Changelog

If you already know what save-exact, npm ci, npm audit fix, npx, updtr, and NVM_SYMLINK_CURRENT do, maybe skip this post. If not, check it out!

This project aims to be a drop-in solution for sites to prefetch links based on what is in the user’s viewport. It also aims to be small (< 1KB minified/gzipped). Relies on IntersectionObserver. Since prefetching is a form of progressive enhancement, unsupported browsers are no big whoop.

KBall, Chris, Nick, and Safia discuss how they keep a healthy relationship with dependencies in their codebase. Listen to learn how they decide when to use third-party dependencies, how they verify and validate dependencies, and how to support the ecosystem of open source libraries.

Eran Hammer makes the case for hapi as your Node web framework of choice. We’ve been talking about dependencies a lot lately due to recent events. In light of that, think about this: hapi was the first (and still the only) framework without any external code dependencies… I personally (and manually) review every single line of code that goes into hapi (excluding node itself). I review every pull request on every dependency regardless if I am the lead maintainer. That’s quite the selling point! He has a lot of great reasons why hapi is worthy of your consideration. Click through for the hard pitch.

arare enables you to write tacit, point-free, declarative & clean code while avoiding side-effects and mutations. Internally the library itself, comprised of over 200 functions, follows the functional programming paradigm and is materialized using fundamental functional qualities such as currying, recursion, tail calls, high-order functions, referential transparency, side-effects elimination and function composition. Ships with a built-in REPL. 💪

In this special episode of JS Party, KBall and Nick are on location at Node + JS Interactive in Vancouver. They talks with Laurie Voss, co-founder and COO of npm Inc. They chat about his talk, “npm and the Future of JavaScript”, JavaScript frameworks, and how the definition of “the fundamentals of the web” is constantly changing.

unified –for the uninitiated– is an interface for processing text with syntax trees and transforming between them. Maybe you’ve never heard of it, but you’ve probably relied on it as part of your software infrastructure: [unified] has been OSS for years, but has recently gotten more traction. It’s used in fancy technology such as MDX, Gatsby, and Prettier, and used to build things like Node’s docs, freeCodeCamp, and GitHub’s open source guide. Project’s like unified are crucial to the JavaScript ecosystem, but they’re difficult to fund and support toward sustainability. Hence, the unified collective. Today, we are pleased to announce the creation of the unified collective. It’s an effort to bring together like-minded organisations to collaboratively work on the innovation of content through seamless, interchangeable, and extendible tooling. We build parsers, transformers, and utilities so that others don’t have to worry about syntax. We make it easier for developers to develop. Let’s show these maintainers some 💚 and share this around to those who should be supporting it.

Adam and Jerod talk with Dominic Tarr, creator of event-stream, the IO library that made recent news as the latest malicious package in the npm registry. event-stream was turned malware, designed to target a very specific development environment and harvest account details and private keys from Bitcoin accounts. They talk through Dominic’s backstory as a prolific contributor to open source, his stance on this package, his work in open source, the sequence of events around the hack, how we can and should handle maintainer-ship of open source infrastructure over the full life-cycle of the code’s usefulness, and what some best practices are for moving forward from this kind of attack.

Contribute your insights to the 2018 npm survey and help to evolve and improve tools, services, and the ecosystem.

Collection of component libraries for UI toolkits for React, VueJS, Angular, ember. and mithril. Including implementation of Material Design, Fabric, Ant design, etc for each front-end framework.

KBall, Jerod, and Nick break down some recent events in the JavaScript world. Take a dive into the recent event-stream malware attack, breaking down the State of JavaScript 2018 survey, and sharing pro tips to make your life better.

When you build your app on top of a JavaScript framework, you’re making peace with the fact that your app will never load in less than X seconds, for some value of X that varies from framework to framework. What exactly is the “X” baseline performance cost? Follow along as Ankur Sethi shares what he learned.

htm is JSX-like syntax in plain JavaScript - no transpiler necessary. This works thanks to Tagged Templates and compiles down to zero bytes using babel-plugin-htm.

Google UX Engineer Adam Argyle joins Jerod and KBall to share all the details on VisBug, his just-released Chrome Extension that “makes any webpage feel like an artboard.” Adam is passionate about doing for designers what Firebug (and later DevTools) did for developers. In this episode, he shares that passion and how it’s driven him to create and open source VisBug.

Cool idea: take Google’s autocomplete suggestions, repeat the same query on them, take those suggestions, repeat the same query on them, and then draw a line between each suggestion. This could be useful for market research, to find alternative solutions, or simply for curiosity’s sake.

