Changelog

Congrats to all of Mocha’s contributors on what looks like a huge release!

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You might be on the fence with CSS-in-JS — especially after hearing from Rich Harris about Svelte on The Changelog #332. Max Stoiber writing on his personal blog with his take on the matter: Primarily, CSS-in-JS boosts my confidence. I can add, change and delete CSS without any unexpected consequences. My changes to the styling of a component will not affect anything else. If I delete a component, I delete its CSS too. No more append-only stylesheets!

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There’s a lot of wisdom in this post alongside some opinions that I find myself nodding along with: My strategy for dealing with the absurd pace of change in web development has been as follows: ignore 99% of it and see if it goes away. While we cover (and talk about) new technologies on a daily basis here at Changelog, that doesn’t mean we adopt everything that hits our radar. Given the hype cycle, it works pretty well. Mongo isn’t exciting anymore, Angular 1 is dead, CoffeeScript is obsolete, I haven’t heard a word about Meteor since it launched… These are all specific technologies. But what about the Single Page App pattern in general? Back in the early days of SPAs, some people argued that it would be faster to only pass the data you need as JSON than to render whole pages. Nearly a decade later, this is almost never true. He goes on to explain how he’s building a side project SPA-style and all the repercussions of that decision. Really insightful stuff here, please do click through and read for yourself.

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KBall picks the brains of 4 of the speakers at JSConf Hawai’i to investigate the future of JavaScript and Web Development.

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You can install swc (the speedy web compiler) from npm just like you’re used to, which will download a pre-built binary. That only works on mac (x64)/linux (x86_64)/win32-x64. For other environments, you’ll need the Rust nightly build. Supports ES 2019, JSX, and TypeScript out of the box. You might want to jump straight to the migrating from Babel section. 😉

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Solid tutorial on Service Workers: You can think of the service worker as someone who sits between the client and server and all the requests that are made to the server pass through the service worker. Basically, a middle man. Since all the request pass through the service worker, it is capable to intercept these requests on the fly.

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ESLint began as a side project 6 years ago and has grown into the most popular JavaScript linter in the world with over 6.5 million npm downloads every week. In short, we’ve realized that in order for ESLint to continue to grow and evolve, we need to get more organized and set up a way to fund ESLint’s development going forward. Today, we are happy to announce the ESLint Collective on Open Collective. Support ’em if you got ’em

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Use dynamic prop based styles with the React bindings and have them transpiled to CSS variables automatically. Great productivity with source maps and linting support. When it comes to web frameworks: ("build-time").wired? && ("run-time").tired?

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Starring Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale (co-creators of Ember.js) and many other big names from the Ember community, “Ember.js: The Documentary” explores why and how Ember.js came to be, the pioneers behind its creation and the life-altering decisions that go into making open-source software. These mini-documentaries are so cool!

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Lightweight and without any external dependencies qoa enables you to receive various types of user input through a set of intuitive, interactive & verbose command-line prompts. The library utilizes a simple & minimal usage syntax and contains 7 configurable console interfaces, such as plain text, confirmation & password/secret prompts as well as single keypress, quiz & multiple-choice navigable menus.

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Are you frustrated with the growing complexity of Javascript and front-end tooling? Read this creative break-up letter from Thomas Barrasso. Here’s an excerpt: We stayed up late at night, holding requests for what felt like hours. You took it to 4 billion places I never thought it could go. In my mind, you had no equal. People thought we were crazy. I could hardly await to escape callback hell because with you, nothing was out of scope. We prototyped one great framework after the next, never stopping to wonder why. Thomas decided to write this break-up letter “as a means of exploring my frustration with both the language and ecosystem.”

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KBall and Nick catch up with Nara Kaspergen and Jen Looper for a pair of conversations covering Voice UI Devices, using NativeScript for mobile development, and Jen’s work with Vue Vixens helping make the Vue.js community welcoming to women and non-binary people.

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A majority of what you need to know about JAMstack on one page. JAMstack is revolutionising the way we think about workflow by providing a simpler developer experience, better performance, lower cost and greater scalability. This simple guide will help you understand why it exists and how to get started.

