~javascriptweekly | Issue 737 - A timeline of JavaScript's history (14)

A Brief History of JavaScript — JavaScript (originally named LiveScript) turns thirty years old this year and the Deno team has put together a fantastic timeline-based tour of how much things have progressed from its first appearance in Netscape Navigator, through offshoots like JScript, standardization, and the introduction of Node.js, all the way through to the modern day.

2x-40x Faster Docker Builds with Blacksmith — With a one-line code change, Blacksmith can make your Docker builds incremental by mounting your Docker layer cache into your GitHub Actions runner. Blacksmith is used by 600+ companies like Ashby, Clerk, and Mintlify.

⚡ Announcing TypeScript Native Previews — Earlier this year, Anders Hejlsberg teased a 10x faster TypeScript through efforts being made to port the TypeScript compiler to Go, enabling it to be compiled and run natively, as well as take advantage of more concurrency. The good news is you can now give it a.. go for yourself.

▶  An Introduction to JavaScript Frameworks — The creator of SolidJS has put together a tight 11-minute video boiling down the different approaches taken by React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and Solid. Dense, but a great way to get a lay of the land.

▶  What's New in Angular — Two members of the Angular team presented a session at this week’s Google I/O event on the latest updates to the Angular framework in anticipation of the eventual release of Angular 20 next Thursday.

ESLint v9.0: A Retrospective — It’s been a year since ESLint v9.0 landed as the first major release in a few years. It enabled the new flat-config system by default and the rollout didn’t go as smoothly as hoped. This retrospective breaks down the full story and shares the lessons learned.

Getting Started with Clerk Billing — Learn how to build a complete billing experience with Clerk and Stripe, no custom UI or webhooks required.

Six Ways Slack, Notion, and VS Code Improved Electron App Performance — An experienced Electron app developer shares a guide to Electron performance optimization and how to get the most out of your apps.

Defuddle: Extract the Main Content from Web Pages — Strips extraneous clutter from HTML in order to leave only the primary content for you to format or use as you wish. Essentially a modern implementation of the ideas behind Mozilla’s Readability. There’s an online demo if you want to give it a try.

snapDOM: Captures DOM Nodes as Images — A fast and accurate DOM-to-image capture mechanism to capture any HTML element as a scalable SVG image, preserving styles, fonts, background images, etc.

ForesightJS: Predictive Mouse Intent Library — An interesting concept, with the entire page acting as a demo of sorts. The idea is to decrease latency by prefetching data or pages as soon as you think a user might be heading in that direction. Your mileage may vary and it’s less useful for touch devices.

Astra: A New JavaScript-to-EXE Compiler for Windows — Boasts “a new approach to compiling” JavaScript applications for a single executable experience on Windows only (for now).

Crosspost: A JS Utility for Posting Across Multiple Social Networks — Currently supports eight different services including Bluesky, X, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

Rockpack 6.0: An Alternative React App Starter — A tool aiming to get React project setup time as low as possible, complete with server side rendering support, bundling, linting and testing. v6.0 updates everything for React 19. GitHub repo.