Changelog

Why use Day.js? 🕒 Familiar Moment.js API & patterns 💪 Immutable 🔥 Chainable 📦 2kb mini library 👫 All browsers support It's worth noting that the author doesn't claim 100% API compatibility with Moment.js, but they say it's close enough that "If you use Moment.js, you already know how to use Day.js." If your app targets modern browsers and is currently packing Moment.js' 16.4kb in its JS bundle, maybe you can get by with Day.js' 2kb instead...

Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community's big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending on JavaScript packages and vice versa, Wasm ES Modules, and Lin's upcoming keynote at Fluent on the parallel future of the browser.

James Long is a prolific blogger and the author of several open source libraries including Prettier. He has recently started developing Actual, a budgeting app built in React and Electron. In this episode we talk about James' approach to business, as well as take a peek behind the scenes at how he works with React.

Easily interact with the WordPress API from your front-end, whether it's React-based or not. Built with axios.

Jerod Santo, Safia Abdalla, Nick Nisi, and Kevin Ball talk about progressive web apps. What are they, what do they do, what are some practical ways of using them, and more.

Paul Kinlan, developer advocate for Chrome and the open web at Google writes: Chrome implemented window.onappinstalled event. It's triggered when a user installs a progressive web app via the Add to Homescreen API or now more importantly via the manual method of Add to Homescreen. This is a very useful addition because it allows you to see engagement on the prompt vs people who use the system banners or menu buttons to install a progressive web app. Now you can track your PWA's install engagement based on the method of install — via the prompt or manually via a custom prompt. Read the docs for more details. Also, make sure you subscribe to JS Party to hear discussions about PWAs and the web platform.

When I first saw this I thought surely they were wrapping some hot new browser API. Nope! For the curious, here's the breakdown of how it works. On a somewhat comical note, the only open issue on the repo is someone challenging the author to do it in just 100 lines...

wasm-pack is a tool for assembling and packaging Rust crates that target WebAssembly. These packages can be published to the npm Registry and used alongside other packages. This means you can use them side-by-side with JS and other packages, and in many kind of applications, be it a Node.js server side app, a client-side application bundled by Webpack, or any other sort of application that uses npm dependencies. We're recording a show with Lin Clark today and will definitely ask her all about the progress Mozilla folks have been making on merging the JavaScript and Rust worlds via WebAssembly. Exciting times!

Like JSFiddle, but for ChordPro chord sheets. I'm no musician, so I'm not embarrassed to say I had to google to learn ChordPro is an ASCII text file format for transcribing songs with chords and lyrics. ChordFiddle is loaded with features and has more coming on the project board. Look under the hood and you'll find two more open source libs: ChordSheetJS and ChordJS.

We talk with Chad Hietala about Ember JS, the long history of Ember, how Chad first got involved, his work on the Ember core team, Glimmer, and more.

Yesterday's bearish link about PWAs caused a bit of a stir in our community Slack. Here comes the bull: PWAs are going to be versatile enough and robust enough that they're going to supplant some of the native apps you might have on your phone (or computer) today. I appreciate the caution on display by use of the word "some". Jon may be bullish, but he's not a zealot! Why does he think PWAs will finally get over the hurdle? One acronym: WASM With the ease of install of PWAs and high performance of WASM, I think we're also going to see some Electron apps moving to be PWAs. Great article. Definitely click through and read the whole thing. 💯

Judah Gabriel starts this post off with the question "Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!” — and I don't fully disagree, until you think about where your users will come from. The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web. There are many more lessons learned about the process — from creation to submission — but here's the tldr... Turning a web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and submitting it to 3 app stores requires about a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape. (We're planning a deep-dive on PWAs for an upcoming episode of JS Party. Subscribe to be notified.)

Here's a shiny new new project from Vue's creator. There are plenty of static site generators in the wild, but most of them are created with blogging or generic content in mind. VuePress has a specific angle: VuePress is composed of two parts: a minimalistic static site generator with a Vue-powered theming system, and a default theme optimized for writing technical documentation. It was created to support the documentation needs of Vue’s own sub projects. The default theme looks great (no surprise there) and the supporting documentation/story telling around VuePress is quite impressive as well. But perhaps you're wondering, "Why not $X?", where $X is a similar alternative. Here's why.

Jerod Santo, Suz Hinton, Feross Aboukhadijeh, and Kevin Ball talk about awesome things being done with JavaScript like WebUSB, WebTorrent, and DSLs.

This is way too freakin' fun! It uses your webcam to insert you into Matrix-y digital rain. 👋

I wasn't ready to become the maintainer of Babel. After all, I had never published my own npm package or explored much of the codebase. But slowly (sometimes really slowly) I got used to it. I recall Kent C. Dodds saying that if you want to be a maintainer, just act like and do the things a maintainers does. Sounds easy enough 🤣. I particularly enjoyed the linked post on imposter syndrome from Rachel Smith.

Jeremy Keith in an excerpt from his new book Going Offline on A List Apart: The internet is a network of networks, all of them agreeing to use the same protocols to shuttle packets of data around. Those packets are transmitted down fiber-optic cables across the ocean floor, bounced around with Wi-Fi or radio signals, or beamed from satellites in freakin’ space. As long as these networks are working, the web is working. But sometimes networks go bad… When the network fails, the web fails. That’s just the way it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Until now. I'm really excited to see Jeremy Keith write a whole book on service workers. I've dabbled a bit here and there, but now that support for them continues to grow, I'm excited to dive in.

Andrew Clark is a developer on the React core team at Facebook who has been working on asynchronous rendering. In this episode we do a deep dive on some of the decisions behind the implementation of async mode in React 16 as well as talk about how applications can benefit from using it.

This library has a tiny (4 KB) footprint, no dependencies, and most (all?) of the features you'd need in a file dropping library.

The party is back! In this episode, we talk about what we love about JS, Tabler and admin UI's, and shoutouts to some of our favorite projects and people.

Jordan Eldredge joined the show to talk with us about Winamp2-js — a reimplementation of Winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and Javascript. For many of our listeners, talking about Winamp may bring to mind some extreme nostalgia about the internet of the past ... and it's certainly that way for Jerod and I. Jordan started this project in 2014 and it's what ultimately got the attention of some folks at Facebook, where he now works on Nuclide. We shared stories about Winamp back in the day, actually listening to music as an mp3, the technical hurdles and learning Jordan has experienced, skinning it, playlists, making it a frontend for Spotify -- which is so ironic to actually say. Also, Jerod has been hacking it via livestream on Twitch to add it as an alternate audio player on Changelog.com.

A simple method that you can compose your components and return just one component that will be a render prop component that combining each prop result from your mapper.

In this episode Michael Jackson talks with David Khourshid about State Machines. David is a developer on the Visual Studio Live Share team at Microsoft. Recently, he's been exploring methods of using finite state machines together with React to create predictable flows through applications that are easy to follow and test.

Consola boasts ease of use, fancy logging (seen below) with CI fallbacks, globally mockable stdout/error wrappers, and more.

Today Glitch, the “friendly community where you’ll build the app of your dreams”, is officially “tearing off the beta label”. To celebrate, they’ve made a major announcement each day this week. The announcements include Glitch for Teams, “Making Learning to Code More Accessible” by adding embed support, “Tackling the Biggest Pain Points in Web Development” by adding things like “full-stack view source”, “Reinventing Version Control with Glitch Rewind”, and open-sourcing the Glitch.com app which will allow the community to remix the site to suggest ideas. Glitch is super exciting to me. Their efforts to make development more accessible, appealing, and fun will likely have profound effects on the community in the coming years.