🗞 Issue 25 / 26.07.2023


📄 The Node.js Best Practices List: 2023 Edition

A valuable, long standing resource has been “modernized to 2023 standards” (complete with recommendations of more modern libraries) with lots of work by creator Yoni and an ever growing team of contributors. The topics remain the same, however, covering areas like code style, project architecture, and taking apps into production. (If you’re already familiar with this list, you can skim through the #new and #updated hashtags on the page.)

YONI GOLDBERG ET AL.


📄Microsoft TypeChat: An Approach for Type-Safe LLM Responses

It’s interesting to see a new project from Microsoft with so many prominent names attached to it, but demonstrates the huge excitement within MS for ML and large language models (LLMs). TypeChat’s goal is to work around the issue of LLMs outputting unstructured natural language and instead to direct such output into a predictable, typed form.

HEJLSBERG, LUCCO, ROSENWASSER ET AL.


©️NODE.JS WEEKLY

🛠 CODE & TOOLS


🔩 Ink 4.3: Build Interactive CLI Apps using React

A terminal-based React renderer so you can build command line apps using React-style components. It's mature and used by all sorts of folks.

VADIM DEMEDES


🔩 Necord: A Framework for Creating Discord Bots

It uses Nest and Discord.js under the hood. Some example apps show how easy it is to deploy bot functions. GitHub repo.

NECORD


🔩 MailDev: SMTP Server and Web Interface for Testing Emails

If your app needs to send email, rather than sending it to a live account, you could send it to this app which lets you get a local preview without having to think about spam filters, etc.

DAN FARRELLY

How We Generate JS and Python SDKs from a Canonical Rust SDK'

PostgresML is an extension that adds machine learning functions into Postgres. Its team loves and prefers Rust but most of its users are using JavaScript or Python. What to do? Simultaneously write multi-language libraries using Rust..

SILAS MARVIN (POSTGRESML)

🗞 Issue 26 / 28.07.2023


📄 Hono + Htmx + Cloudflare: A New Stack?

A lot of people seem to be jumping on htmx lately as an alternative to the complexity of frameworks like React, but what if you want to keep using JSX? Hono is a (vaguely Express-like) Web framework targeting edge function use cases and includes middleware for rendering JSX. Yusuke gives a quick example of how all this can come together with Cloudflare Workers and D1 for a simpler, full-stack JS experience.

YUSUKE WADA


📄 Shrinking VS Code with Name Mangling

There’s a fair bit of JavaScript in VS Code but the team has managed to reduce the size of the shipped code by almost 4MB without actually doing any deleting or refactoring thanks to a new ‘name mangling’ build step. This is a great read on how the team approached things and got it working.

MATT BIERNER


©️JS WEEKLY

⚡️ IN BRIEF

🐦 React/Redux's Dan Abramov is leaving Meta. Having achieved so much and reaching a point where he feels ready to move on, Dan is departing Meta but will remain on the React team as an independent third party. 💙

📘 The Concise TypeScript Book is, unsurprisingly, a guide to using TypeScript. More surprisingly, it's all on GitHub and free to read. Hurrah.

Tixy is an interactive page for learning logic, math and expressions by solving puzzles using a visual grid. It starts off very simply, but gets elaborate quickly. This is a neat way to pick up some of the skills needed for Dwitter.

JSPlayground is a new Web-based JavaScript sandbox tool.

Is the term 'Jamstack' finished? Brian Rinaldi wonders.

🎉 RELEASES

Bun 0.7
The JavaScriptCore-based alternative JS runtime adds (experimental) Vite support, Web Workers support, and includes a --smol option to run in memory constrained environments (with a significant memory reduction shown off in the post).

Astro 2.9
The 'zero JS by default' framework adds experimental support for view transitions and more.

Neutralinojs v4.13.0
Lightweight cross-platform desktop app framework.

Remix 1.19
Modern full-stack JS framework.

Node.js v20.5.0 (Current)

So true 😂