Another week, still no website. Boo me. I messed something up with the DNS and to make a long story short: It's time for weekend. You are already most welcome to subscribe to the mailing list though.

• Week 04
• Week 03
• Week 02
• Week 01

News

• ECMAScript 2018 (that would be ‘ES9’, or are we dropping those names?) has been finalized and brings us rest/spread, new regex features, promise.finally and more good stuff! Dr. Axel Rauschmayer wisely remarks ECMAScript versions are of less importance since we’ve got stages. If a proposal hits stage-4, meaning it will be included in the next ECMAScript version, it is safe to use.

JavaScript

• Currying is one of these concepts that is hard to get your head around and I always welcome more material on the subject. Rémi wrote a great explanation of currying in JavaScript on codementor.io.
• Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel wrote a must-read introduction to Git-hook and wins award for best hero image 2018. Read Git-hooked on javascriptjanuary.com
• It’s true that a Webpack configuration can get complicated quickly. Making a config with support for a framework, transpiling, separate staging/dev/build options, testing, minifying, etc. can have you browsing through four different pieces of documentation at the same time. Webpack is taking care of a lot of stuff and is an impressive and well thought-out build tool. I’m looking forward to version 4 which also offers a ‘zero-config’ option, but it still won’t hurt to update your knowledge with this free course on webpack.academy by Webpack Guru Sean Larkin.
• On that note, a small reminder that bundlers can be overwhelming at times by Arthur Reis Puthin.
• Sarah Drasner’s article ‘JavaScript, I love you, you’re perfect, now change’ on css-tricks.com has some nice ideas on improvements of the language! Not everyone will agree and some might not even be feasible (because of reasons), but it shows that we can share our own ideas on what we like and don’t like within the language.
• I confess. I’m still not used to JavaScript debugging with breakpoints and pop a console.log in my code way too often. I know I should own the skill of proper debugging and I’m hoping this Smashing Magazine article by Dustin Driver and Jason Laster will help me on my way: Debugging JavaScript With A Real Debugger You Did Not Know You Already Have

Development

• Many of you know Dave Geddes. I’ve featured some of his articles in earlier versions of the roundup, and he is the creator of awesome lessons like Grid Critters. He gave an insightful interview on stackingthebricks.com and I suggest you check it out! “In this interview, you’re going to learn how Dave’s boredom at work fueled an unexpected path into creating products of his own”
• The pitchforks were out once again this week Because the Slack web app doesn’t support video in FireFox. I’d share my thoughts on this if Matt Perry didn’t already wrote them down in an article titled On Slack, web standards, and bloody cynicism. I’m going to tweet something nice to the slack team, BRB.
• - Sketching in the browser is a full on long-read about bringing design systems for developers and designers closer together. In this article Mark Daleigh, DesignOps lead at Seekjobs, explains the evolvement of their design process in detail.

CSS / HTML

• Variable fonts are upon us and before this article I didn’t know what they did yet. Richard Rutter wrote ‘How to use variable fonts in the real world’, explains what variable fonts are and how to use them in a real application right now.
• Dave Rupert wrote a bit on making cheapass Parallax with CSS variables. It seems like a very elegant technique and might even be further improved upon with Intersection Observer. I’m going to keep this link at hand.
• If you’ve ever used SVG icons from a sprite as <use> symbol, you know it gets difficult to control the styles of multiple paths. Sarah Dayan published an article to show you how to do make multi-colored SVG icons with css variables 🎉!

OSS

• Sockette is ‘The cutest little WebSocket wrapper!’. They already had me at the logo. As the name implies, it’s a tiny (344 bytes) WebSocket wrapper that reconnects when the connection is lost. Made by Luke Edwards.
• And award for best OSS name 2018 goes to URQL, an acronym “Universal React Query Library”. Ken Wheeler / FormidableLabs created URQL to simplify working with GraphQL within React. Check out the introduction article and the repo on github. I’m looking forward to give this a try.
• Callbag is a standard for JS callbacks that enables lightweight observables and iterables. I’m not entirely sure what that means but it looks really clever. callbags-basic is a tiny library based on the Callbag standard. Read the ‘why’ article by André Staltz and please explain to me like I’m five when you’re done.
• JSDOM-worker is going to be incredibly useful to someone, I’m sure: adds pseudo Web Workers to Jest! Think of it like a Web Workers polyfill for Node. By Jason Miller
• KAP is an open source screen capturing tool and it looks beautiful, simple and made for developers! Go try it out!

Public Service Announcements

• Yes. Yes it is
• Interesting thought and I kind of agree. Structuring and normalizing data and scaffolding that data within an app is pretty complicated and far removed from design and UX. Also, people who are good in structuring data are not necessarily good in UX, or the other way around.
• I never really thought about this, but that's cool!
• Kent C. Dodds is all about helping people and now he needs your help. Sort of. He's actually helping people again by getting them involved in Open Source Software

Inspiration

• Greensock updated their showcase site and it's glorious.
• Loving this Pixel Gradient tool by Noah Leigh
• Chris Gannon eggcels at making loader yokes!
• Trippy tentacles. I like it

What I’ve been up to

• I still haven’t finished my blog post on transpiling. It’s quite a long article and I feel like it shouldn’t be rushed. In it I explain about ECMAScript history, versions, stages, Babel, using Babel on its own or in combination with Webpack. I’ve learned a great deal writing the article, including how impressive Babel and the Babel team actually is. 👏
• Another thing I learned from writing this article is that naming and versioning is really hard. Not just for people who make web applications, but also for people who make tools, frameworks and even languages. Thanks to the never-forgetting internet, any change in naming and versioning of your tools will result in a batch of new confused developers getting Google results that aren't up to date anymore.
• Some other exciting things are coming up, but I’m trying to be discrete here. More soon.

As always, thank you for reading and don’t work too much this weekend!

Arden