The Web Huddle #4

Thursday, February 2, 2017

The Web Huddle is our monthly roundup of the best links shared in the Black Pixel web team’s Slack channel.

Semicolons Still Matter

Here at Black Pixel we absolutely believe in using semicolons and for good reason: ASI can really bite you in the butt. A user recently submitted an issue to React that ended up being a ASI failing scenario. The fault is easy to miss at first glance, so it’s understandable that the user didn’t know it was the missing semicolon causing the problem.

Immutable Colors

With the new immutability craze, developer Adrien Antoine created a neat little library for color manipulation. As the Antoine puts it, Kewler is a “functional and immutable color manipulation library.” Some may question the need for immutability, but we find it helpful for doing equality checks after modification. This is extremely useful in the context of something like React or Redux if you want a performant application.

Linter Write Good

As developers we pride ourselves on creating beautiful works of art in our code. Unfortunately, this artistry and attention to detail does not translate well into our writing skills in most cases. Developer George Marchin created an interesting linting plugin for the Atom text editor that will warn you if you’re making grammatical mistakes, using unnecessary verbiage, and more.

Promise Fun

Developer Sindre Sorhus created a nice repository for all things promises and patterns. We’re heavily invested in promises and love the idea of creating patterns to solve general problems. One of the hardest parts of having a medium to large development team is getting everyone on the same page with their style or approach to a specific problem. Pattern libraries help with this and open up the opportunity for some awesome discussions within your team.

Chrome Throttling Background Tabs

If you have used requestAnimationFrame before you already know of this behavior but soon Google Chrome will start throttling background tab timers. This is definitely a hot topic at the moment since it has implications with technologies such as WebSockets. I think it’s great that Google is trying to increase the performance of its browser, and it will definitely help with battery-draining apps like Slack and Google Chrome. Developer Samuel Reed chimes in with some of his thoughts regarding Google’s new decision on his blog. What are your thoughts on this decision?

React 15.5 and 16 Roadmap

Dan Abramov recently created an umbrella issue for React 15.5 and 16 on GitHub. These types of issues are great because they can help prepare your team for transitioning into a new version. We’re ecstatic over the recent Fiber work and love that createClass is disappearing to hopefully advocate for a more functional approach to all of your React code.

Top Pens of 2016

Web development had an awesome year in 2016. To celebrate this, Codepen released its top 100 pens of 2016 to showcase all of the time and effort developers put into their great contributions to the community. While pens are used as prototyping or proof-of-concept tools most of the time, this list contains things you can use that will be immediately applicable to an application.

Notable Tweets

Webpack 2 final pre-release:

Jason Miller asks the important questions:

ES2015 wins with spread calls:

Dan Abramov gives solid advice:

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