News and Articles

Douglas Crockford is our featured video, so let's talk about evolving JavaScript and all things JSON. Judicious JSON explains all the weird things in it, you can learn why it can be incredibly slow, people wonder what even is a JSON number, why JSON.parse corrupts large numbers and others even call parsing JSON a minefield. The 80/20 Guide to JSON.stringify has some gems like the toJSON method. There are some interesting new JavaScript proposals, like Decimal and the Safe Assignment Operator. And, did you know you can Compile and run C in JavaScript? There's a new(ish) tutorial how to create an npm package but also insight how much of a mess NPM has become in the the great npm garbage patch. And, lastly, is it time for Oracle to free JavaScript?

Quick Trick

You probably used JSON.stringify() dozens of times, but did you know you can control the string it generates and even filter the output? Learn more here.

Code and Tools

Talking about JavaScript, Generators are a thing that I have a hard time getting my head around. Generators explained on a senior-level helped a lot and I learned that you can use Generators to visualize algorithms. I also learned a lot about destructuring in JavaScript, Bitwise Operators and how to create cleaner promises with safe-await. There is also a really strange syntax to get an Array element’s type that was new to me. You can use Sets to generate unique random numbers and encoding and decoding URLs in JavaScript is trickier than you may think. Beaconing is a thing I also didn't know much about and fetchLater() is how it works. There is an interesting benchmark comparing JavaScript minifiers. If you just want to back to playing with JavaScript, how to Build a Tic-Tac-Toe Game is fun.

Lots of JSON tools for you:

• JSON Resume - create your resume to be parsed and re-used
• JSON generator
• JSONata - JSON query and transformation language
• JSON Canvas - An open file format for infinite canvas data
• JsonTree.js - customisable tree views to visualise JSON data.
• jd - a CLI tool  and Go library for diffing and patching JSON
• gron - Make JSON greppable
• URL to JSON - converts web pages to JSON data
• JSON lines data format - like CSV, but in JSON
• Paste JSON as Code a VSCode extension that does just that
• json-viewer - another tool to display JSON
• lossless-json - parse JSON without risk of losing numeric information

Cool code demos

Talks and Videos

This is the true story of where JSON came from, how it became what it is, and what comes next. Check out what Douglas has to say. Also, learn more on the magazine.

Other videos and talk write-ups of note:

• Behind The Scenes: The Making of VS Code
• Christian Woerz - The Eventloop in JavaScript - How does it work? (30m)
• Eileen Fürstenau - Next.js Unleashed: Optimizing Web Vitals (27m)
• Wendelin Peleska - Bun: the all in one JS toolkit (18m)
• Eckhardt, Stemmildt  - Why HTMX is crushing React, Vue & Svete (30m)

Events

Join NODES 2024, the largest gathering of the graph community, on 7 November 2024! Learn from experts across four tracks—Applications, AI, Data Science and Graphs. Plus, don't miss the exciting Road to NODES hands-on workshops in the coming weeks, covering everything from app development to graph visualization and GraphRAG. Register now!

Work and Jobs

Is "JavaScript framework developer" a new, valid term? Was it OK to fire a Lazy and Mediocre' HR Team after a badly configured system auto-rejected their manager's CV? Can developer AI help you to keep your A-Team together? And it seems harder to get into the market as 1 in 6 companies hesitate to hire recent college graduates.

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• js13kGames 2024 - all the submissions of games in 13k of JavaScript
• Drunk tic tac toe - you know how to write it (see above), try to play it drunk
• 50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution