#525 — February 12, 2021

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JavaScript Weekly

▶  JavaScript's Creator Brendan Eich Shares The Full Story of JavaScript — Lex Fridman is an AI researcher who’s becoming well known for high quality interviews with some of the greatest minds of our time and here he talks with Brendan Eich about his coding history, JavaScript’s full origin story, the browser wars, and Brave.

Lex Fridman

Marko 5: eBay's UI Library Grows Up — If you’ve used eBay, you’ve used Marko. It’s eBay’s open-source JavaScript UI framework and is celebrating its ninth birthday with a new major version. There’s a lot to like, but it’s obviously not React or Angular. Project homepage.

Ryan Carniato

Locate Front-End Issues Like JavaScript or Network Errors Instantly — Get proactively alerted on any client-side issues such as JavaScript and network errors, optimize the load time of your front-end resources, and detect any UI issues that affect critical user journeys. Try it free with Datadog Synthetics.

Datadog sponsor

Remotion: Create Videos and Motion Graphics with React — I'm no fan of video editing, but what if rather than creating videos in apps like Final Cut or AfterEffects we could just program them.. Here's a fantastic 90-second trailer showing off the idea, but Alex Anderson has also put together an 18-minute screencast showing off exactly how to make a video production of your own. v1.1 just dropped. GitHub repo.

Jonny Burger

Mass Function Overloading: Why and How? — Lea is rewriting Bliss to use ES modules and is pondering the implications for her API’s design.

Lea Verou

Quick Bits

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team

Find Your Next Job Through Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.

Hired

📖 Articles, Opinion & Tutorials

Sharing Data Between CSS and JavaScript with Custom Properties — How to use JavaScript to give CSS things it can’t access. For example, CSS can’t read pointer coordinates, but JavaScript can.

Christian Heilmann

Generators in JavaScript and How to Use Them — Not played around with generators (as introduced in ES6) yet? This is a pretty good walkthrough.

Karim Elghamry

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify kept build times under 5 minutes while they scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers.

Buildkite sponsor

How to Generate a Presigned URL in Modular AWS SDK for JavaScript — A very common use case for S3 is to have client side apps directly download or upload assets to/from it (e.g. photos, videos, large uploads). The way to give users privileged access to S3 objects or buckets without giving them full-on AWS credentials is to use signed URLs, as demonstrated here.

Allan Zheng

Seven Interview Questions on JavaScript Closures — You might want to revise A Simple Explanation of JavaScript Closures before you take these on ;-)

Dmitri Pavlutin

Accessing Hardware Devices on the Web: A Roundup of APIs — Chrome tends to have more unique APIs for hardware access so take care if cross browser compatibility is necessary, but there are a lot of options nonetheless from the Gamepad API or getUserMedia to the Generic Sensor API or Web NFC.

François Beaufort

How Ruby on Rails' Creator is Taking on JavaScript Frameworks with Hotwire — David Heinemeier Hansson holds strong views about Web development and JavaScript-heavy front-end frameworks isn't a part of his approach.

Richard MacManus

Build Interactive Messaging with Stream, MML, Node, & React

Stream sponsor

▶  Syntax.fm Covers Deno — The popular Syntax.fm Web development podcast turns its attention to Deno (the TypeScript-oriented, safety first, server side JavaScript runtime) with a thorough tour of its capabilities and potential.

Syntax Podcast podcast

Clean Code Through Reactive Programming in Angular with RxJS
Paul Clavier

Getting Started with Apache Kafka in Node.js
Valeri Karpov

🛠 Code & Tools

supported by Okta

WebdriverIO v7 Released — WebdriverIO is a popular browser and mobile automation testing framework for Node. v7 brings it over to TypeScript, improves its Google Lighthouse integration, and improves compiler tool integration. There’s even a brief video about the release.

Christian Bromann

GoldenLayout: A Multi-Window Layout Manager for Webapps — This project went open source five years ago (we covered it in issue 279!) but with this week’s 2.0 release has been rewritten in TypeScript, reworked (bye jQuery!), and now only supports modern browsers. Want some demos?

Wolfram Hempel

Ember Table 3.0: Powerful Table Control for Ember Apps — Another older library that’s been brought up to modern standards (though it has dropped Ember versions under 2.8). Always great to see this happening. GitHub repo.

Addepar

Managing Your Tasks Shouldn't Be a Task — "Clubhouse is like a fast and delightful version of Jira, a more purposeful version of Trello." - Current User.

Clubhouse.io sponsor

Mineflayer 3.0: Let's Build Minecraft Bots in JavaScript — Want to have some gaming fun but not ready to put down the code? There’s even a tutorial aimed at non-coders if you want to let the kids have a go. GitHub repo.

Andrew Kelley

run-parallel 1.2: Run an Array of Functions in Parallel — Run an array of functions in parallel.

Feross Aboukhadijeh

🆕 Quick releases:

  • Marked 2.0 — Fast Markdown parser and compiler.
  • React Static 7.5.0 — Progressive static site generator for React.
  • Lerna 4.0 — Tool for managing projects with multiple packages.
  • Mocha 8.3.0 — Test framework for Node.js and the browser.
  • Deno 1.7.2 — Server-side TypeScript runtime.