Revision 404: Bleeding-Edge JavaScript

This revision we had the pleasure to sit down with Christophe Porteneuve (@porteneuve) who is based in Paris. Christophe made his entry to web development almost twenty-five years ago and is well known in today’s JavaScript scene since back in the days when he became core team member of prototype.js (who still remmebers this?). Nowadays he runs the consultancy & training company Delicious Insights together with a pertner where they offer (Node-)JS, Tooling and Git Workshops. On top of that Christophe can usually be found MC’ing the dotJS Conferences.

Shownotes

[00:04:14] Bleeding-Edge JavaScript

In our fireside-chat we talked about old and new JavaScript additions, which we find very helpful, if not even mind-blowing. We started off with an older but underappreciated feature, ES Proxies, as Christophe just recently held a talk about those at the Fronteers Conference (Slides). Proxies allow to watch objects like in immer.js or like in Vue.js 3, or build traps in order to instrument property access, or to do meta-programming.

Afterwards we talked about how new features find their way into JavaScript, what ECMA is, what JavaScript, what TC-39 and the different „Stages“ means and why JavaScript today is still a trademark of Oracle in the United States.

And of course we also talked about these features:

• private fields/methods (scattered acress three proposals)
• nullish coalescing
• optional chaining
• Promise.allSettled/any
• pipelines
• partial application
• first-class protocols
• numeric separators

[01:21:34] Links

This time we have two links for you:

Delicious Insights Screencasts

We can really recommend Christophe’s screencasts. Right now there are four available for you to watch:

• Git Core Concepts (this one is free)
• “Git undo” or the art of rolling back
• JavaScript: this is it (about the „this“ keyword)
• Writing Modern Async JavaScript

The later three ones are not free, but as listeners of this podcast, you get a 30% discount until January 15th, 2020, with this link: screencasts.delicious-insights.com/?coupon=WORKINGDRAFT-30-OFF.

Think About! Conference 2020

The second thing, we’d like to promote is next year’s iteration of the Think About! Conference. The inaugural 2-day-conference happened this year in Cologne and not only were we blown away but the concept and contents, we also happened to do five super interesting interviews there: workingdraft.de/category/on-tour/thinkabout19/. Ticket sales for next year opened and there are still Early Bird Tickets left, for EUR 380 instead of the regular EUR 500.