Today I learned about the with method on the Array.prototype object. This
method is used to create a shallow copy of an array but with one element
replaced at a given index.
const arr = [1, 2, 3]
const newArr = arr.with(0, 5)
console.log(arr) // [1, 2, 3]
console.log(newArr) // [5, 2, 3]
This is useful when you want to replace elements in an array without mutating the original array.
So it’s even easier now to add a documentation website to your project! While
looking over the Zod github repo, I saw that they were using docsify to
house their documentation. It’s pretty slick and I intend to use it for my own
projects… well at least the work ones 😆.
TIL that you can use console.log with color!
console.log(
'This is %cMy stylish message',
'color: yellow; font-style: italic; background-color: blue;padding: 2px',
)
TIL that Storybook has a way to specify the behavior of args — ArgeTypes.
This is a great way to constrain the values that your component can accept and
provides information about args that aren’t explicitly set in the story.
// Replace your-renderer with the renderer you are using (e.g., react, vue3, angular, etc.)
import type {Preview} from '@storybook/your-renderer'
const preview: Preview = {
argTypes: {
// 👇 All stories expect a label arg
label: {
control: 'text',
description: 'Overwritten description',
},
},
}
export default preview
TIL about e18e (Ecosystem Performance). It’s an initiative to connect folks and projects working on improving JS package performance.
TIL that if we want to make a deepClone of an object in JS, there’s a built in
method in most browsers: structuredClone!
The old one (which works but doesn’t account for things like Set and Map or
even Date)
const originalObject = {
name: "John",
age: 30,
date: new Date(),
details: {
hobbies: ["reading", "gaming"],
address: {
city: "New York",
zip: "10001",
},
},
};
const clonedObjectOldWay = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(originalObject));
// what do you think happened to the date? 😏
// hint... no longer a string!
console.log(clonedObjectOldWay);
console.log(originalObject.date instanceof Date); // true
console.log(clonedObjectOldWay.date instanceof Date); // false (Date is not preserved)
Shout out to Matt Pocock — the person behind Total Typescript — for the twitter thread that exposed me to this function!
TIL, from Dom Farolino that he’s trying to make addEventListener extinct with
the observables api!
// Filtering and mapping:
element
.on('click')
.filter(e => e.target.matches('.foo'))
.map(e => ({x: e.clientX, y: e.clientY}))
.subscribe({next: handleClickAtPoint})
Got a node_module giving you a headache? Need to give it a band-aid? Thank
your lucky stars for
patch-package.
It’s a vital band-aid for the bleeding edge!
If you ever want to know (sort of) the cost of adding a package to your node app, you can use bundlephobia!
During office hours with Kent, I learned about semver calculator!
It seems pretty dope and I’m going to use it in the future!
I also learned that Sanity has their own query language for working with JSON.
Might be worth looking into if you need to do some transformations and just move
it into the query versus doing it in the code.
TIL about a sick template for building a headless shopify theme with Sanity and Hydrogen.
Need to run background jobs? Not writing Ruby On Rails and therefore not using
Sidekiq? Check out trigger.dev
I can probably use this somewhere in the future but TBD 🤔!
TIL about serve by vercel. It lets you serve your SPA/static files, incredibly
easily! We may or may not be using it at work for some of our SPAs 😉.
every on the JavaScript Array object is great since it checks to see if a
given callback function is true for every value in the array… but there’s
some caveats to it. Namely, every will return true for the empty array, and it
does not take into consideration empty slots during its processing.
Refer to the following code to get an understanding of the caveats:
const isNumber = (v) => typeof v === 'number'
[].every(isNumber) // true
[1, ,2].every(isNumber) // true
[1, null, 2].every(isNumber) // false
There’s a new kid on the block and this new kid is a game changer! Panda is a new css-in-js solution that works in the server-first framework era!
While working on my site, I realized that there was a nifty utility that handles merging my tailwind classes for me!
TIL that there’s a nifty methd on the Object type in JS: fromEntries. It’s
the counterpart of entries method that exists on the Object.
Here’s an example for you:
let obj = {foo: 'bar', baz: 42}
const entries = Object.entries(obj)
console.log(entries)
// Expected output: [["foo", "bar"], ["baz", 42]]
obj = {}
console.log(obj)
// Expected output: {} 😆
obj = Object.fromEntries(entries)
console.log(obj)
// Expected output: Object { foo: "bar", baz: 42 }
As I was thinking about how I would migrate my search index for my site to remix, I came across an alternative to Lunrjs… and yes I know I can use Algolia but I personally think it’s overkill for what I want for my site.
So there’s this thing called unified that allows us to take things like
Markdown, HTML, or plain text and turns it into structured data (AST) so that we
can apply transformations on said data. Its rich plugin pipeline allows us to
typically write one line of code to chain a feature into a process.
