#418 — January 4, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

RunJS: A JavaScript 'Scratchpad' Tool for macOS — Write and run JavaScript instantly. Useful for learning, experimenting, or perhaps even creating screencasts, tweets, or similar educational content.

Luke Haas

FBT: An Internationalization Framework from Facebook — Facebook has open sourced an internationalization framework that they’ve used internally till now. The goal is to be ‘both powerful and intuitive’. GitHub repo. Or see example usage code to get a better feel.

Facebook

Top JavaScript Frameworks and Topics to Learn in 2019 — We see a lot of ‘top X’ posts when editing JavaScript Weekly but this annual review of the JavaScript tech ecosystem by none other than Eric Elliott is always a crowd pleaser.

Eric Elliott

Make Magic with Creative Coding in Canvas & WebGL 🎩✨ — Use JavaScript to create generative art, interactive animations, 3D graphics with ThreeJS, and custom shaders in GLSL. ✨You'll learn the fundamentals for creative coding jobs like games, advertising, AR/VR and installation artwork!

Frontend Masters sponsor

Electron 4.0 Released — Electron is a popular project from GitHub that’s heavily used to create desktop apps with modern Web technologies (such as VS Code and Slack's desktop client). 4.0 introduces some new features but notably bumps up the underlying dependencies to Chromium 69, Node 10.11, and V8 6.9.

Michelle Tilley

Artificial Intelligence in JS with TensorFlow.js — A brief, high level explanation of one of the problems a system like TensorFlow.js can solve: the recognition of written numbers. (Note: This is one post in the always great annual JavaScript January series.)

Seth Juarez

What Happened with Node.js in 2018 — This week’s Node Weekly was dedicated to a month by month runthrough of the biggest things that happened in the world of Node.js. We also did a best frontend links of 2018 in Frontend Focus.

Node Weekly

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Find A Job Through Vettery — Vettery matches top tech talent with growing companies. Create your profile to get started.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials and Opinions

Fancy Function Parameters — The process behind making an opaque function call easier to understand using objects and optional arguments.

Jake Dohm

Creating and Filling Arrays of Arbitrary Lengths in JavaScript

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Creating a Reusable Accordion Component That Works Anywhere — How to make a web component using Angular Elements which can now be used with any or no framework.

Priyesh Patel

Read Now: the Ultimate Guide to Npm — Everything you need to know to know to use the npm CLI, from basic building blocks to time-saving tips and tricks.

NodeSource sponsor

Running Node.js 11 on AWS Lambda — With Lambda’s new Layers feature and custom runtimes you can now build your own custom artifacts, enabling you to share and manage common code between serverless functions.

Adnan Rahic

The Chronicles of JavaScript Objects — A back to basics tour of what objects are in JavaScript and how they behave.

Arfat Salman

Create Your First Custom Angular CLI Schematic with NxNx is a toolkit for people building enterprise-grade Angular apps.

Sam Julien

Storing and Using the Last Known Route in Vue — How to keep a reference to the last known route a user visited in Vue. Also a good excuse to check out the all-new CSS Tricks redesign!

Mateusz Rybczonek

The Developer’s Guide to Not Losing the Metrics You Need

InfluxData sponsor

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

Adam Neary

Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With 'Full Stack' — Thoughts I think a lot of us may have had but hadn’t put into words yet.

Heydon Pickering

🔧 Code and Tools

AVA 1.0: A Powerful Test Runner for Node — AVA is a test runner with a concise API, detailed error output, and process isolation that let you write tests more effectively. You may find the README more useful than these release notes if you aren’t familiar with it yet though.

Mark Wubben and Sindre Sorhus

Take the Pain Out of Acceptance Testing with Gauge by Thoughtworks

Gauge sponsor

Rollup.js 1.0: A Module Bundler for JavaScript

Low.js: A Node Port for Embedded Devices — Has far lower system requirements than standard Node and can now be flashed on to ESP32-WROVER boards. Here’s how.

neonious GmbH

string-similarity: Finds Degree of Similarity Between Two Strings — Uses the Sørensen–Dice coefficient which is better than Levenshtein distance for many use cases.

Akash K

Magic Grid: A Simple Library for Dynamic Grid Layouts — This has a slightly different use case than CSS Grids may be useful for as explained in this article.

Emmanuel Olaojo

Brain.js: A Neural Network Library — If you’re looking for an excuse to play with neural networks, there’s an interactive 19 part course on using Brain.js to do just that.

Robert Plummer