#503 — August 28, 2020

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JavaScript Weekly

ztext.js: A 3D Typography Effect for the Web — While it initially has a bit of a “WordArt” feel to it, this library actually adds a pretty neat effect to any text you can provide. This is also a good example of a project homepage, complete with demos and example code.

Bennett Feely

D3 6.0: The Data-Driven Document Library — The popular data visualization library (homepage) takes a step forward by switching out a few internal dependencies for better alternatives, adopts ES2015 (a.k.a. ES6) internally, and now passes events directly to listeners. Full list of changes. There’s also a 5.x to 6.0 migration guide for existing users.

Mike Bostock

Scout APM - A Developer’s Best Friend — Scout’s intuitive UI helps you quickly track down issues so you can get back to building your product. Rest easy knowing that Scout is tracking your app’s performance and hunting down small issues before they become large issues. Get started for free.

Scout APM sponsor

Danfo.js: A Pandas-like Library for JavaScript — An introduction to a new library (homepage) that provides high-performance, intuitive, and easy-to-use data structures for manipulating and processing structured data following a similar approach to Python’s Pandas library. GitHub repo.

Rising Odegua (Tensorflow)

Electron 10.0.0 Released — The popular cross-platform desktop app development framework reaches a big milestone, though despite hitting double digits, this isn’t really a feature packed released but more an evolution of an already winning formula. v10 steps up to Chromium 85, Node 12.1.3, and V8 8.5.

Electron Team

Debug Visualizer 2.0: Visualize Data Structures Live in VS Code — We first mentioned this a few months ago but it’s seen a lot of work and a v2.0 release since then. It provides rich visualizations of watched values and can be used to visualize ASTs, results tables, graphs, and more. VS Marketplace link.

Henning Dieterichs

💻 Jobs

Sr. Engineer @ Dutchie, Remote — Dutchie is the world's largest and fastest growing cannabis marketplace. Backed by Howard Schultz, Thrive, Gron & Casa Verde Capital.

DUTCHIE

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

Vettery

📚 Tutorials, Opinions and Stories

Minimal React: Getting Started with the Frontend Library — Dr. Axel explains how to get started with React while using as few libraries as possible, including his state management approach.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

A Leap of Faith: Committing to Open Source — Babel maintainer Henry Zhu talks about how he left his role at Adobe to become a full-time open source maintainer, touching upon his faith, the humanity of such a role, and the finances of making it a reality.

The ReadME Project (GitHub)

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects - Try Buildkite ✅ — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

The Headless: Guides to Learning Puppeteer and PlaywrightPuppeteer and Playwright are both fantastic high level browser control APIs you can use from Node, whether for testing, automating actions on the Web, scraping, or more. Code examples are always useful when working with such tools and these guides help a lot in this regard.

Checkly

How To Build Your Own Comment System Using Firebase — Runs through how to add a comments section to your blog with Firebase, while learning the basics of Firebase along the way.

Aman Thakur

A Guide to Six Commonly Used React Component Libraries

Max Rozen

Don't Trust Default Timeouts“Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t.”

Roberto Vitillo

Guide: Get Started with OpenTelemetry in Node.js

Lightstep sponsor

Deno Built-in Tools: An Overview and Usage Guide

Craig Buckler

How I Contributed to Angular Components — A developer shares his experience as an Angular Component contributor.

Milko Venkov

🔧 Code & Tools

fastest-levenshtein: Performance Oriented Levenshtein Distance Implementation — Levenshtein distance is a metric for measuring the differences between two strings (usually). This claims to be the fastest JS implementation, but we’ll let benchmarks be the judge of that :-)

ka-weihe

Yarn 2.2 (The Package Manager and npm Alternative) Released — As well as being smaller and faster, a dedupe command has been added to deduplicate dependencies with overlapping ranges.

Maël Nison

Light Date ⏰: Fast and Lightweight Date Formatting for Node and Browser — Comes in at 157 bytes, is well-tested, compliant with Unicode standards on dates, and written in TypeScript.

Antoni Kepinski

Barebackups: Super-Simple Database Backups — We automatically backup your databases on a schedule. You can use our storage or bring your own S3 account for unlimited backup storage.

Barebackups sponsor

Carbonium: A 1KB Library for Easy DOM Manipulation — Edwin submitted this himself, so I’ll let him explain it in his own words: “It’s for people who don’t want to use a JavaScript framework, but want more than native DOM. It might remind you of jQuery, but this library is only around one kilobyte and only supports native DOM functionality.”

Edwin Martin

DNJS: A JavaScript Subset for Configuration Languages — You might think that JSON can already work as a configuration language but this goes a step further by allowing various other JavaScript features in order to be more dynamic. CUE and Dhall are other compelling options in this space.

Oliver Russell

FullCalendar: A Full Sized JavaScript Calendar Control — An interesting option if you want a Google Calendar style control for your own apps. Has connectors for React, Vue and Angular. The base version is MIT licensed, but there’s a ‘premium’ version too. v5.3.0 just came out.

Adam Shaw

file-type: Detect The File Type of a Buffer, Uint8Array, or ArrayBuffer — For example, give it the raw data from a PNG file, and it’ll tell you it’s a PNG file. Usable from both Node and browser.

Sindre Sorhus

React-PDF: Display PDFs in a React App As Easily As If They Were Images

Wojciech Maj

Meteor 1.11 Released

Filipe Névola

🕰 ICYMI (Some older stuff that's worth checking out...)