Damian’s notes

Today’s five-minute job slamming to a halt because React Markdown does not deign to have an old-timey CommonJS entry point and the TypeScript-savvy Jest bundled with Create React App doesn’t work with currently fashionable ES6 modules. Sigh.

Noted by Damian Cugley 1 year, 8 months ago.

Modern web apps are a combination of JavaScript, CSS and other files that get bundled together with a bundler like Webpack or Rollup. Here’s an article on why you might prefer Rollup.

Why I use Rollup, and not Webpack Complexity, frustration, bloated. Those are the first words that come to my mind whenever I see Webpack. Over the past several years, I’ve…

Noted by Damian Cugley 2 years, 4 months ago.

Observable Plot is a free, open-source JavaScript library from Mike Bostock, creator of D3. Simple incantations in its fluent API form a DSL for creating visualizations of tabular data with the minimum of friction.

(Via @simonw on Twitter)

Observable Plot Observable Plot is a free, open-source JavaScript library to help you quickly visualize tabular data. It has a concise and (hopefully) memorable API to foster fluency — and plenty of examples to learn from and copy-paste. In the spirit of show don’t tell, below is a scatterplot of the height and weight of Olympic athletes (sourced from Matt Riggott), constructed using a dot mark. We assign columns of data (such as weight) to visual properties (such as the dot’s x), and Plot infers the rest. You can configure much more, if needed, but Plot’s goal is to help you get a meaningful visualization quickly.

Noted by Damian Cugley 3 years, 5 months ago.

A cool portfolio web site that only works if you DISABLE JavaScript.

You are probably too young to remember the days when web designers were required take in to account surfers who routinely disabled JavaScript for security reasons (which still apply, but which we ignore because we want to use Twitter).

Insisting on having JavaScript disabled is a bit extreme but it demonstrates as nothing else could that you can produce sophisticated layouts with CSS alone.

(Via @heydonworks on Twitter)

You have arrived at a website named heydonworks.com: HeydonWorks

Noted by Damian Cugley 3 years, 11 months ago.

While we were all busy reimplementing jQuery and replacing it with more elaborate JavaScript frameworks, plain JavaScript has quietly gained features that mean you can do a lot on a small site without requiring complex frameworks at all.

(Via @timbray on Twitter)

A little bit of plain Javascript can do a lot I’ve never worked as a professional frontend developer, so even though I’ve been writing HTML/CSS/JS for 15 years for little side projects, all of the projects have been pretty small, sometimes I don’t write any Javascript for years in between, and I often don’t quite feel like I know what I’m doing. Partly because of that, I’ve leaned on libraries a lot! Ten years ago I used to use jQuery, and since maybe 2017 I’ve been using a lot of vue.

Noted by Damian Cugley 4 years, 5 months ago.

A runtime for TypeScript or JavaScript programs that is positioned as a single-executable alternative to TypeScript + Babel + Node + NPM + ESLint + Prettier + Webpack. Modules are imported from URLs (same system as ES6 modules running in browsers), and asynchronous APIs use promises rather than those old-fashioned callbacks (so not a drop-in replacement for Node). Implemented in Rust, and aiming to be secure-by-default by restricting access to files and networks unless explicitly allowed.