Top picks — 2024 October
What a month. When everyone lost hope for the new major release of the most popular Node.js framework of all time, Express v5 just dropped. Deno also released a major version bump, and Evan You founded a company that is going to build the cargo for the JavaScript ecosystem. To top it off, I have some great CSS articles for you all and, of course, as always, a music recommendation from my collection. Enjoy the read ☕
Album of the month
I received this album on the 2nd of October, and that was the day I knew what to put in this paragraph at the end of the month. A collaboration between one of my favourite rappers and a producer who is also very high on my favourites list. “The Auditorium Vol. 1” by Common and Pete Rock sounds fresh, like a comeback that good rap deserves. Pete Rock is one of the most versatile producers ever, and he didn’t disappoint on this release. Almost a month after I heard the full album for the first time, I still enjoy it as much, or even more, than before. Solid rap music, folks!
Top picks
Announcing VoidZero - Next Generation Toolchain for JavaScript
Evan You, the inventor of Vue, Vite and plenty of other well-known frameworks, has just founded VoidZero Inc. The mission of the company is to build an open-source, high-performance, and unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. It is a blend of tools from the OXC family, Vite and Rolldown to handle bundling, linting, formatting and TypeScript transformation. Just by looking at some of the benchmarks attached, it outperforms my favourite Biome by a significant percentage. Alexander Lichter interviewed Evan You, so give this video a play if you are still curious after reading the initial announcement.
What’s the Difference Between HTML’s Dialog Element and Popovers?
Recently added <dialog> element and popover attribute may cause a lot of confusion. They are so similar in many ways, but there are a few subtle differences between them that can make or break the experience of your website. Chris Coyier put together this fantastic piece that puts it all into one place.
Announcing BCD Watch
Eric Meyer, Brian Kardell and Stephanie Stimac built this fantastic tool that helps track features that are landing in the browsers. Weekly reports with all the features can be a little bit overwhelming, so there is an option only to report on the features that landed in all three dominant players. Also, you can subscribe to it via RSS and get just one update a week and stay up to date. So handy!
Announcing Deno 2
My favourite JavaScript runtime, Deno, just got a big update to version 2.0. It comes packed with a lot of great features, like extended compatibility with the Node.js ecosystem, new CLI commands (install, add and remove), a stable standard library, workspaces (yeah 🎉), LTS versions and more. As you would expect from a fancy framework, of course there is a flashy video to celebrate the release.
Typography and Opentype Default Stylesheet (TODS)
Richard Rutter published this helpful repository that lists all recommended CSS typography settings. Most sections are very well described. Even if you don’t need to apply any of these changes now, it is good to skim through because you can learn a thing or two.
CSS Tricks That Use Only One Gradient
A very long list of creative use cases for a single CSS gradient. Temani Afif really exhausted the subject in this post.
Introducing Express v5: A New Era for Node.js Framework
This is a moment that many Node.js developers have been waiting for over 10 years. Express v5 has landed, and although it is a cosmetic update, it introduces a bunch of quality improvements, such as support for promises, dropping older versions of Node.js, changes to the router logic, and a few more.
You should go to conferences
Sophie Koonin explains why it is worth attending a conference and getting involved in a community. The article concludes with a list of reputable conferences around the UK, Europe, and a few global ones.
Unlocking the Power of JSON Patch
JSON Patch is an interesting standardised format that can produce a lot more concise updates to JSON resources. It is efficient, precise, easy to read (not so easy for deeply nested JSON documents), idempotent and standardised. It has an implementation in most programming languages. I found this concept very interesting and I am wondering why it is not more popular. This article is a good primer on the concept.
Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS
This article by the WebKit team is a continuation of a debate about the best shape of a masonry layout specification. This post includes a list of very convincing reasons why it is a better idea to keep the new kind of layout, under the CSS Grid specification in contrast to a totally new model as per Google’s team suggestion. I like the reference to the core principles for good web standards established by Bret Bos, co-creator of CSS. This is a very good and long read for all CSS enthusiasts.
WebStorm and Rider Are Now Free for Non-Commercial Use
JetBrains just made their WebStorm and Raiden free for non-commercial use. These tools are absolutely top-tier tools for all JavaScript, TypeScript, and .NET programmers. This is a great announcement. I am only wondering what is going on with Fleet, an editor that they released some time ago; it made some noise, but then it went so quiet.
So are you going to try webstorm :) xd
Doubt it. I am perfectly fine using Helix for now :) The simpler, the better for me.