Astro + React + Vue Counter Demo

Netlify's Cassidy Williams made a demo to illustrate the flexibility of Astro, the framework-agnostic static site generator I covered a few weeks ago. Take a look at this index.astro page which casually imports React and Vue components alongside each other, passes them some shared data, and renders them. 👀

Please re-read that paragraph if it didn't get you excited.

Temporal: getting started with JavaScript’s new date time API

If you haven't yet dug into the Temporal API — a saving grace for JavaScript's awful Date API — now is a good time. It reached stage 3 status a few months ago (making it all but guaranteed to make it into EcmaScript) and 2ality (an excellent resource in general) has just published a nice introductory guide.

Just one of the things that makes Temporal a life-saver:

Temporal distinguishes two kinds of time. Given a global instant of time:

• Wall-clock time (also called local time or clock time) varies globally, depending on the time zone of a clock.
• Exact time (also called UTC time) is the same everywhere.

Epoch time is one way of representing exact time: It’s a number counting time units (such as nanoseconds) before or since Unix epoch (midnight UTC on January 1, 1970).

The Temporal Cookbook also contains a lot of practical usage examples.

Optical size, the hidden superpower of variable fonts

A brief explainer on optical sizing, a lesser known feature of variable fonts that allows typefaces to alter character glyphs based on font size. Much like the .ico file format bundles multiple versions of an image into a single file, optical sizing allows variable fonts to bundle multiple versions of glyphs into a single font.

An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding

This Medium post had been sitting in my reading list for a few weeks but I finally got around to reading it. Here are a few that particularly resonated with me:

1. How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it

19. How to help someone get promoted

21. How to find interesting work on your own, instead of waiting for someone to bring it to you

Benchmarking JavaScript Memory Usage

The team at WebPageTest did a deep dive on memory usage in modern web apps. There are some unsurprising findings (like JS bundle size strongly correlating with memory usage) and some findings I didn't expect (like number of DOM nodes having a fairly weak correlation to memory usage).

JS Is Weird

An absurd but fun quiz to test your knowledge of JavaScript's quirks. I got 15 out of 25 correct. 😬