The top tools, stories, and resources of the past year.

1. ECMAScript 2020: The Final Feature Set — TC39 (and then Ecma) approved the ECMAScript 2020 spec in early 2020, but what was new? Dr. Axel rounded it up succinctly with links to the various proposals. We also now have a draft of ECMAScript 2021 with us if you want to get prepared.. :-)

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

2. 150+ JavaScript Questions (With Their Answers Explained) — Want to test your JavaScript knowledge? Whether for fun or a job interview, this remains an interesting set of questions, complete with explanations of the answers.

Lydia Hallie

3. ▶️ A Look at Deno: A (Then-)New JavaScript Runtime — Deno is a new(ish) JavaScript/TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, and it was interesting to see his second take on a similar idea. 1.0 dropped in May with later releases adding cool things like being able to create standalone executables. Will Deno continue to grow in 2021? Let's see.

Bert Belder

4. Fixing Memory Leaks in Web Applications — When the front-end became more dynamic, part of the bargain was that front-end developers would have to deal with “a new class of problems that don’t really exist in the server-rendered world”.. including avoiding memory leaks on 101 different types of client device. Here’s an introduction to client-side memory leaks and how to begin investigating them.

Nolan Lawson

5. WTFJS: A List of Funny and 'Tricky' JavaScript Examples — This has been around for years but continues to resonate with developers and gets various tweaks and adjustments. Worth it if you want to take a look into some of the more “uh, what?” corners of JS.

Denys Dovhan

6. I Created The Exact Same App in React and Vue And.. — If anything is guaranteed for 2021, React and Vue will continue to push and inspire each other. The author of this post built the same app in React and Vue in both 2018 (the pre-hooks era!) and 2020 to see the differences between the two.

Sunil Sandhu

Rome: Unifying The Frontend Development Toolchain — We first casually mentioned this in-beta tool, dubbed the “spiritual successor of Babel”, back in April, but things have continued to come a long way since then. Rome aims to replace Babel, ESLint, Webpack, Prettier, Jest, and more, to ostensibly simplify the frontend workflow. We’re all for it if it works. Here’s an introductory blog post.

Sebastian McKenzie

1loc: A Collection of One-line JS Snippets — A neat little collection of vanilla JavaScript one-liners divided into various categories (arrays, date/time, DOM, etc).

Nguyen Huu Phuoc

Snowpack: A Build System for the Modern Web — Say bye-bye to your bundler and let modern browsers’ ES module support do the heavy lifting with Snowpack. Or if you need to target more than just modern browsers, you can always just use it to speed things up in development. A Snowpack 3.0 release candidate came out at the end of 2020 with the final 3.0 release due... any day now.

Fred K. Schott

Grid.js: An Advanced Table Control — A lightweight, advanced table plugin that can work alongside React, Angular, Vue, or, well, nothing. Check out some of the examples for more on how to use it. It uses Preact under the hood.

Afshin Mehrabani

33 Line 'React' — Sure, React does some useful things, but you can do the same things with very little code, so.. why not? A fun experiment that was rather unlikely to replace React ;-) Also of interest was that Hacker News had its say and the author responded.

Oliver Russell

GitHub Unveiled Its 'Super Linter': One Linter to Rule Them All? — Setting up the right linters for the various types of code in your projects can be… a bit of a pain. So GitHub unveiled Super Linter, a combination of linters you could use with your repos via GitHub Actions for a variety of different languages.

GitHub

Vue 3.0 'One Piece' Released — Vue.js is a highly popular framework for building UIs with JavaScript, and a common alternative to things like React or Angular. Vue 3.0 was in the pipeline for so long that its eventual release post actually got relatively few clicks, but it's a huge release nonetheless with a new composition API, Teleport, and more.

Vue.js Team

p5.js 1.0: The 'Creative Coding' Libary — A major milestone for a long-standing JavaScript library that builds upon Processing, a popular creative coding environment (which also inspired the Arduino IDE). p5 is a bit hard to explain succinctly, so definitely check it out.

lauren mccarthy

Senior UI/Front-End Developer — Help power the world’s largest online design school and help students worldwide learn design and improve their careers.

Interaction Design Foundation

JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team

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Vettery