Preact X, Node-RED 1.0, and TypeScript 3.7 beta

#457 — October 4, 2019

Read on the Web

JavaScript Weekly

Preact X: A Fast, 3KB React Alternative— Two years in the making, the latest version of Preact, a popular lightweight React-compatible alternative, is here. Support for hooks, ‘fragment’ components, and improved error handling are all here. For more info, check out the What’s new in Preact X guide.

Preact

The Differences Between the Same App Created in React and Vue— An interesting side by side comparison of the same app built by the same developer in both React and Vue.js. If you’ve seen this post before, it’s just been rewritten and updated to use React hooks.

Sunil Sandhu

🔒 Build an Encrypted File Transfer in 15 Minutes— Tanker.io helps you secure data exchanges in your apps. Encrypt, upload and share files in one API call, in the browser. No key management, zero crypto skills required.

Tanker sponsor

Creating Custom JavaScript Syntax with Babel— Wow, this is cool. An introduction to forking Babel and creating your own custom JavaScript syntax.

Tan Li Hau

Evaluating JavaScript Code via import()— import lets us dynamically load modules but can also work as a sort of alternative to eval.. an interesting trick here.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Node-RED 1.0 Released— Node RED is a flow-based, visual programming tool (aimed primarily at hardware automation) that’s built on top of Node.js. Despite only reaching 1.0 now, it’s a mature project used in numerous real world IoT projects.

Nick O'Leary

💻 Jobs

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote)— Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

Your Princess (or Prince!) IS in this Castle: Node Developer (London)— This role is for a senior JS/Node/React dev who can’t wait to tackle more architectural responsibility at a large, well-known company with a passion for saving folks money.

CareersJS

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

Vettery

📘 Articles & Tutorials

How to Build Cross-Platform, Native Desktop Apps with NodeGUI— A beginner’s guide to NodeGUI, a tool for building native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS styling in a more lightweight way than using Electron.

James Hibbard

How V8 Is Improving V8 Regular Expressions— This is very technical, JavaScript engine-y sorta stuff, but basically the V8 team show off their technique for speeding up how regexes are interpreted.

Patrick Thier and Ana Peško (V8)

Free Webinar on User Journey Testing with Scott Davis from ThoughtWorks

Gauge sponsor

How to Build a Progressive Web App (PWA) with only Vanilla JS— Bring a native-like experience to your webapps with this grab bag of techniques including styling, fonts, Service Workers, and creating a manifest file.

Sayan Mondal

Don't Use Variables Without Knowing About the 'Temporal Dead Zone'— In short, don’t use anything before declaring it.

Dmitri Pavlutin

Don't Sync State, Derive It— Avoid synchronization bugs and hidden complexity by deriving (or calculating) state in React apps on the fly rather than keeping numerous copies of state around your app.

Kent C Dodds

▶  Let's Build a 16-Bit Virtual Machine in JavaScript— This is a ‘rabbithole which goes really deep’ warns Francis, but you’ll learn a lot of interesting things along the way.

Low Level JavaScript

BLOG: JavaScript Project Configuration— Check out our full list of JavaScript blog posts.

Big Nerd Ranch sponsor

'How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the JavaScript Ecosystem'— Sometimes you have to take a step back and think about what really matters.

Flavio Copes

🔧 Code & Tools

Carbon: Create Beautiful Images of Your Source Code— We’re huge fans of seeing code snippets shared on social media and while images do have accessibility issues, they remain a rapid-fire way to get code into a tweet or Instagram image and Carbon excels at the task.

Carbon

SweetAlert2: Responsive, Customizable and Accessible Popup Boxes— An attractive and accessible (WAI-ARIA) replacement for native popup boxes with zero dependencies.

SweetAlert2

The Most Complete Spreadsheet Solution for JavaScript Apps - SpreadJS— Fast enterprise JavaScript spreadsheet for delivering true Excel-like spreadsheet experiences. Download free eval.

SpreadJS by GrapeCity sponsor

Tribute: A Library for Handling @mentions— If you have text fields, in which other users might be cited, this could be handy. Check out the demo page.

ZURB

Cropper.js: An Image Cropping Control— A mature project but continuing to get frequent releases.

Chen Fengyuan

Revocable Queue: Specialized Async Queue Data Structure— Asynchronously and lazily read/write values to a queue, from which you can also revoke yet-unread values.

Kyle Simpson

🐦 Over on Twitter...