Time to get decorating

April 1, 2022 By Mark Otto Off

🀞 Fingers crossed, but unless we’ve been successfully pranked ourselves, this is an April Fools’ prank free zone! Sorry if you like a bit of frivolity on April 1st, but completeness and accuracy come before entertainment here. Boring, I know, but we don’t stand a chance against YouTube or video games πŸ˜†
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Peter Cooper, your (boring, though still quite foolish) editor.

React 18 Released β€” The plan was for v18 to be an easy upgrade even if there were many changes under the hood.. and despite the introduction of a new concurrent renderer, Suspense, new hooks, automatic batching, and more, they’ve done a great job keeping the ship steady. The React 18 upgrade guide covers some things you need to consider, and if you’re a completist, the changelog digs deep.

The React Team

Electron 18.0 Released β€” Not content to let let React get all the v18 glory, the popular Electron cross-platform ‘build desktop apps with JS, CSS and HTML’ framework also reaches v18 with upgrades to Chrome 100 (also out this week), V8 10.0, and Node 16.13.2.

Keeley Hammond and Sofia Nguy

β–Ά  The Story of Next.js β€” A good balance of detail and high level overview to tell the Next.js story. Despite being just 12 minutes long, it goes into a lot more background and history than you’d expect, too. Fingers crossed for Gatsby and Remix next, perhaps?

Tyler McGinnis

IN BRIEF:

RELEASES:

Preact 10.7.0 – Tiny, fast React alternative.
wavesurfer 6.1.0 – Navigable audio visualization.
Vite 2.9.0 – Next gen frontend tooling.
D3 7.4.0 – The Data-Driven Document library.
React Testing Library 13 – Adds React 18 support.
MIDIVal 0.0.16 – MIDI messaging library now has MIDI clock support.
ioredis 5 – High perf Node.js Redis client.

Senior Front-End Engineer (Remote) β€” We’re looking for an engineer to join the web team at Unsplash. Small team but big product. React + strict TypeScript with plenty of functional programming.
Unsplash

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired β€” Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It’s free for job-seekers.
Hired

πŸ“’ Articles & Tutorials

Locale Aware Sorting in JavaScript β€” When building a localized app, the default sorting logic for strings might not do quite what you want.. localeCompare and Intl.Collator to the rescue.

Elijah Manor

How to Use Props in React β€” We first linked to this three years ago but Robin has been updating his posts to modern standards, so it remains a fantastic resource now too and is packed with prop-oriented examples.

Robin Wieruch

Conquering JavaScript Hydration β€” Hydration plays a big role in many JS-based site generators but can sometimes be a performance bottleneck. This article is conceptual but digs into some of the ways in which newer frameworks are rethinking things.

Ryan Carniato

πŸ›  Code & Tools

Visual Studio Code March 2022 Released β€” VS Code gets updated every month, but this feels like one of the bigger updates for JavaScript developers in particular. Native local history support is the headline feature but the JS debugger now lets you collect and visualize heap profiles to keep an eye on memory allocation. We also now get JS highlighting when within HTML files.

Microsoft

πŸ“₯ Reader Submissions

In recent months, we’ve been receiving an increasing amount of submissions from readers (thanks!) and while we use many of them, we don’t have enough time to review everything to the right level. Given the backlog, we want to try out a new section to share things from our inbox to you more quickly:

If you have something to submit, email [email protected] or just hit reply to any issue of this newsletter and we’ll see it πŸ™‚