Well, we’ve reached the last issue of TL;DR of the year, and the first that’s a week late! Oops! But we made it to 13 issues. Not bad! Perhaps we can double it next year.

Also, wow… what a wild year for our industry.

After years of growth, we’ve had the highest layoffs since the dotcom bubble in 2001. Many of which due to macro-economic trends, but of course also many companies taking advantage the downturn to get rid of people at a time everyone else does.

Many of us have felt the effects, either by being laid off and trying to find land the next gig or in our network. I wasn’t spared myself! Certainly a humbling experience.

So here’s hoping for a better year! We’re not out of the woods yet.

Upcoming events

We have one last JS Code Club: Online this year, happening this Saturday, the 23rd. Do you have a fun holiday project? This might be a great place to kick it off.

In the next year our first event will be a new Code Buddy event on Discord. Code Buddy is like a book club, but instead of books the group will study tutorials and courses together. This is happening January 16th. Read all about it on Guild.

The year in JS - Marco Campos

2023 went so fast, it seems like January 1st was yesterday! Lots of things happened on the web recently, so here are some reviews and highlights:

Let's start with this very thorough review from Kevin Powell on the new things happening in CSS in 2023:

Safari (and in turn every browser on iOS) are getting even better support for PWAs, making them almost usable in iOS.

Here is a overview from WWDC 2023: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10120

On JS land, here is another video with a bit of irony on the changes in Javascript this year:

On a more serious note, for all of you working with node and typescript: update to the latest LTS (version 20), set type: module on your package.json, and set module: nodenext and target: es2022 on your tsconfig.json.

This will ensure you will have native ES modules running on node with the least amount of compilation from typescript. It will save you a lot of headaches with edge cases and quirks on module resolution and async code… ask me how I know! 🙃

Happy holidays!

Hope you all get the rest you deserve and an excellent 2024, from Drey, Marco & Evert and all of the Toronto JS volunteer team!

It is also a time of fun challenges and quick projects, so brush up your IDE and terminal and jump in on the advent calendars below!

• Advent of code - https://adventofcode.com/

• Advent of Javascript - https://www.adventofjs.com/

• Advent of CSS - https://www.adventofcss.com/

Happy holidays and happy coding!

Upcoming Toronto JS Events

• December 6th, Wednesday: JS Tech Talk [In-Person]: Simplify Complex Apps, React and React native Code Share, Apollo Caching

• December Code Club: watch out for the date ;)

• January 24th, Thursday: JS Tech Talk [ Online ]: What would the browser do? Simpler mental models with Remix

Community Showcase

Shout out to Michal Svatos’ new version of their Star Trek Pi-hole theme! 🖖

You can find out more on the LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7132826003256573952-eTTR/

If you need a public domain music to give back to all those call centers and scams put someone on hold, you are in luck with Gregory's PBX hold music: https://5kb.us/music-on-hold.mp3

On a nice community effort to debug Lazar's astro course (you should check it out!) we found out about some quirks with better-sqlite3 and the sqlite3:// protocol on some node versions. More on Liz’ post on LinkedIn.

Still on a similar topic, check out Lazar's videos on neovim:

Through figuring how to bring events online, returning to in-person events, mentoring new event organizers, onboarding volunteers, organizing a donation drive for TorontoJS self-sustainability, expanding the spirit of life, light and love which is the core of our community, Jen will be missed! We wish her all the best in future endeavours. If you see Jen at an upcoming event then please thank her for the time, effort and contribution she has put into our community!

Upcoming Toronto JS Events

• Toronto JS Social [In-Person] - TONIGHT!!!!

• November 19th at 2:00pm - Toronto JS Code Club [Online]

• November 26nd at 1:00pm - JS Social: OpenTTD [Online] - Love public transit? Play a 30 year old game together, online!

• December 6th at 6pm - JS Tech Talk [In-Person]: Simplify Complex Apps, React and React native Code Share, Apollo Caching

Other events happening in Toronto

• November 28th at 7:00pm - Civic hacknight #421 - AMA with the City of Toronto's Deputy CTO [In-Person]

• November 30th at 6:00pm - You've deployed... But how is your app performing? [In person]

• November 30th at 6:00pm - Toronto Tech Social [In-Person hosted by BrainStation]

Industry News

Next.js introduces a trial run of partial rendering! This an optional option leading to possible feature updates in coming time. With most web applications built today, we are given the choice of static or dynamic rendering. There is also routes that has both static and dynamic content though! For example, a social media feed, static rendering for posts but dynamic rendering for likes.

Introducing partial rendering! “Partial Prerendering is an experimental feature that allows you to render a route with a static loading shell, while keeping some parts dynamic. In other words, you can isolate the dynamic parts of a route.”

Source of Image

What does this mean and how can it benefit developers? When the static shell route is served, the load time is fast, ignoring the dynamic content that is on the page. The shell then leaves gaps for the dynamic content that will load asynchronously! COOL! Then the async gaps are loaded which reduces the load time of the overall page! How NEAT!!!!!

Here are some steps to help you step up your personal project using Partial Rendering!

Support Toronto JS

If you happen to have a few bucks laying around or would just want to help our community to grow and maintain itself, head to our Open Collective page and make a contribution!

In the category of bulky backend frameworks that solve problems React introduced, new problems are afoot.

Kent C. Dodds, contributor to the Remix framework wrote an article titled “Why I Won't Use Next.js”, which, if you’re a user of either Next.js or React is worth reading. In my opinion it reflects shifting opinion against Next and React pretty well, including the growing influence of Vercel, a company that’s paid its way into the Frontend developer’s mindshare.

Is Next.js or React going away? Of course not! But it’s a glimpse in the shifting mindset highly popular technology stacks go through as they first win everyone’s hearts, but eventually gain a growing resentment which makes room for new upstarts that don’t have all their predecessor’s baggage. And so the wheel turns.

Upcoming Toronto JS Events

• Thursday, November 9th - React, Graphs, Realtime, Embeds - JS Tech Talk Night - in person!

• Wednesday, November 15th - Toronto JS Social - in person!

• November 26nd - JS Social: OpenTTD online - Love public transit? Play a 30 year old game together, online!

Other events happening in Toronto

All happening on November 7th, make your pick!

• DSA Technical Interview Prep

• Cracking the A11y Code: Web Accessibility Basics for Beginners

• Civic hacknight #418 - Human-centred housing initiatives at the City

Also most Saturdays, Mob Programming. Next one November 4th!

Community Showcase

Hacktoberfest has wrapped up! While we’re all sad about the end of the hacktoberfest t-shirts, this didn’t stop people from contributing to open source projects anyway!

Special thanks to Ibrahim Ahmed and Kieran Huggins from upgrading the Toronto JS website from the React 15 gutter all the way to React 18, and making the most amazing 404 page ever.

Ahmadreza Shamimi writes about Advancing Color Coding with OKLCH: A Leap Beyond RGBA. The new way to describe colors with the catchiest name!

Jacky Tea has been working on a mock stock market MERN application and is looking for contributors. Read more about it on his Slack message or check out the code on github.

Jen Chan *tried* to launch a new channel on software architecture, but due to unclear requirements this has turned into a place to discuss the design of buildings. If you want to help get that train back on the rails, or discuss your favourite McMansion, join!

Support Toronto JS

If you happen to have a few bucks laying around or would just want to help our community to grow and maintain itself, head to our Open Collective page and make a contribution!

Donate to TorontoJS

Starting with the basics: have I been pwned is a website where you can check if your email has shown up in data breaches.

If you want a video explanation on the site and why it is important, here it is:

If you want to get geeky and dive into the rabbit hole on the breach that started everything and the logic behind it on a funny way, this XKCD comic is for you (here is the explained page, because I'm not so smart to understand the pun without someone explaining it to me):

Now to the next point: use a password manager, but don't pick anyone as they are also susceptible to attacks and breaches.

If you want to understand how a password manager works, here is a video explaining that:

Now for the last bit of news on security: Google is making passkeys the default for new accounts.

And “what are passkeys” you might ask, in short, they are a more secure way to confirm identity than passwords, as they rely on public key cryptography.

Here are some links about passkeys:

• Explanation for non tech people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuzddtQZeT8

• More technical docs from Google: https://developers.google.com/identity/passkeys/

• How to implement passkeys in login forms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qSCYiU_Yr4

Now for something completely different…

Past Events

The first Website Club was a huge success! The event brought together people to share their experiences on building and improving their own websites. And also working with the community to fix bugs.

Upcoming Events

October 21st - A Walk in the Park

October 22nd - JS Code Club - October 2023

October 23rd - Large Language Models: What Are They And How Do We Use Them?

November 26th - JS Social: OpenTTD Online

Community Showcase

A shout to Daniel Stoianov's mom who is making some cute “pair programming buddies”.

She lives in Ukraine and since February 2022, she has been doing volunteer work daily related to supporting veterans. She also volunteers in a kitchen that prepares food for the army. Before this, she made toys that were sold at charity auctions. She gifts many of these toys to soldiers, who use them as talismans in the trenches.

To show your support for Daniel and his mom follow this slack thread: https://torontojs.slack.com/archives/C06HNH45U/p1697067738850839

Now, a shout out to a full past week with lots of people showing their projects!

• Gregory shared a server where people could interact and control their robot car.

• Evert Pot published a blog post reflecting on the job market and working 80% of the regular work schedule.

• Adan published a blog post on migrating a blog from Hugo to Astro.

• Divish shared their personal project for a Youtube downloader written in react, node.js and socket.io.

• Liz shared a project for a custom 302 redirect page for Vercel.

Support Toronto JS

If you happen to have a few bucks laying around or would just want to help our community to grow and maintain itself, head to our Open Collective page and make a contribution!

Donate to TorontoJS

What is Hacktober? It is a yearly event to encourage open source contributions where be it through code or no code issues! Registration is open now with lots of projects awaiting for help!

Upcoming Events

(TONIGHT) - JS Workshop for Women Developers [In Person] - (at Capacity). This workshop covers topics like writing documentation and public speaking!

(October 12th from 2pm - 6pm) - We are introducing a new type of event called JS Website Club! Bring your laptop, write a blog post. We can also help figuring out tech stacks, buying domains or figure out hosting. Any experience level can join, because WordPress is still a thing too!

(October 22nd from 4pm - 6pm) - The monthly online Code Club will be happening! Register here to attend! These monthly events are to bring your projects that you have been thinking of building, you are currently working on or it gives an opportunity to collaborate with fellow folks in tech on the projects they are working on! All levels of knowledge welcomed :)

Other events happening in Toronto:

• October 10 - Civic Hacknight hosted by Civic Tech Toronto. For the month of October the focus will be on housing in the city of Toronto. This will both be an in-person and virtual event

• October 10 - Syntax hosted at Mascot Brewery. A laid-back event for all web developers and coding enthusiasts!

• October 19 - Rangle.io is hosting their ReactTO fall edition event! The event will focus on the how to use state management for some of the state management libraries out there

• October 23 - Tech Tank is back with another event hosted at the Cohere office. Large Language Models: What Are They And How Do We Use Them?

Community Showcase

Canadian startup Polyseam is building [CNDI]. It’s a free and open source tool for self-hosting popular open source projects and they’re doing it using Deno (a Next-generation JavaScript Runtime)!

For a complete demo of the tool, check out this [walkthrough]!

Mike Vautour has released his second video of documenting building a personal portfolio project using Payload CMS in public. For this video he says that “there are a couple sections that require an unknown number of elements so we will use array type collections to handle those inputs”.

Industry News

New changes have landed for Remix v2 and Next.js 13.5!!!

First off! What is Remix? Remix is a full stack web framework that lets you focus on the user interface. It is built on the Web Fetch API (instead of Node), that allows the code to be run anywhere.

With adjustments to the minimum version support for Remix v2, it now officially requires React 18 as well as Node 18 or later to use. There has been added changes with removals of future flags from the remix.config.js file, as well as lots of changes/API removals that had a lot of deprecation warnings in Remix v1. For all the changes with v2, they can be viewed here!

Now Next.js 13.5. Developers have been complaining about the slowness of the Next.js dev server lately, so these changes with 13.5 will increase that! 22% faster startup, 29% faster HMR (fast refresh), 40% less memory usage, optimized package imports and over 438 bugs patched! wow! Read about all the changes with Next.js here!

