#498 — July 24, 2020

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JavaScript Weekly

Several New Features Promoted to Stage 4 at TC39 — If you’re interested in the future of JavaScript, several features have been promoted to stage 4 which, in TC39 parlance, means they are ‘finished’ and ready for inclusion in the formal ECMAScript standard. They include:

  • Promise.any and AggregateError
  • Number separator support (e.g. 1_000_000)
  • Weak references
  • Improvements to Intl.DateTimeFormat
  • ..and more, naturally 😄

Hemanth HM

Vue 3 Now in Release Candidate Stage — The final Vue 3.0 release isn’t due till sometime next month, but the API and implementation are now considered ‘stabilized’ with no new major features or breaking changes expected. There’s also a beta of the devtools with 3.0 support and a new v3 focused documentation site. Also here's some of what's new in Vue 3.

Evan You

Learn State Machines from the Creator of XState, David Khourshid — By modeling the state in your application with state machines and statecharts, you will spend less time debugging edge cases and more time modeling complex application logic in a visually clear and robust way.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Svelte 💛 TypeScript — Svelte, a popular compile-time JavaScript framework, now supports TypeScript too. Here’s how it works and how the current approach makes a previously difficult task a lot easier.

Orta Therox

V8 Version 8.5 Now in Beta — Coming soon to a Node.js near you (not to mention Chrome 85), the latest branch of the V8 JavaScript engine boasts Promise.any, String.prototype.replaceAll (no regex needed!) and support for logical assignment operators (like ||=).

Zeynep Cankara (Google)

What The Heck Is.. Memoization? — Dan Abramov is back tackling the topic of memoization – when you can optimize a function by caching results that are ‘expensive’ (in terms of time or memory) to calculate numerous times.

Dan Abramov

⚡️ Quick bytes:

💻 Jobs

Senior Full-Stack Engineer to Join Growing Team (React, Node.js) - London or Remote — Build our mental health platform for psychedelic therapy. Core tech is evidence-based generative music for therapists, care seekers and physical spaces.

Wavepaths

Senior Front-End Systems Architect (Remote, Western Hemisphere) — Got experience architecting and implementing front-end systems? Join us (in this fully remote role) and help us define best-in-class experience managers, site generators, UI and conversation frameworks.

MyPlanet

One Application, Hundreds of Hiring Managers — Use Vettery to connect with hiring managers at startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Vettery

📚 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

The Official Redux Essentials Tutorial.. Redux — A redevelopment of the basic Redux introduction that focuses on teaching you how to use the popular state container the right way with best practices. It’s practicality first and then digs into ‘how it works’ later on.

Redux Team

A Gentle Introduction to Webpack — No violence here, just why webpack exists, what problems it solves, and how to use it. Tyler has a good reputation as a teacher in the JavaScript space, so enjoy.

Tyler McGinnis

Eliminating Duplicate Objects from Arrays: Three Approaches

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Serverless Rendering with Cloudflare Workers — How to do server-side rendering ‘at the edge’ using Workers Sites, Wrangler, HTMLRewriter, and tools from the broader Workers platform.

Kabir Sikand

A Deep Dive Into V8 — Dive into V8's internal functioning, compilation and garbage collection processes, single-threaded nature, and more.

AppSignal sponsor

▶  New Course: Build JavaScript Applications with Node.js — Microsoft has released a video course covering Node from the very start through to setting up a project, debugging, using VS Code, and building an Express-based API.

Microsoft

An Introduction to Stimulus.js — Released by Basecamp a year or two ago now, Stimulus is a very light library to add behavior to your HTML elements without going full-on with a framework. Commonly used in the Ruby on Rails world, but worth checking out in its own right.

Mike Rogers

Your Blog Doesn’t Need a JavaScript Framework — Perhaps controversial, but, in explaining why he chose Eleventy over Gatsby, Iain argues that developers often overcomplicate sites, adding heavy frameworks where none is needed?

Iain Bean

How to Create a Dynamic Rick and Morty Wiki Web App with Next.js — A good tutorial for getting started with Next.js and deploying to Vercel by building a fun wiki site.

Colby Fayock

A Mental Model to Think in TypeScript — If you’re new to TypeScript and struggling with how to ‘think more in types.’

TK

🔧 Code & Tools

Perfect Arrows: A Minimal Way to Draw 'Perfect' Arrows Between Points and Shapes — Here’s a live demo.

Steve Ruiz

🎸 React Guitar: A Flexible 'Guitar Neck' Component for React — You’d use this to render things like chord positions, say. But, even better, you can ‘play’ it too 😁

React Guitar

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Handsontable: A Mature Data Grid That Feels Like a Spreadsheet — Somehow it’s been six years since we linked this last, but it’s still being updated and works with Vue, React, and Angular too. The only downside is it’s dual licensed, so it’s only free for evaluation or non-commercial use. GitHub repo.

Handsoncode

⚡️ Quick releases:

🎨 Creative Corner

Over the past few years Elijah Manor has been penning a few frontend developer jokes. Now, he's converted one such joke into a comic strip using the TypeScript-powered Excalidraw web-tool. Take a look: