It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
Jamie Corkhill has written this wonderful post about Node and I think it’s perhaps one of the best technical articles I’ve ever read. Not only is it jam-packed with information for folks like me who aren't writing JavaScript everyday, it is also incredibly deliberate as Jamie slowly walks through the very basics of JavaScript (such as synchronous and asynchronous functions) all the way up to working with our very own API.
Jamie writes:
… Read articleWhat is Node in the first place?
Rik Schennink documents a system for being able to write CSS selectors that style a page when it has scrolled to a certain point. If you're like me, you're already on the lookout for document.addEventListener('scroll' ... and being terrified about performance. Rik gets to that right away by both debouncing the function as well as marking the event as passive.… Read article
Steve Souders, "JavaScript Dominates Browser CPU":
Ten years ago the network was the main bottleneck. Today, the main bottleneck is JavaScript. The amount of JavaScript on pages is growing rapidly (nearly 5x in the last 7 years). In order to keep pages rendering and feeling fast, we need to focus on JavaScript CPU time to reduce blocking the browser main thread.
Alex Russell, describing a prototype of "Never-Slow Mode" in Chrome:
… Read article... blocks large scripts, sets budgets for certain
Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'foo' of undefined. The dreaded error we all hit at some point in JavaScript development. Could be an empty state from an API that returns differently than you expected. Could be something else. We don’t know because the error itself is so general and broad.
I recently had an issue where certain environment variables weren't being pulled in for one reason or another, causing all sorts of funkiness with that error staring me … Read article
Around this time last year, I wrote an article about the JavaScript learning landscape. Within that article, you’ll find my grand plans to learn JavaScript — complete with a link to a CodePen Collection I started for tracking my progress, and it even got dozens of comments cheering me on.
Like most people, I was ambitious. It was a new year and I was excited to tackle a long-standing project. It was my development version of losing 30 pounds … Read article
This little site by Remy Sharp's makes it clear whether or not a JavaScript method changes the original array (aka mutates) or not.
I was actually bitten by this the other day. I needed the last element from an array, so I remembered .pop() and used it.
const arr = ["doe", "ray", "mee"];
const last = arr.pop();
// mee, but array is now ["doe", "ray"]This certainly worked great right away, but I didn't realize the original array had changed … Read article
Ire Aderinokun has written a nifty piece using loops and when we might consider replacing it with another method, say .map() and .filter(). I particularly like what she has to say here:
… Read articleAs I mentioned earlier, loops are a great tool for a lot of cases, and the existence of these new methods doesn't mean that loops shouldn't be used at all.
I think these methods are great because they provide code that is in a way self-documenting. When
A common need when writing vanilla JavaScript is to find a selection of elements in the DOM and loop over them. For example, finding instances of a button and attaching a click handler to them.
const buttons = document.querySelectorAll(".js-do-thing");
// There could be any number of these!
// I need to loop over them and attach a click handler.There are SO MANY ways to go about it. Let's go through them.… Read article
Many people have messaged me, confused about where to get started with testing. Just like everything else in software, we work hard to build abstractions to make our jobs easier. But that amount of abstraction evolves over time, until the only ones who really understand it are the ones who built the abstraction in the first place. Everyone else is left with taking the terms, APIs, and tools at face value and struggling to make things work.
One thing I … Read article
Whenever I see someone really effectively debug JavaScript in the browser, they use the DevTools tooling to do it. Setting breakpoints and hopping over them and such. That, as opposed to sprinkling console.log() (and friends) statements all around your code.
Parag Zaveri wrote about the transition and it has clearly resonated with lots of folks! (7.5k claps on Medium as I write).
I know I have hangups about it...