So the next 14 days we can expect temperatures up to 20 degrees during the day, with minimal precipitation. It’s starting to be time for sweaters and light jackets again. I know that the idea of summer being over and winter is scary, but we’re about to enter the prettiest time of the year with the best fashion so it’s not all bad!

Upcoming events

The next in person JS Tech Talk is on September 27th. There will be 3 talks:

• Shruti Vellanki - Integrating Accessibility into Your Developer Workflow.

• Nik LeBlanc, "DORA at DevCycle: Tracking engineering metrics that matter".

• Rob Jackiewicz, "Fast iteration cycles, how to get feedback and build the right thing".

So whether you’re interested in accessibility, expressing the value your team creates through a discrete set of metrics or simply not being slow, there’s something for you here! Last but not least, our very own Jen Chan is sponsoring pizza for this event!

The number of seats for these events is usually limited, so you’ll want to RSVP soon to ensure you have a spot!

A few weeks from now, on October 4th (🐈 World animal day! 🐕) we’re also hosting: Code & Communicate: a workshop for women developers. The workshop covers topics like writing documentation and public speaking. Read all the details and RSVP on guild. Seats will will up quick!

The next Code Club will be on October 21st. Keep an eye out on this newsletter or Slack for updates.

Other events in Toronto:

• September 28th - React + Native is hosting Loading...A deep dive into website and web app performance. React and Performance rarely appear in the same sentence, so it will be interesting to see how these worlds collide!

• September 29th - “Cracking the Silicon Valley North Ceiling: Tackling Challenges Faced by Women and Non-Binary People in Tech”. An in-person event hosted by Queertech for queer woman and non-binary people.

• November 9 and 10 The VueConf Toronto, a Vue Conference in Toronto is happening, in Toronto!

Community showcase

In this section we show projects and articles by YOU! Have something to share or want to show off? Share it on the #show-n-tell slack channel.

Dann has been working with his 7 year old on Party Paint! Is this the youngest member of the Toronto JS community? Check it out here: https://inatree.net/partypaint/

Mike Vautour built an open-source tool to make it easy for his non-technical clients to share information bout setting up DNS records. Check out the Github Project, or a demo video.

Elizabeth McCready is back and has started a new series about data structures and algoritms in Javascript. Give us a way to subscribe Liz!

Updates from the last TJS Code Club

Last Saturday there was another Code Club! There were 5 separate streams on Discord, and here’s some of the accomplishments from that day:

• Charles brought his comic book web app for feedback. We noticed that there were some comics with covers containing explicit content. So we worked on a solution to filter comics by rating.

• Marco stayed in the main room exploring a simple reverse proxy with Hono. It went pretty fast and took the first half of the event. On the later half there were general discussions and a showcase of other projects that Marco has worked on.

• Aun worked on his next.js note taking app to solve a problem with data persistency.

• Elizabeth was having issues loading a font file on her react project with chakra.js. We figured out how to load custom fonts with Chakra.js and that that the font file needed to be in the /public directory.

• Matt had a TDD session in one room to discuss how to better integrate tests in a code base.

Feature Flag Management Built for Developers.

(sponsored) DevCycle is a Toronto-based feature flag platform that makes it easy to create and manage flags at scale, maintain an organized codebase, and stay on top of tech debt. Sign up for free today.

Terminal Tip

If you’re on a recent mac, you’re probably already using ZSH instead of the previous default Bash. ZSH has a lot of nice features that make it easier to use, but they’re not always easy to find. My tip today is to take a look at Oh My Zsh! Installing it will instantly yassify your command prompt and for example show you your current git branch, but it also comes with dozens of plugins that are easily turned on.

Works on Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, GNU/Herd, AIX, OpenSolaris or Windows (with WSL).

There is news about a possible whiteout coming this winter, so let’s enjoy all the heat and news before everything freezes up!

Upcoming events

Happening tomorrow (September 7th) Toast will be hosting an Online Hiring Event focused on female and non-binary people. Registration for the event is here.

On September 16th at 4 PM EST we will have the next Toronto JS Code Club. It will be an online mob programming event, so please bring your projects!

Our next Toronto JS in-person event will happen on September 27th (a.k.a. last Wednesday of the month), so stay tuned on the #events channel on slack for more information.