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A cool/fun intro to Wasm where you build a game for cats (catch the red laser dot) completely in Go. The fact that WASM is still considered a MVP (MAP) and that you create a game like this, without writing a single line of JS, is amazing! CanIUse is already fully green, there is nothing stopping you from building WASM powered websites and apps.

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React Quantum parses through your React application to create a color-coded tree model of its component hierarchy. On hover, each tree node will display two key component performance metrics—render time and re-render frequency—as well as memoized state and props to indicate what, specifically, initiated the render.

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The goal of this series of blog posts is to create a personal website using Gatsby V2 from the default starter. The final website will have an index page where you can introduce yourself, a list of all blog posts, individual blog pages, tag pages listing blog posts in specific categories, and a projects portfolio page. Here’s all the parts to this deep dive. Part 1: Introduction and Setup Part 2: Styling with Sass/SCSS Part 3: Generating Blog Posts with Markdown Files Part 4: Creating a List of Blog Posts Part 5: Adding Thumbnail Images to a Blog List Part 6: Adding Multiple Responsive Images to a Markdown Blog Post Part 7: Adding Tags to Blog Posts Part 8: Creating a Project Page from JSON data Part 9: Pagination, Deploying to Netlify, and SEO Check out the example repo on GitHub and preview the final website.

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Panelists Nick Nisi, Suz Hinton, and Kevin Ball chat about the perceived Great Divide in front end development, why 2019 is the year of TypeScript, and shout outs to inspirational members of the community.

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Jerod and Adam talked with Rich Harris –a JavaScript Journalist on The New York Times Investigations team– about his magical disappearing UI framework called Svelte. We compare and contrast Svelte to React, how the framework is embedded in a component, build time vs. run time, scoping CSS to components, and CSS in JavaScript. Rich also shares where Svelte v3 is heading and the details on Sapper, a framework for building extremely high-performance progressive web apps, powered by Svelte.

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Mint is super cool, but handing over your precious financial information to a 3rd-party is always a bit nerve-racking. Evan You’s new Node app builds a bridge between Plaid (for bank access) and Google Sheets (for data storage) so you can roll your own system. Now you only have to trust your precious financial information to two 3rd-parties 😉. But! This is open source so at least you don’t have to trust the application code.

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SCRIPT-8 is designed to encourage play — the kind of wonder-filled play children experience as they explore and learn about the world. In order to support this goal, everything in SCRIPT-8 has immediate feedback. It is what some call a “livecoding” environment. Send this to $YOUNG_PERSON in your life. But also bcc it to yourself. 😉

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Your 3 intrepid hosts try to explain JS concepts (bind/apply, thunks, and ReasonML) to each other as if we’re five year olds. Hilarity and/or confusion ensues. During Pro Tip Time, Suz tells a story of woe, KBall motivates himself, and Jerod tries to keep you in the flow. Finally, we point our project spotlight at Fly CDN and talk edge applications and IoT.

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By utilizing a simple and minimal usage syntax rels enables you to easily view various analytics & stats regarding the releases of any GitHub repository, displayed in a clean & concise manner, right from within your terminal.

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Kent C. Dodds shares the backstory of paypal-scripts, a tool that encapsulates all the tools common to PayPal applications and published modules and why TypeScript was a fit. Kent took a poll in their #paypal-scripts Slack channel and 100% of respondents said they wanted the change. Here’s what happened next… About a week later, I had totally migrated paypal-scripts from supporting Flow to supporting TypeScript (most of that time was making all the tools recognize .ts and .tsx files 🙄 and allowing paypal-scripts to dogfood itself which is kinda tricky 🐶). … Then we had Christmas break 🎄 and the week we got back after the new year 🎆, it was merged and now every new project starts off with modern tools that will stay updated by default and will be statically typed with TypeScript.

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The JS Party crew discuss static site generators, our experiences with them, and what the future might hold for this ever-evolving technology.

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KBall and Nick meet up with Jory Burson and Amal Hussein at Node+JS Interactive. Together we open up the black box of the JavaScript standards process, talk about how to get involved, and then dig into the use of ASTs to transform and analyze JavaScript.

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