a glorious era that was! Sadly, ⟨bgsound⟩ has been removed from browsers and MIDI is obscure and hard to play back. In this talk, we’ll bring MIDI and ⟨bgsound⟩ back from the dead using WebAssembly, Emscripten, Web Audio, and Web Components. When we’re finished, you’ll be able to give your webpages the 90’s treatment in a modern, standards-compliant way!