Issue 33

Must Read

Gmail to Block .js File Attachments Soon

.js is to join .exe, .bat, and other file types in being blocked for security reasons. You’ll need to archive or host them instead from February.

Learn

Refactoring 30,000 Lines of JS with Types

How to significantly change 30,000 lines of client-side JavaScript without breaking things? This team tried both Flow and TypeScript and brought some minimal typing into play.

“Use your nice tools without jumping through unnecessary hoops”: npm on the job

npm’s the obvious choice for managing JavaScript dependencies, but when Ellie Mae built a web app, they needed to keep some code private. How? “Choose tools that work with the grain of how you want to work, and work with the grain of your tools…”

An Introduction to Observables for Angular Developers

What are ‘observables’? Why are they helpful for asynchronous communication? And how can you use them in an Angular 2 application with RxJS? Answers here.

ECMAScript Regexes Are (Going To Be) Getting Better

Regular expressions were added to JS 18 years ago and have only been slightly improved. Mathias looks at five new proposals under consideration to improve them further.

Tools & Code

An Introduction to Parsing Expressions with Nearley

Nearley is a fast and modern parser toolkit for JavaScript that uses the Earley algorithm and this is a handy walkthrough the ideas involved.

Interesting Links

ES Proposal: Shared Memory and Atomics

ES2017 is picking up some new concepts that will help with building higher-level concurrency abstractions. Here’s Axel with the deep dive.

Misc

Styled-Components: Enforcing Best Practices In Component-Based Systems

Building user interfaces on the web is hard, because the web and, thus, CSS were inherently made for documents. Some smart developers invented methodologies and conventions such as BEM, ITCSS, SMACSS and many more, which make building user interfaces easier and more maintainable by working with components.