#399 — August 17, 2018

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

A blast from the past this week as we take some time out to ask Dr. Axel Rauschmayer, a former editor of JavaScript Weekly, some questions on the release of his new book, JavaScript for Impatient Programmers. You can find that further down in this issue :-)
— Peter Cooper, editor

JavaScript Engine Fundamentals: Optimizing Prototypes — Having a deeper understanding of how JavaScript engines work can help you reason about the performance characteristics of your code and this diagram-rich post digs into engines optimize around JavaScript’s use of prototype-based inheritance.

Mathias Bynens

▶  Kyle Simpson says 'Keep Betting on JavaScript' — A look back at “how far we’ve come” to see what the path ahead may look like for JavaScript. Filmed at JSCamp Barcelona. Associated slides here.

Kyle Simpson

How to Choose the Best Framework for Mobile Development? — The mobile development landscape has changed and we've put together a list of modern options for you. This is a long term decision, you must choose wisely. Download our free ebook to learn more.

Progress sponsor

16 JavaScript Data Visualization and Charting Libraries — A rather extensive summary and comparison of charting libraries, comparing key factors such as chart types, commercial vs free, and their open-source status.

Dan Englishby

V8's Embedded Builtins and Reducing V8's Median Heap Size by 19% — The V8 JavaScript engine ships with an extensive library of built-in functions and a lot of work has gone into reducing the memory overhead these can represent.

Jakob Gruber

Creating a Chrome Extension in 2018: The Good, the Bad and the Meh — Talks through the development lifecycle of creating an extension and lists some of the architectural gotchas.

Tim Nolet

Visual Studio Code's July 2018 Update — The most popular editor in the JavaScript world has added a variety of features, many of them JS-oriented, including JSX tag completion, a ‘add all missing imports’ feature, and better JS/TS error reporting.

Microsoft

💻 Jobs

Node Data Engineer at eBench (Remote, full-time) — We're a SaaS company that creates beautiful data visualizations. Enjoy crafting quality code? We would love to hear from you.

eBench

Front-end Developer at Forza Football — We're seeking an open minded person who enjoys working in a team and has advanced knowledge in frontend development.

Football Addicts AB

Find A JavaScript Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in dev roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials and Opinions

10 Things You Will Eventually Learn About JavaScript Projects — A collection of common patterns that made working on even the most uncoordinated projects somehow manageable.

The Cat with a Dragon Tattoo

Setting Up Constants via Proxies

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Build a Netflix Style Video Delivery Platform — SDKs for all platforms - Play videos at the same quality and speed as Netflix & YouTube.

Bitmovin sponsor

How Angular CLI Budgets Save My Day And How They Can Save Yours — Runs through what Angular application budgets are and what problems they can help surface.

Tomas Trajan

The Generic Sensor API — The Generic Sensor API aims to provide a consistent JS API for client device sensors.

Ruadhan O'Donoghue

Handling Authentication in Vue with Vuex

Chris Nwamba

▶  Web Performance For Third Party Scripts: Two Talks — Two talks to help you take into account the effect third party scripts may have on your site’s performance.

SmashingConf

▶  Next-Generation Frontend Testing with Cypress.io

Amir Rustamzadeh

See Why Facebook, Spotify, & Sony Trust CircleCI with Their CI/CD

CircleCI sponsor

▶  A Conversation with Ember Co-Creator Tom Dale on Ember 3.0 and Ember's Future

JavaScript Jabber podcast

A Proposal: Elixir-Style Modules in JavaScript

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

Three Reasons to Use Vue.js in Your Next Web Project

Arnaud Lewis

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

💬 A Q&A with…
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
JavaScript book author and trainer
Munich, Germany

To celebrate the release of his new book, JavaScript for Impatient Programmers, we've caught up with once-JavaScript Weekly editor Dr. Axel Rauschmayer to ask him a couple of questions:

What is an 'impatient' programmer?

I’m assuming that readers of my latest book are 'impatient' in the sense that they want to get started with JavaScript as quickly as possible.

Most chapters are split into two parts. First, the basics, or what is the absolute minimum that you need to know? Then, more advanced stuff, or what should you know once you are more familiar with the language?

This is the only book, that I’m aware of, that covers all of JavaScript, up to and including the very latest version (ES2018). That allowed me to omit old features that were superseded by better features in recent versions (but I do include references that explain the omitted features).

What recent JavaScript features do you think are underused and deserve more attention?

Three stand out for me:

  • In the category “boring, but important”, I count modules and classes, because they provide standardization where we previously had competing and incompatible approaches.
  • Built-in support for iteration is great, especially if combined with destructuring: for (const [i, x] of arr.entries()) console.log(i, x);
  • Asynchronous functions and asynchronous iteration make asynchronous programming much more pleasant. They are the culmination of a standardization process that started with Promises in ES6.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer is the author of JavaScript for Impatient Programmers — out now.

🔧 Code and Tools

Tone.js: A Web Audio Framework for Making Interactive Music in the Browser — Lots of examples here.

Yotam Mann

SpaceTime: A Lightweight JavaScript Timezone Library

Spencer Kelly

Move Fast and Fix Stuff. Over 500K Developers Fix Errors with Sentry — Notify only the right person based on the commit and see unminified code in the stack trace with source maps.

Sentry sponsor

from-html: Get Element References Directly From a String of HTML — An interesting and straightforward way to create nested DOM elements.

m3g4p0p

flowchart.js: Turn Textual Representation of Diagrams into Flow Charts — Want something similar for UML sequence diagrams? Here you go.

Adriano Raiano

📅 Some forthcoming JavaScript events