September 29th also brings us “Cracking the Silicon Valley North Ceiling: Tackling Challenges Faced by Women and Non-Binary People in Tech”. An in-person event hosted by Queertech for queer woman and non-binary people.

On November 9 and 10 it will be the next VueConf Toronto.

Happening in the community

September is bringing us some changes in the organization.

Danny Kim has stepped down from his position as Code Club organizer. Taking his place will be Dale Karp and Marco Campos who will be hosting the events. Thank you, Danny, for gently introducing more people to open-source contributions and I hope we can keep the Code Club vibrant and fun.

Sherry Yang has also stepped down as Community Organizer and the host for online socials. We hope you can bring as much energy to the Calgary tech community as you brought to Toronto.

On more news from the community, here is a shout out to Chensheng Xu for sharing a tool that helps checking the color contrast for Tailwind colors (code here).

And a new video from Lazar Nikolov on CSS Container Queries to check out.

Newsletters recommendation

This issue let’s bring some recommendations of moar news for you to follow:

• Frontend Focus is a web frontend focused (pun intended) newsletter with news about HTML, CSS and JS.

• Javascript Weekly is all things JS and news about the language and tools.

• Focused on the node side of things there is Node Weekly.

• Deno also has its own newsletter, Deno News.

• Web Tools Weekly has a list of new tools to discover every week.

• If you like weird or different stories about tech in general Bizarro Devs is an interesting newsletter.

Jobs

If you have an open Job Posting relevant to the members of our community, please send an email to events@torontojs.com.

We’d love to link it in our next newsletter at no cost.

If you have anything to share for the next edition, find us on the Toronto JS slack.

Contest!!!!

Daniel Stoianov from TorontoJS has built a frontend quiz!! so cool!! The first three people that solve the quiz by end of Friday at 11:59pm EST will receive a prize! Message Daniel on slack to verify the correct code!

Upcoming events

• August 30th is our monthly JS Social: Online. A great place to meet like minded individuals and chat about what you are currently working on or anything you have found fascinating as of late on your journey in tech!

Please look at our events calendar on Guild or Meetup for other upcoming events!

Also happening in Toronto:

• Toronto MongoDB User Group at Microsoft Canadian Headquarters (In person) - September 5, 2023

• Embracing Continuous Learning: Navigating Skill Development in Tech hosted by Tech Tank (Online) - September 6, 2023

• [TechTalks] Loading...A deep dive into website and web app performance hosted by React Toronto (In person) - September 28, 2023

Happening in the community

Lazar Nikolov writes and talks about CSS Nesting! A new feature coming to modern browsers August 29th. CSS Nesting allows selectors to be nested inside other selectors. This helps with reducing code repetition, file size, organization and giving easier options to refactor.

Let’s see an example without nesting:

/* No nesting */
article.card {
  border: 1px solid lightgrey;
  border-radius: 6px;
  overflow: hidden;
}

article.card header {
  border-bottom: 1px solid lightgrey;
  background: #f1f3f4;
  padding: 16px;
}

This example can be written with nesting like this:

/* With nesting */
article.card {
  border: 1px solid lightgrey;
  border-radius: 6px;
  overflow: hidden;

  & header {
    border-bottom: 1px solid lightgrey;
    background: #f1f3f4;
    padding: 16px;
  }
}

Check out the article on CSS Nesting here!

A few of folks in TorontoJS have started building a public Toronto JS member website, where people in the community can create public profiles and show off their projects. It’s early in the building process, but there’s a Github Repo. Join the Code Club if wanting to contribute!

Industry News

React brings on documentation for TypeScript!!! How exciting!! It includes a walkthrough of how to add typescript to an existing React project as well as a walk through of learning TypeScript with React Components, examples of typing hooks, common types from @types/react, as well as resources for further learning.

Poll

Wow! With a total of 35 votes, 63% of folks choose to use Visual Studio Code as their main editor! Vim with 14% of voters! Finally, Sublime and WebStorm tied for 11% of votes!

What are commands, shortcuts or extensions that you use that are necessary for your day to day coding? We would love to know! Let us know in the comments :)

Terminal Tip

If you want to quickly search for a command you’ve typed before, try CTRL-R to do a search over all previous commands in your history.

zsh (currently the default shell on mac, but highly recommended on other operating systems too) does a better job maintaining this list and tends to have better defaults if you’re stuck on bash, you might at the very least want to increase how many entries are saved by setting the HISTSIZE environment variable to a much higher setting. This can be done in your ~/.bash_profile file.

