#​727 — March 14, 2025

Read on the Web

Together with  Clerk

JavaScript Weekly

A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle — It looks deceptively simple – just 14 characters of JavaScript – but after working with JavaScript for 29 years, I got it wrong. A clue: it goes back to a browser-related quirk from 30 years ago..

Hillel Wayne

TypeScript's Compiler to Get 10x Faster — TypeScript has shaken up the JavaScript ecosystem in recent years with an increasing number of developers relying on its strong typing and added structure. TypeScript’s compiler isn’t particularly fast, though, but the TypeScript team at Microsoft are changing that by porting it to Go!

Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft)

💡 Dr. Axel Rauschmayer takes a closer look at the details behind the port.

Build a Secure Project Management — Learn a security-first approach to building web applications by building a secure project management platform with Next.js.

Clerk sponsor

IN BRIEF:

  • Node.js v20.19.0 (LTS) is a notable release for a maintenance branch of Node as an exception has been made to the maintenance policy for backporting require(esm) support, which is now enabled by default.

  • The latest version of Chrome (and preview versions of Firefox and Safari) support two new HTML attributes, command and commandfor, for adding declarative actions to HTML buttons without directly requiring JavaScript.

RELEASES:

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Building APIs with Next.js — A detailed, official introduction to the concepts behind using Next.js’ App Router and route handlers to build public APIs you can expose to web, mobile, and third-party clients.

Lee Robinson

How The New York Times Migrated from Enzyme to React Testing Library — A thorough look at the technical challenges and strategies the NYT used to perform a piecemeal upgrade of its React testing approach without disrupting either end users or other developers.

Felipe Buenaño (NYT Open Team)

Which AI Model Is Best for Fixing Unit Test Errors? Claude, o3-mini, GPT-4o? — Better context wins every time. Wallaby enters the chat to give AI what it needs - test coverage and runtime values - to debug smarter.

Wallaby Team sponsor

How ECMAScript Engines Optimize Your Variables — From the authors of the Boa JS Rust-powered JavaScript engine.

Boa Developers

📄 Use Cases for the Document Picture-in-Picture API – A way to open a floating, always-on-top window (‘picture-in-picture’) that can display arbitrary HTML content. Chrome only, though. Jad Joubran

📄 Using Intl.DurationFormat to Format Time Durations with Locale Support Trevor I. Lasn

📄 Learn Zod So You Can Trust Your Data and Your Types Diana MacDonald

📄 10 Hidden Gems in Angular That You Should Use IE 33

📄 Underrated Angular Features Armen Vardanyan

🛠 Code & Tools

Refractor 5.0: Robust Virtual Syntax Highlighting using Prism — Wraps the powerful Prism syntax highlighter to output objects instead of an HTML string so you can manipulate and render it as you wish (e.g. in a VDOM or at the terminal). Lowlight, by the same author, offers the same functionality but backed by highlight.js.

Titus Wormer

svg2pdf.js: SVG to PDF Conversion in the Browser — There’s an online playground to give you a feel for what it can do.

yWorks GmbH

🔒 Protect Against AI Bots, Fraud, and Abuse in Real Time — WorkOS Radar protects your app with advanced device fingerprinting — stop fake signups, free tier abuse, bot attacks and brute force attempts today.

WorkOS sponsor

⌘K: A Fast, Composable, Unstyled 'Command Menu' Control — The home page includes some neat examples in a variety of styles. GitHub repo. Needs React 18+.

Paco Coursey

🔎 Node Modules Inspector — A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, “installs” a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty’s Zach Leatherman did here.

Anthony Fu

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly — PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it’s only a few megabytes in size.

ElectricSQL / Neon

  • Gleam 1.9 – Type-safe functional programming language that targets both the Erlang VM and JavaScript runtime.

  • <css-doodle> 0.42 – Web component for drawing patterns with CSS.

  • Faker 9.6 – Generate fabricated data to your heart's content.

  • Choices 11.1 – Configurable select box/text input plugin.

  • 🕒 Spacetime 7.8 – Lightweight timezone library.

  • Ink 5.2 – Use React to build CLI apps.

📰 Classifieds

Meticulous automatically creates and maintains an E2E UI test suite with zero developer effort. Relied on by 1000s of orgs, including Dropbox, Lattice, Bilt Rewards and many more.


Current PDF setup slowing you down? Try Nutrient's PDF SDK — it's used by IBM, SAP, DocuSign and countless others to open, edit, and customize with ease across platforms.


👀 Give your eyes a break! MonoLisa is a font optimized for developers. Try now.

📢  Elsewhere

A quick roundup of some of other interesting updates or useful resources in the broader developer landscape: