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#​784 — May 5, 2026

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JavaScript Weekly

Build AI Features That Get Better Over Time — Join Scott Moss for this detailed video course covering agentic systems, eval harnesses, RAG, and context engineering — everything you need to ship reliable, production-ready AI features.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Node.js 26.0.0 (Current) Released — A little macOS build snafu pushed last week’s release date out to today, but the latest version of Node is here, complete with the Temporal API enabled by default, V8 14.6, and Undici 8. v26 is the ‘current’ cutting edge release until October when it’ll be promoted to LTS.

Rafael Gonzaga

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

  • PM2 7.0 – The Node.js process manager gets a refactor that slashes its dependency footprint, and extends cluster mode and the monitoring agent to Bun apps.

  • Astro v7 Alpha – The web framework for content-driven websites teases its Vite 8-based, Rust-based compiler-driven version, alongside its v6.2 release.

  • Electron 41.5 – The cross-platform desktop app framework adds support for Touch ID for WebAuthn on macOS.

  • Ember 6.12 – The final 6.x release in preparation for Ember 7.0.

  • ESLint 10.3, Zod 4.4, Babylon.js 9.5

📖  Articles and Videos

Testing Vue Components in the Browser — Julia sets up integration tests for her components that run entirely in the browser, sidestepping extraneous tooling, and shares issues she ran into around mounting components, waiting on the DOM, filling forms, and measuring coverage.

Julia Evans

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, supports Vitest, Jest, Karma, Jasmine, and more.

Wallaby Team sponsor

📄 'I Got a $134 Cloudflare D1 Bill: Here's How I Cut It 95%' – Adventures in using SvelteKit on Cloudflare Workers with D1 (SQLite) and Drizzle ORM. Justin Ahinon

📄 Inside React's Out-of-Order Streaming – See how the magic happens behind the scenes. Sankalpa Acharya

📄 Making Bluetooth Low Energy Work with JavaScript Ifedayo Agboola

🛠 Code & Tools

Anime.js 4.4: The Flexible JavaScript Animation Engine — At ten years old, the ‘animate anything from JavaScript’ library continues to get even better with a new scrambleText effect and auto-grid layout mode for stagger grids. The docs for Anime are truly top-tier and packed with examples.

Julian Garnier

Video Archiving with the Vonage Video API and React — Master four ways to record: capture audio-only, separate streams, or use Experience Composer for custom branded layouts.

Vonage sponsor

Formisch: A Modular, Type-Safe Form Library — A schema-based, headless form library for Preact, Qwik, React, SolidJS, Svelte and Vue that manages form state and validation (using Valibot). Try out some demos in the playground.

Open Circle

opentype.js: Read and Write OpenType Fonts — Get direct access to letterforms in the browser and Node.js. Has broad WOFF, OTF, and TTF support, and supports ligatures, kerning, and emojis. You can also create your own fonts from scratch. The new v1.3.5 release is a preview of the soon-to-land 2.0. GitHub repo.

Frederik De Bleser

View Transitions Mock: Non-Visual Polyfill for Same-Document View Transitions — A JS implementation of Same-Document View Transitions, without the visuals. Write one clean code path: supporting browsers get the transitions, non-supporting ones get an instant DOM swap, but the promises behave the same.

Google Chrome Labs

  • 🎬 Mediabunny v1.42.0 – Read, write, and convert audio and video files in the browser. v1.42.0 notably adds HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) read/write support.

  • pnpm v11.0.5 – The fast and efficient npm alternative has deployed many bugfixes since last week's big 11.0 release.

  • Electrobun 1.18 – Build tiny cross-platform desktop apps atop Bun. (Changelog)

  • useHotkeys 5.3 – React hook for using keyboard shortcuts in components.

  • RxDB 17.2.0 – Fast, local-first, reactive database for JS apps.

📰 Classifieds

⌘ Command Code is a frontier coding agent that ships features, fixes bugs, writes tests, & continuously learns your taste. Start now for $1.

Flaky tests slowing down dev? Meticulous gives engineers confidence to ship faster by autonomously testing every edge case of your web app.

⚙️ The new Clerk CLI: Run clerk init to scaffold auth, clerk config to manage it in code, Clerk API to query it. Open source: clerk.com/cli

Handsontable Theme Builder has AI. Describe your theme, get a token set that fits your data grid — no CSS overrides, no trial and error.

📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem

  • How can you not love a project homepage where you're a cat in a convertible driving through an endless barrage of obstacles? Crashcat is a JavaScript 3D rigid body physics library built for games, simulations, and web experiences, complete with numerous fun examples.

  • ✉️ Cloudflare has open sourced Agentic Inbox, a self-hosted React 19 and React Router 7-based Gmail-style email app that ties together and heavily leans on numerous Cloudflare APIs.

  • Ladybird is a "truly independent web browser" with its renderer and JS engine built entirely from scratch, with an alpha release due later this year. In the project's latest update they cover recent significant JS and CSS improvements.

  • Tired of localhost:3000 on your projects? Vercel's Portless lets you run daemons accessible via a more user-friendly .localhost hostname over HTTPS.

  • Thales is a TypeScript to Lean compiler that type-checks a subset of TypeScript and emits a Lean sidecar, turning your code into a Lean module you can reason about.