Hello everyone and welcome to another round of Front-End News.
- Are you ready for Hacktoberfest? Digital Ocean and the DEV community prepare a month-long celebration of open-source software.
- Next, we'll have a look at what's new in v7.8 of the V8 engine
- Vivaldi celebrates 500k community members
- WebKit updates the Intelligent Tracking Prevention to v2.3
Next, come the usual software updates and the Developer of the Week. So stay with me until the end to find out all the details.
As always, I have also prepared a video version for those that prefer listening instead of reading. If you enjoy this format, I would appreciate it if you would subscribe to the YouTube channel as well.
Are you ready for Hacktoberfest?
If it's October, it's Hacktoberfest. For the sixth time in a row, Digital Ocean is getting ready for another month-long event dedicated to open-source software. And this time they are also partnered with the amazing Dev community. Whether you are a seasoned contributor or a student just learning to code, a maintainer, an event organizer or a company of any size, you can bring your contribution to the growth of open source.
Up to 50.000 contributors will receive a limited-edition T-shirt if they complete the challenge of making 4 Pull Requests (PRs) over the month of October to any public repo on GitHub. These PRs must follow the official guidelines in order to count towards the completion of the challenge. If you don't know where to start, there is a list of over 25.000 issues that maintainers highlighted for this event.
Hacktoberfest is also a great opportunity for local events where you can meet other developers and work together towards a shared goal. Those who want to run such a meeting can download the official Event Kit and can add their event to the official listing. There are already over 200 events in the list, with more expected to appear as October goes by.
Open Source plays a huge role in the modern software development ecosystem. Hacktoberfest can be your chance to make your own contribution and get recognition for your efforts. All you have to do is register on the official website and get started.
Happy Coding!
V8 release v7.8
The V8 team continues their six-week release cycle with the creation of the v7.8 branch, that will come live with the upcoming Chrome 78 release. We can now get a preview of some of the features that will ship in that version.
To begin with, there are some hefty improvements to JavaScript performance. The V8 engine can now start compiling scripts during the preload streaming process. In some cases, this can reduce the user-perceived compilation time down to zero. Other notable mentions are faster object destructuring, lazy source positions and faster RegEx match failures.
Another major feature is moving the WebAssembly C/C++ API from experimental to officially supported. There is also an improvement to the startup time, due to better use of background threads on multi-core machines.
More details are available on the official blog post linked below.
Vivaldi celebrates 500k community members
September has been a great month for the team behind Vivaldi.
At the beginning of the month, they successfully launched the beta version of the browser for Android devices. The app is coming close to 150k downloads and it includes the option of synchronizing data between your desktop and mobile browsers. Things are far from perfect, but many users declare themselves satisfied with the experience already.
The Vivaldi community also reached a major milestone. Over 500k people make use of the free services included with the membership, like free email, your own blog or access to the community forums.
Vivaldi might be just a niche browser at the moment. Yet it already has a highly active community and it keeps gaining more and more traction. Why not give it a try? It might be the browser you didn't know you need.
WebKit releases Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.3
WebKit keeps updating their Intelligent Tracking Prevention technology. The latest version, 2.3 brings further enhancements to the prevention of tracking via link decoration. In their own words:
ITP 2.3 caps the lifetime of all script-writeable website data after a navigation with link decoration from a classified domain. (...) By limiting the ability to use any script-writeable storage for cross-site tracking purposes, ITP 2.3 makes sure that third-party scripts cannot leverage the storage powers they have gained over all these websites.
There are also updates to the Storage Access API and the inclusion of a debug mode for ITP in Safari 13 running on macOS Catalina. You can now debug your website using the same version of Safari as your clients.
ITP 2.3 is included in Safari on iOS 13, the iPadOS beta, and Safari 13 on macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra. More details are available on the official blog post linked below.
Software updates and releases
This week I am highlighting updates for three software packages. In each case you can find the full details in the release notes linked down below.
Node v12.11.0
NodeJS needs no introduction. The platform has advanced the current version to v12.11.0. Some notable updates are integration for V8 v7.7 and a stable version of the worker_thread module.
React Router v5.1
React Router is a state container for the current location. Update v5.1 introduces a number of hooks for React 16.8 users. This provides the ability to compose state and behavior instead of just composing elements. There is an entire article about this new feature that you can read from the link below.
Quasar App CLI v1.1.0
Quasar is a framework that allows developers to build high-performance VueJS user interfaces following the Material Design 2.0 Guidelines. The CLI functionality has been advanced to v1.1.0 and it brings support for Sass source files, automated configuration, and a number of smaller features, tweaks, and fixes.
Developer of the Week
This week we are acknowledging Emma Wedekind as the new Developer of the Week. Emma is a front-end developer and designer. She grew up in Upstate New York, spent a few years in Austin, Texas, then flew across the Atlantic with her two cats to join her husband in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Emma is a big supporter of Design Systems and is currently working to build one for LogMeIn. She also speaks about them on events all over the world and has been a featured guest on many podcasts.
Emma Wedekind ๐@emmawedekind
Here is a photo of my pretending to speak. 4th conference talk โ I look like Iโm running for office ๐๐คฃ @ReactBoston15:26 PM - 21 Sep 2019
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Emma believes strongly in the power of mentorship and the value this kind of relationship can bring both for the mentor and the mentee. Thus she decided to start the Coding Coach website, a free, open-source platform for connecting developers and mentors all over the world.
Emma loves to share her experience as a developer. She writes articles on her own blog, on Medium, and on the Dev community portal. Recently she became a co-host for the Ladybug podcast together with Kelly Vaughn and Ali Spittel, where they are debugging the tech industry.
The best way to get in touch with Emma is via Twitter. And while you're there, click the Follow button, then go and check her podcast. There's a high chance you will find a lot of useful info there, no matter how far you are in your developer career.
- https://emmawedekind.com/
- https://twitter.com/EmmaWedekind
- https://ladybug.dev/
- https://mentors.codingcoach.io/
Question of the Day
Do you intend to participate to Hacktoberfest?
Please leave your answers in the comment section or send them to https://twitter.com/frontendnexus.
Thatโs all there is in this edition. Follow Front End Nexus on Twitter at https://twitter.com/frontendnexus to be notified as soon as a new update happens. I also want to encourage you to subscribe to the YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgACtqiDmnSaskDIBsK54ww. I can unlock some more options once the channel hits 100 subscribers, so your support is highly appreciated.
Have a great and productive week and I will see you next time!
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