Benny Powers is NOT pleased with what he believes is missing from the latest React release:

For five years now, there’s been a concerted, multilateral push to bring React into line with every other major framework on custom elements, enshrined in the HTML and DOM specs for years now. Much effort was spent both in public and behind the scenes to encourage the React core team to implement real support for the standards.

But then the PRs were closed, or ignored without public comment. And the issues languished. And the hopeful indications of a willingness to play ball with the rest of the web community grew stale and limp.

We, developers that want to write components that work in any frontend stack, were really hopeful that React 17 would deliver, but React is still the mobile iOS of front-end frameworks.

My spidey sense tells me that “the mobile iOS of front-end frameworks” isn’t a compliment…

I’ve been in the industry for a while and experienced a lot of the “no-code problems” that affect us, programmers. I’m talking about impostor syndrome, comparing yourself to others, that kind of stuff.

I decided to write (and promote!) this article as a way to share my experience with beginners and help them deal with that kind of stuff.

This is a neat little trick from Vitor Paladini:

clamp() is a CSS feature that helps you write less of it. It is a rather new feature in CSS so a lot of developers might not be aware of how useful it is.

Twitter has officially released its new API, aka version 2. Introduced with an astonishing video and proudly promoted as a rebuild “from the ground up to better support developers”, including business, academic researchers, students, and makers.

I was really excited to see the new opportunities that it brings. While still in an early access phase, I must say that I’m a bit disappointed so far…

Antoni Kepinski, who was a guest of ours on JS Party #85:

I wrote a short tutorial on how to embed Changelog’s podcast player into a React application so that it doesn’t affect the performance and accessibility of the site.

While I do understand that Changelog isn’t interested in How-to's and tutorials, I feel like this one can be an exception, as it is related directly to Changelog and its podcasts ;)

Antoni is correct! How-to’s and tutorials aren’t something we share often. It’s not that they aren’t useful, it’s just that they aren’t really news and they are rarely noteworthy. But I’ll make an exception this time. 😉

Cezar Augusto:

It took me just 3 minutes to fully understand the concepts of React Hooks thanks to this great post.

That’s a ringing endorsement, if I’ve ever seen one. If React Hooks are new (or confusing) to you, give this 3 minutes of your time. 😀

tapping_device lets you inspect your program’s behavior without adding any breakpoints or puts-ish methods. In this post, the gem’s author walks through using it to find the cause of a real-world Rails issue in less than an hour.

We continue to use bundlers even though ES Modules (the new JavaScript module system) runs natively on the web. Why?

Over the last several years, JavaScript bundling has morphed from a production-only optimization into a required build step for most web applications. Whether you love this or hate it, it’s hard to deny that bundlers have added a ton of new complexity to web development – a field of development that has always taken pride in its view-source, easy-to-get-started ethos.

Related ~> JS Party #69

10 cool things you can achieve with nothing but HTML. They don’t all work well (and they don’t all work in all browsers), but the big takeaway here is that you should know the capabilities of the tools you’re using before you layer another tool on top.

Manuel Bieh:

As an independent Freelance Developer I was wondering how I can support the Open Source community… so I had this idea: starting with my next project I will ask my clients for an hourly rate that is 1 Euro higher than I originally negotiated or I would usually charge. I will take that money (up to ~160 Euros per month) and support those projects on Open Collective that I’m basing my work upon in my client’s project.

I like the spirit of what Manuel is doing here, but I’d suggest a slightly different tactic: raise your rate by N euros/hr (where N is at least 10) and give that to open source maintainers whose software you use on the client’s behalf. No need to complicate the client relationship with additional line items or things to explain. Besides, you’re probably under charging as is. Most of us are…

Rich kicked the proverbial hornet’s nest yesterday. After you read his 10-point post, stick around for the comments, many of which rebut one or more of those points. I’ll weigh in on #3: Platform Fatigue

Every time we add a new feature to the platform, we increase that complexity — creating new surface area for bugs, and making it less and less likely that a new competitor to Chromium could ever emerge.