The results are in and JavaScript continues to take over the world! Over 20,000 developers were surveyed about JavaScript including JS variants, frameworks, tooling, and demographics. Of particular interest is the Opinions sections which compares results to previous years to show how developer sentiment is trending regarding satisfaction with the language and the ecosystem.

NESTED LOOPS is a JavaScript band that combines music and video with web tech to perform live at JSConf. In this episode, Jerod and Suz are joined by Jan Monschke and Kahlil Lechelt, which comprise 2/3 of the group. After sampling one of their tracks, we hear the story of how they got the band together, the journey of building a tech stack for their first live performance, and how that stack was then rewritten to be “good” for their second performance. Suz is at awe with the technologies at play. Jerod wonders if there’s room in the world for musicians directly targeting JavaScript devs. A good time is had by all.

I was exploring patterns that enable the browser to render a page as fast as possible by including code alongside the initial HTML so that the browser has everything it needs to start rendering the page, without making additional requests. Our two go-to options to achieve this goal are inlining and server push (more on how we use those), but each has drawbacks: inlining prevents a file from being cached for reuse, and server push is still a bit experimental, with some browser bugs still being worked out. As I was preparing to describe these caveats, I thought, “I wonder if the new Service Worker and Caching APIs could enable caching for inline code.” I’ve been dabbling a bit with service workers over on Brightly Colored to improve the loading time, so this exploration of caching inline CSS is fascinating. In fact, I used to completely inline all the CSS on the site, but switched to a file request because of the way I thought service workers, well… worked. Surprisingly, this implementation doesn’t look too difficult.

Our goal with Guess.js is to minimize your bundle layout configuration, make it data-driven, and much more accurate! In the end, you should lazy load all your routes and Guess.js will figure out which bundles to be combined together and what pre-fetching mechanism to be used! All this in less than 5 minutes setup time. That’s an excellent goal! But how will that work? During the build process, the GuessPlugin will fetch report from Google Analytics, build a model used for predictive pre-fetching and add a small runtime to the main bundle of your application. On route change, the runtime will query the generated model for the pages that are likely to be visited next and pre-fetch the associated with them JavaScript bundles. The tool was announced at Google I/O back in May, but as of today it’s still in alpha.

You can pair with a friend without setting up a proxy server, debug servers behind NATs, and more. WebTTY also works in-browser. You can connect to a WebTTY session from this static page: https://maxmcd.github.io/webtty

In this episode, Nick talks with Ives van Hoorne about his project CodeSandbox. They chat about Ives deciding to work on it full-time, how CodeSandbox is built, some of its best features, and what lies ahead.

I love how people continue to experiment in browserland. Min has some cool stuff going: Tabs in Min take up less space, giving you more room to browse the web. Pages you haven’t looked at in a while fade out, letting you see what’s important, and Focus Mode hides your other tabs to prevent you from getting distracted. It also sports built-in ad blocking (table stakes for new browsers to compete?) and DDG integration in the search bar. Min is built on Electron, so while it may be fast it possibly isn’t memory efficient. But what browser is, these days? It’s also worth noting that Min runs on an older version of Chromium, so it’s likely missing some security fixes. (More on that right here.)

Handling dynamic virtual hosts, load balancing, proxying web sockets and SSL encryption should be easy and robust. I agree! With built-in support for clustering, HTTP/2, LetsEncrypt, and Docker, this is worth a look. 👀

The Linux Foundation is essentially a foundation for foundations, and the newest member to join the ranks is the GraphQL Foundation. We’ve been tracking news and talking about GraphQL for some time now. Back in 2012 Nick Schrock, Dan Schafer, and Lee Byron got together at Facebook to build the next generation of Facebook’s iOS app powered by a new API for News Feed — what they arrived at was the first version of GraphQL. Lee Byron has this to say about today’s announcement: Today, GraphQL has been a community project longer than it was a Facebook internal project — which calls for its next evolution. As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption since its open sourcing. Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, I hope to see GraphQL become industry standard by encouraging contributions from a broader group and creating a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support. So who’s involved? Well, GraphQL Foundation is being created in partnership with the Linux Foundation, Facebook, and nearly a dozen other companies. Those “other companies” are likely large scale companies who’ve contributed to or are using GraphQL in production and have a vested interest in its future.

Safia, Nick, Jerod, and Chris get together to talk about documentation. Documentation is essential in our work but it can be difficult to get buy in. The crew talks about how you can get others to care about it in your organization, tools that make documentation easier, and some examples of companies doing it right.