~javascriptweekly | Bookmarks (209)

📉 How We Made Our Rich Text Editor Load Faster — CKEditor is a long-standing, full featured GPL and commercially licensed rich text editor but its complexity can come with a performance cost. In this two part series (part two here), the CKEditor team digs into how they’ve recently significantly boosted its performance.

How to Build a Snake AI Game with Docker and TensorFlow.js — You’ve probably heard about people ‘vibe coding’ games by letting LLMs do the coding work, but what if you want to build a game yourself that has neural network powered elements? TensorFlow.js offers one solution that you could just as easily adapt to non-gaming contexts.

TypeScript's Compiler to Get 10x Faster — TypeScript has shaken up the JavaScript ecosystem in recent years with an increasing number of developers relying on its strong typing and added structure. TypeScript’s compiler isn’t particularly fast, though, but the TypeScript team at Microsoft are changing that by porting it to Go!

A Perplexing JavaScript Parsing Puzzle — It looks deceptively simple – just 14 characters of JavaScript – but after working with JavaScript for 29 years, I got it wrong. A clue: it goes back to a browser-related quirk from 30 years ago..

Build a Secure Project Management — Learn a security-first approach to building web applications by building a secure project management platform with Next.js.

Building APIs with Next.js — A detailed, official introduction to the concepts behind using Next.js’ App Router and route handlers to build public APIs you can expose to web, mobile, and third-party clients.

How The New York Times Migrated from Enzyme to React Testing Library — A thorough look at the technical challenges and strategies the NYT used to perform a piecemeal upgrade of its React testing approach without disrupting either end users or other developers.

Refractor 5.0: Robust Virtual Syntax Highlighting using Prism — Wraps the powerful Prism syntax highlighter to output objects instead of an HTML string so you can manipulate and render it as you wish (e.g. in a VDOM or at the terminal). Lowlight, by the same author, offers the same functionality but backed by highlight.js.

svg2pdf.js: SVG to PDF Conversion in the Browser — There’s an online playground to give you a feel for what it can do.

⌘K: A Fast, Composable, Unstyled 'Command Menu' Control — The home page includes some neat examples in a variety of styles. GitHub repo. Needs React 18+.

🔎 Node Modules Inspector — A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, “installs” a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty’s Zach Leatherman did here.

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly — PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it’s only a few megabytes in size.

Lynx: A Fresh Way to Build Apps from Web Technologies — Lynx is a new set of tools for building JavaScript-powered native and Web apps that draws inspiration from React Native but aims to be more modular and flexible (and eventually framework agnostic). It comes from, and is used by, TikTok, and comes with its own QuickJS-based JavaScript engine.

JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back — A developer with ‘a decade away’ from writing JavaScript returns to find that one thing hasn’t changed: “Choosing the right JavaScript framework is hard, man.”

Dr. Axel's 'Sales Pitch' for TypeScript — As one of JavaScript’s most esteemed writers, if Dr. Axel can’t convince you of the value of TypeScript, who could?

Instrument, Monitor, Fix: A Hands-On Debugging Class — Join us for a hands-on session where you’ll build it, watch it break, debug it, and go from “no idea what’s wrong” to fixing issues.

Reimplementing Crossy Road in JavaScript — Two well put together tutorials so far covering reimplementing Crossy Road with either Three.js or React Three Fiber. In both written or video form.

Node Just Added TypeScript Support. What Does That Mean for Deno? — The Deno team, who went all in on TypeScript from day one, reflects on the continued increase in levels of support for TypeScript in Node and how their approaches differ.

TanStack Form v1.0: Headless, Type-Safe Form State Management — A type-safe, framework agnostic (React, Vue, Angular, Solid and Lit are all supported out of the box), headless and isomorphic way to create and work with forms, with this v1.0 release over two years in the making. If you already use things like Formik or React Hook Form and are wondering how it differs, here’s...

Electron App Boilerplate with Modern Dependencies — A basic template app that uses React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Electron Vite, Biome, and includes a GitHub Actions release workflow.

Fable: A F# to JavaScript Compiler — If you fancy F#’s flavor of almost-entirely-functional development, this could be for you. GitHub repo.

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 — Four months in the making, TypeScript 5.8 lands with a strong Node focus. You can now use require() for ES modules in the nodenext module, there’s a new node18 module for developers who want to keep targeting Node 18, and most notably there’s now an --erasableSyntaxOnly option to ensure no TypeScript-only runtime semantics can be used.

A Report on How the Web is Really Using JavaScript — Each year, the HTTP Archive puts together the Web Almanac, a report on the ‘state of the Web’. The JavaScript section has just gone live and goes into depth on how much JS we’re using (or failing to use!), the popularity of TypeScript, loading methods, Web Worker use, and, yes, jQuery still leads...