Co-sign! 💯

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?

Some sage advice from Ali Spittel that we all would do well to consider. In my experience, problem solving skills are the most valuable asset we have as developers. (Communication skills are a close #2.)

Liran Tal:

Developers, often lacking insights into the intricacies of Docker, may set out to build their Node.js-based docker images by following naive tutorials which lack good security approaches in how an image is built. One of these nuances is the use of proper permissions when building Docker images.

To minimize exposure, opt-in to create a dedicated user and a dedicated group in the Docker image for the application; use the USER directive in the Dockerfile to ensure the container runs the application with the least privileged access possible.

Jonathan Carter, in a deep-dive on the why (and how) behind Live Share:

When we set out to build Visual Studio Live Share, we learned that teams collaborate in very diverse ways, with unique and meaningful perspectives about how it works most effectively for them (e.g. frequency of collaboration, session duration, whether it happens ad-hoc vs. scheduled).

Interesting insights, excellent collaboration feature. 👌

11, 12, and 14 were new to me.

Here is a list of 15 Git commands you may not know yet, but hopefully they will help you out on a journey to master this tool.

“Dependent types” might sound complex, but it is not. Instead, it is a useful feature and I am going to show how it works and when you should rely on it.

Cool new feature in Python. Nikita’s on the case 👍

This is a great article that covers the 🐛 gamut:

1. spotting bugs
2. reporting bugs
3. reproducing bugs
4. fixing bugs

I love the “lifehack” snippets Nikita sprinkles in as well. Like this little gem right here:

Lifehack: sometimes you might want to submit a broken code to your branch so it will trigger a CI build. After the build, it will be saved in your project. And your colleagues will be able to link to this problem. Your next commit will have to solve the issue.

Andrey Sitnik:

No emails left for me to read. Nor write. I’ve sent a message to my family and delegated my open source projects (Autoprefixer and PostCSS) to my friends. With my last tweet sent, I turn off my laptop, phone, and tablet. My Digital Sabbath begins in 10 minutes: no digital devices for the next month.

An absolutely fascinating read. You can visualize Andrey’s digital sabbath on his GitHub contribution graph 👇

Many languages like java and php share a concept of final entities.
final entity is something that can not be changed. We did not have this feature in python. Until two events happened recently…

Here’s a new way of hosting server-side rendered single-page applications. Instead of paying for servers and doing the tedious work of keeping them safe and up-to-date, deploy your Nuxt.js app to AWS Lambda with Serverless instead.

Follow the walkthrough, or jump straight to the code.

Have you considered using a PWA to create a Chrome extension?
Sam Thorogood writes on Dev.to:

So you’ve built a PWA, created your service worker, and followed all the guides. In my case, that is Emojityper: a simple PWA where you can enter words, and receive emoji. This is perfect for desktop and entering emoji in editors that don’t support them.

But once you’ve built this great experience, you’re not limited to distributing it only on “the web”. In this post, I’m going to detail how I shipped Emojityper as a Chrome extension, accessible via a browser action.

Error handling in an asynchronous language works in a unique way and presents many challenges, some unexpected. There are seven main error handling patterns in Node.js. Let’s briefly check them all.

I’m not sure if this post serves to demystify all of these techniques, but it’s definitely a nice, quick overview of the different patterns.

Max wrote an excellent intro (for his past self) to using the Shell. He covers what it is, common actions, package managers, dotfiles, aliases, and more. Check this out as a refresher, or send it to a friend who needs a nudge in the right direction. ✊

Ali Spittel lays out 7 excellent tips for writing cleaner code.

1. Use descriptive naming
2. Functions should do one thing well
3. Comments should tell the “why”
4. …

It’s imperative to first learn rules like these, follow them for awhile, and then (and only then) you will be equipped to know when (and when not) to break the rules.