It’s more than this though as it is collective that spans multiple
organizations and an ecosystem that includes:
I was once asked about matrices in an interview. Still unsure how they work but we’ve got them in the browser specs 🤣.
My mind was blown today when I learned that browsers now ship with a native way to easily check if the window matches a specific media query. 🤯
Essentially, you can pass in a media query into window.matchMedia and the
returned object will tell you if the window matches you media query. It also
ships with event listeners so you can handle resizing out of the box ❤️ .
Shout out to my main man Vepor for this piece of knowledge!
Turns out you can set up auto scroll restoration with browser APIs (yay!).
State management is hard but there’s a difference between state management in our apps versus managing our app’s server cache. Luckily, there are two libraries that we can use to help us with our server side state needs.
React query and RTK Query. We’re using React Query at work but RTK query looks cool too!
I’ll probably do a small POC this weekend to get a feel for the ergonomics.
Whenever you’re going to be talking about dates, keep these things in mind:
There’s a nifty little library to write shell scripts using node. Yay for less hassle!
Turns out that there’s a neat little time formatter that most browsers ship with that allows us to do locale specific time formatting. It’s inside of the Intl.
Intl.DateTimeFormat('en-US').format(Date.now())
If you want to know what element on the page currently has focus, you can use
document.activeElement to get access to the reference of the currently focused
element.
I’m using it to handle the / key to force my website to move focus onto the
search input (similar to what github does) and to not try to make the site
refocus the search if is the currently active element.
toFixed(n) provides n length after the decimal point; toPrecision(x)
provides x total length. Both will round! Both are functions that exist on the
Number prototype!
While working on a javascript monorepos course, I was exposed to Volta.
Volta eases the node development process by allowing developers to easily pin node versions to a project and will automatically switch the development machine to the right version when switching between contexts 😃.
So you can actually run an npm install for a directory without having to
actually change directories. Look: npm install --prefix /my/project/root
If you’re rendering over 50 rows in react-table and messing around with
complicated filter logic, it’s wise to utilize something like react-window to
get some performance gains as users are not going to be interacting with
elements not in the viewport so we shouldn’t tax them for the rendering costs
behind such frivolous elements.
TIL that there is a method built into the Date object toLocaleString. It
essentially allows us convert a date string to a locale specific string.
TIL that you can’t open a window in full screen with window.open
While I was working on something at my day job, I learned about
prex.
It essentially allows us to cancel our promises (think axios or some other xhr).
return new Promise<void>((resolve, reject) => {
const request = http.get(from);
// abort the request if canceled.
const registration = token.register(() => {
request.abort();
reject(new Error("Operation canceled."));
});
request.on("error", err => {
registration.unregister();
reject(err);
});
}
Basically, avoid having to do any major logic from the SIGTERM signal or any other EXIT signals in node because they can often times be fired twice. It’s much better to run any clean up code that you want in the start of the process versus the end.
Also check out death on npm. It’s a handy helper library.
Turns out you can’t use Xpaths to access elements in a shadow dom.
TIL that Jest will buffer console.log statements but this is not true for
console.info.
Vincent and I learned that if you’re attempting to add keyboard events to
divs, you’ll want to supply a role and a tab-index if you’re wanting to
react 😉.
During work today, my colleague Mo and I were having issues making DELETE
requests to a micro service that he had created. In Postman and the standard XHR
function that ships with Google Chrome, the delete requests were going through
with no problem but when we tried to make a call via axios.delete(url/id), the
server kept returning a 400 error.
The truly peculiar thing was that making a call in the following manner worked:
axios({
method: 'DELETE',
url: `url/${id}`,
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
Authorization: 'Bearer SOME_TOKEN',
},
})
However, this failed:
axios.delete(`url/${id}`, {
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
Authorization: 'Bearer SOME_TOKEN',
},
})
Long story short, TIL: axios.delete will drop the content-type header (which
is the right behavior) so my buddy Mo had to change up his micro service
endpoint to not expect a content type 😁!
TIL that the main attribute in package.json refers to the entry point for a
commonjs node module and that the module attribute refers to the es module
that can be used by bundlers such as wepback and rollup.
So here is a nice little thing I’m going to try and get people using at work, I hope! PLOP js!
It allows us to keep our project structure consistent by creating a CLI tool
that will help automate the creation of files that should exist for various
modules in our codebase. For example, if we are creating a React component, a
structure that we’d like to enforce in order to keep our project neat and tidy
is:
When it comes to managing npm packages for your organization, there’ a great
little package called: Verdaccio.
Verdaccio is a light-weight npm proxy registry. It allows us to host private
Node.js packages and is compatible with all client package managers, such as
Yarn and npm. There’s even a Docker image you can use to get you up and
running!