V8 stepping up to four-week release cycle

#528 — March 5, 2021

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😆 If this were an episode of Friends, it would be called something like “The One With All The Big Releases” — enjoy!
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Peter Cooper, editor

JavaScript Weekly

jQuery 3.6.0 Released — I’m always delighted to share jQuery news for a few reasons. First, it’s one of the best JavaScript nostalgia trips we still have. Second, jQuery is still so heavily used whether in CMSes or even by developers who simply continue to appreciate it. The updates are minor here, but we’re promised a jQuery 4.0 is on the way.

Timmy Willison

V8 (and Chrome) to Get Faster Release Cycle — Google Chrome is speeding up its release cycle from six weeks to four weeks (so get ready for Chrome 100 this time next year!) and the V8 team are stepping up to match it.

Ingvar Stepanyan

Get Your Free SPOTcon 2021 Tickets Today — Join hundreds of developers on March 26, 2021 for Scout APM’s inaugural digital conference on performance, observability & transforming the future of web application development. The SPOTcon 2021 speaker lineup and agenda are now available.

SPOTcon by Scout APM sponsor

Gatsby 3.0 Released — Gatsby is a React-based open source framework with performance, scalability and security built-in. v3.0 promises an 80% speed improvement to the local development experience. They’ve also introduced Gatsby Hosting.

Hashim Warren (Gatsby)

Electron 12.0.0 Released — Despite some compelling alternatives like Neutralino and Tauri, Electron remains the big cheese in the ‘build desktop apps with JavaScript’ game. v12 updates from Node 12 to 14 (hello V8 8.9!) and to Chromium 89.

OpenJS Foundation and contributors

Quick Bits

• The latest version of VS Code has been released with stable Apple Silicon builds, TypeScript 4.2.2, and a ‘quick fix’ feature for adding missing function declarations.
• Vue Mastery have opened up free access to their Vue 3 + TypeScript course till March 9 (next Tuesday).
• RedMonk is a top developer analyst firm and their latest programming language rankings report is fantastic news for JavaScript (which is the #1 language) and TypeScript (now at 8th).
• Deno 1.8 has landed with experimental support for WebGPU, making doing GPU-based computation from JavaScript even easier.

💻 Jobs

Full Time Front-end Software Engineer (Remote) — Experienced with React? Write fast, performant code? If so, join us on our journey to help companies better measure, analyze and share their data.

Metabase

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team

Find Your Next Job Through Hired — Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.

Hired

📖 Articles, Opinion & Tutorials

▶  How to Build a Space Invaders Clone in JavaScript — Ania set herself a fun challenge to try and code up Space Invaders as quickly as possible while explaining what she’s doing at the same time. It’s fun to follow her thought process.

Ania Kubów

Building a Discord Bot Using Discord.js — Node is ideal for building chat bots and here’s a complete walkthrough of using the Discord.js library to do this on the Discord chat system to create a joke posting bot.

Subha Chanda

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Serving Dynamic Meta Tags to Bots and Crawlers using Firebase and Cloudflare Workers — With it being so suited to low latency, on the fly processing of live HTTP requests, Cloudflare Workers lets you do rather different things to most other serverless platforms. This isn’t the most efficient example but is a neat idea nonetheless.

Richard Cooke

CSS-in-JS Support in DevTools — Google’s take on managing your CSS with JavaScript using the facilities available with their DevTools.

Alex Rudenko

The Complete Guide to Angular Security — Goes through the OWASP top 10 security threats and relates them to Angular development.

Christian Lüdemann

How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript Developer” Became a Fan — The on-going increase in TypeScript’s popularity makes opinion pieces like this all the more interesting to me, despite being reasonably shallow.

Chirag Swadia

Build a Video Chat Service with JavaScript, WebRTC, and Okta

Okta sponsor

The Darker Side of JS: Three Features You Never Want to Use — None of these will surprise long standing JavaScript developers (especially The Best Parts readers).

Fernando Doglio

‘I’ve Used The pipe() Function 2,560 Times and I Can Tell You It’s Good’

Ivan Novikov

Shepherd: Guide Your Users Through a Tour of Your App — I love how the homepage for this project shows off the actual feature it provides. This isn’t a brand new project but continues to get frequent updates.

Ship Shape

OrbitDB: Peer to Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web — A serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database that uses IPFS for storage and automatically syncs across peers. It’s limited to Node and browser use cases for now and here’s an introductory guide.

OrbitDB Community

Enhance Front-end Performance by Rapidly Resolving JavaScript Errors

Datadog Synthetics sponsor

Swiper: A Modern Mobile Touch Slider — Complete with hardware accelerated transitions and native-like behavior. There are integrations with React, Svelte, Vue.js and Angular, too.

Vladimir Kharlampidi

web-minecraft: A Minecraft Client Written in JavaScript — I haven’t had time to test this for myself yet, alas, but this sounds like quite the project.

Michał Jażdżyk