JavaScript NewsWeek 002
JSConf EU Videos
First item this week is JSConf Europe! If you just learned about it from me — it’s probably too late. BUT. You can still enjoy all the great talks from the conference thanks to THAT playlist.
There are total of 19 videos at the moment. With new ones being added on the daily basis.
My personal favorite is the brilliant talk by Anjina Vakil on the topic of Functional Programming and Immutable Data Structures.
If you watch this talk — you will never be lost in all those cryptic terms again. She manages to explain Immutability with emojis!
How cool is that?
JSON FEED
Next Up — in the “future is now” section is JSON Feed. Coming from two brilliant software engineers — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons.
JSON Feed is a format proposal that is similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON.
For most developers, JSON is far easier to read and write than XML. Developers may groan at picking up an XML parser, but decoding JSON is often just a single line of code.
Just a quick look under the hood, that’s what Manton and Brent are proposing:
It just looks so much cleaner, so much nicer and overall sexier.
Definitely worth you attention, guys, if you’re developing some kind of backend API that is using feed format.
I know I will be updating some of my APIs to follow this spec.
Article of the Week
Eric Elliot has been busy recently writing some very cool and deep articles. And this week’s pick is his article Composing Software: An Introduction.
If you get inspired by the talk I pushed earlier — and want to become serious about functional programming — that is definitely the best place to start!
What I like about Eric is his honesty. He starts his article by citing the phrase we all heard before:
Programming is “the act of breaking a complex problem down into smaller problems, and composing simple solutions to form a complete solution to the complex problem.”
And then goes on to saying -
One of my biggest regrets in life is that I failed to understand the significance of that lesson early on. I learned the essence of software design far too late in life.
Great introduction to a great article. Eric goes into great detail on function and object composition. With lots of code samples and cool techniques. Worth a great concentrated read!
Library of the Week
You probably heard about this one: d3.js is THE go-to JavaScript library for visualizing data.
But what I experienced was also how overwhelming it is to dig into. There is this never-ending list of functions in API documentation, hundreds of tutorials and more then 20 thousand examples on the main documentation page alone!
Where do I even start?!
I discovered THIS brilliant post on medium: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to d3.js by Ian Johnson. It is perfect.
First it actually goes into explaining complex concepts in a very approachable fashion: how data gets mapped visually, what challenges are there on the web etc.
And then the article introduces you to d3 in a very soft way. Lots of visual elements. Of course my beloved GIFs! Very easy to grasp.
One of the key points — the community behind d3 gets introduced. And I always find it much more effective when I start learning something — just to connect with the real people. So having the slack channels and everything laid up for me — incredible!
Definitely something you ought to look into — if you at all interested in data visualization.
Tutorial of the Week
This week I found a great one that I enjoyed a lot personally. This one is by Yury Dymov and was posted on Smashing Magazine website: An Easy Way To Integrate The JSON API And Redux
The main focus of the tutorial is the question of how to manage data that is coming from JSON API. More specifically how to fetch this data from the backend and manage it in your frontend. Using Redux.
Yury has created a very cool working demo right here on the GitHub. And that is what I always prefer when learning — working demos. So I can kind of jump into it.
And that’s what I did. And that’s why I’m recommending this one to you. Tested. Works great =)
End
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See you all next week!
