Many of us use TypeScript in our React applications to eliminate an entire class of runtime bugs. But surprisingly, one of the most commonly used types: React.ReactNode turns out to be unsafe, failing to detect objects that cannot be rendered by React. This post digs into what is going on and how to fix it in your system.

JS Party co-host KBall just launched a new site:

Improve your career, your relationships, and your self-confidence by becoming a better communicator.

I’ve known Kevin for awhile now and I can assure you, the dude is an excellent communicator. This, from his newsletter, resonates 100% with me:

If there’s one thing that I can point to that has contributed most to my career success, it’s been my relentless focus on improving my abilities to speak in public, write coherently, and listen carefully.

We nerded out on this stuff back on JS Party #93. I heartily suggest listening to that if you haven’t yet.

Inspired by JSParty #70, 4 quick lessons on the philosophy of testing. The motivation?

Tools like Mocha, Jasmine and Jest have made writing tests far easier… But there’s still a gap. It’s extremely hard to find information on the philosophy of testing. What to test and why. How much is enough? What type of tests should I be writing, and when does it fit into my process?

Inspired by JSParty #77, a breakdown of 5 of the top skills for junior JavaScript developers to learn.

My personal favorite point is this one on the importance of looking for bigger picture patterns:

One of the great things about front-end development in 2019 is that despite the abundance of frameworks, we’ve also started to see some big megatrends that are true across frameworks. This is good news for developers because it means that as you go deep in one framework you can still pick up skills that will translate to others if need be.

KBall combined his learnings while working on Zurb’s Foundation with some original research to curate this massive list of CSS resources.

Topics are arranged in an order that makes sense for learning from scratch. So if you’re brand new to CSS, you should be able to start at the top and work downwards, gradually increasing your understanding.

Bookmark this and share it with a friend. 💯

KBall, on Vue’s ⭐️ count surpassing React’s:

Don’t get me wrong, I love Vue - I’ve been using it far more than React recently - but github stars are more of a measure of the “hipness” of a project than its actual use.

He backs that up by citing the preposterously low number of stars ‘earned’ by the Apache web server, which powers ~38% of websites. What is a useful metric, then?

There is no perfect measure - there are many many ways to install and use any of these projects - but NPM has become the de facto standard for installing JavaScript packages. If we look at download statistics for the core package of each of these frameworks - the vue package and the react package, that should give us a reasonable proxy for actual use.

Click through for his detailed findings, but the big takeaway is right there 👆 in the headline.

KBall with the round-up of what’s new in Node 10 and npm 6. We did a deep-dive on npm’s new (and upcoming) security features with Adam Baldwin (npm’s head of security) on yesterday’s JS Party live show. The produced version 🚢’s Monday!