~javascriptweekly | Bookmarks (276)

Fabric.js: SVG-to-Canvas and Canvas-to-SVG Library — Provides an interactive object model on top of the HTML canvas to make it easier to work with multiple visual elements. A long standing project, v6 has been in the pipeline for a while and the first release candidate recently dropped.

Your Background Images Might Be Causing CLS by Salma Alam-Naylor — In this post, learn how to to avoid unexpected cumulative layout shift (CLS) with tried and tested solutions.

Five Node Version Managers Compared — Ideally, we could use the latest LTS version of Node for everything, but in reality we often need to switch versions. Numerous tools let you do this. NVM is the best known, but N, FNM, Volta, or even pnpm could suit you better?

'At Some Point, JavaScript Got Good' — The author notes JavaScript got a “big ‘boost’” with ES6, and commends the continuous improvements made since. Perhaps unsurprisingly, an associated lively discussion on Hacker News highlighted some lingering overall disdain.

Pintora: An Extensible Text-to-Diagram Rendering Library — A similar idea to Mermaid but with a different attitude to extensibility as well as no requirement for a headless browser server-side. The intro docs have both visual and code examples.

Headless UI v2.0 for React — From the Tailwind folks, Headless UI is a suite of unstyled, accessible UI React (and Vue, though at a lower version for now) components, designed to integrate well with Tailwind CSS.

Make Your Dev Experience Even Faster — 🥷 Console Ninja now logs network requests (fetch, XMLHttpRequest) for your app! Visually linking network activity directly to your code provides immediate insights into network behavior.

jQuery to JavaScript Converter — A browser-based tool to quickly convert jQuery scripts over to, well, non-jQuery-using code. Repo here.

DerbyJS 4: The Mature MVC Web Framework — Derby has lived through most of Node.js’s history and remains a viable option for building realtime, collaborative apps in particular. GitHub repo.

graphql-request 7.0: Minimal GraphQL Client — Now a pure ESM package with first class TypeScript support for both client and server-side.

Development Notes from xkcd's 'Machine' — I bet many of you are fans of xkcd! For this year’s April Fools’ joke, they published ‘Machine’, a giant Rube Goldberg machine of sorts (explained here). With a lot of TypeScript up front and Haskell in the back, here’s how it works at a technical level. (GitHub repo.)

Figma’s Journey to TypeScript — How the team at Figma automatically migrated code written in their own Skew programming language over to TypeScript — without disrupting a single day of development.

Gulp Never Went Away; Take the Gulp Developer Survey? — It’s easy to forget many great tools that got a lot of press years ago are still going and doing well. So it goes for Gulp, a build system and toolkit first released in 2013. Gulp 5.0 came out last month and the team is on a mission to make it even better. If...

▶  Seamless Drag and Drop Between Applications — A fantastic demonstration of using browser APIs to create more elegant drag and drop experiences that even work across different browser windows or IFRAMEs, with Atlassian’s Pragmatic Drag and Drop library doing the heavy lifting.

Why Patching Globals is Harmful — Modifying global APIs to extend their features is common, but not particularly desirable if readability, maintenance, and predictability are qualities you enjoy.

Start Coding for Free! Build Real-Time Chat Messaging in Days — Looking to quickly integrate your desired combination of low-level API access and pre-built Stream libraries and components? Find out how to get started with Stream today.

Announcing TypeScript 5.5 Beta — It’s not even the final release (expect that in a month or two) but 5.5 has many people excited as it has many major enhancements, including inferred type predicates, the ability to import types in JSDoc via comments, regex syntax checking, isolated declarations, and more. If you want more practical examples, Matt Pocock 🐦 wrote a good Twitter thread.

Maybe MOAR Is Not the Answer 🫠 — Turns out a relentless push for MOAR features and developers was wrong. Leaders could do with some reflection on less.

Finally Understanding How Array.sort(comparator) Works — “After 13 years of JavaScript, I finally have a way to remember how the comparator function in Array.sort() works..”

Build Advanced Interactive Experiences with the StackBlitz SDK — Join our live stream on programmatically embedding interactive dev environments on your site.

Happy World Password Day! Curious About How We Got Here? — Learn about the history of passwords in this timeline that spans millenniums, and find out why passwords are history.

Tagify 4.26: An Elegant Input Component for Tags — The polished demos show a lot of effort has been put in here. GitHub repo.

Journey.js: No-Dependency Library to Create Interactive Guided Tours — The live examples are basic, but the focus on accessibility and built-in support for 51 languages are pluses.

▶  Let Me Be: "const ... Is Stupid and You're Using It Wrong" — An entertaining 12-minute talk on misunderstandings around the use of const vs let. This was bound to provoke some strong reactions (see the Twitter thread) but let him make his point!