Jobs

If you have an open Job Posting relevant to the members of our community, please send an email to events@torontojs.com.

We’d love to link it in our next newsletter at no cost.

Upcoming events

We have the following Toronto JS events on the docket:

• Most Saturdays from 4pm-6pm Danny is hosting JS Code Club: Online on Zoom. This is a mob hacking event where 1 or more people bring projects or problems to work on together. I try to go every week as they’re always inspiring and Danny is a great host. Look out for a link on the #events channel in Slack close to August 12th and August 19th.

• On August 30th we also have the monthly JS Social: Online scheduled. A good place to meet like-minded individuals over a snack or drink from the comfort of your home.

Please look for our events calendar on Guild or Meetup for other events and more up to date information.

Also happening in Toronto:

• On August 16th at 8pm TechTank is hosting a panel: “I made it through the HELLSCAPE that is job search” featuring 3 panelists on Zoom. A topic a lot of us can relate to. TechTalk is fully community organized, without a commercial angle, so you can expect some honesty without being sold something.

Happening in the community

Peter Liu has built an incredible 3D model editor that uses CSS as a rendering engine.

You can play around with it on his github pages website.

Michal Svatoš has been working on a LCARS-inspired interface for his Pi-Hole. LCARS is the fictional UI in 24th century Star Trek. It looks fantastic and wins Michal the inaugural “Nerd Of The Month award”. Congratulations Michal!

A few of us also have started working on a public Toronto JS member website, where people in the community can create public profiles and show off their projects. It’s early days, but there’s a Github Repo. Join the Code Club if you want to pitch in!

Industry news & hot takes

Stefan Judis shares a pretty cool (currently Firefox-only) feature to make live minimaps on websites using just CSS. Wild!

Spiffytech writes about ways emoji’s can be detected in strings.

Poll

Check back next week for the results!

Jobs

If you have an open Job Posting relevant to the members of our community, please send an email to events@torontojs.com.

We’d love to link it in our next newsletter at no cost.

Terminal Tip

You can use !! to repeat the last command. For example, if you forgot to run sudo, you can repeat the last command with sudo !!.

It is amazing to see the community growing and people getting involved in it. If the number of events and happy faces all around is a sign of success, then we are successful!

I'd like to take a moment to shout out to the amazing volunteers that make ideas come true. You are the best and we couldn't do it without you! 🥳

As everyone has bills to pay and, unfortunately, we can't live off dreams alone, we are happy to announce that our OpenCollective is up!

Please contribute if you can so we can make this community even better!

All the funds will go towards covering the baseline costs of operation and improving the community events experience.

Now, to the news…

Upcoming events

The upcoming months are full of events to join, here are some highlights:

• Happening July 27th, we have the JS Tech Talk in person event with support from Sentry

• July 28th: July In-Person Social

• August 19th: JS Code Club: Online - Group Programming

• August 30th: JS Code Club: Online - Group Programming

Please look for our events calendar on Guild and Meetup for other events and more up to date information.

Also, happening in Toronto:

• The React+Native group is hosting a tech talk: “Beyond Markdown: Enhancing Developer Docs with MDX on GitHub Pages”, on August 3rd at the Loopio Office. Sounds intriguing!

Happening in the community

• An interesting, albeit very technical, discussion happened on slack about Fractional Indexing. It is a way of indexing items on a list using floating point numbers where to add or move items we only need to change the index of that item. Find the thread here.

• The Toronto JS home page is getting some well-deserved love thanks to Michal Svatos with the help of Jen Chan, Kieran Huggins, and Taz Singh. Now you can see events directly from there!

• A heated debate around UML and the use of diagrams also happened, it has interesting opinions and ideas and is worth checking. Here is the thread on slack.

What’s new in Javascript?

Let's talk for a second about WebGPU. It is an interesting new technology that allows us to mine crypto on the browser harness the power of GPUs. WebGPU builds upon the idea of giving developers access to lower-level instructions of the GPU compared to WebGL.

To make a comparison with native, WebGPU would be like Vulkan, where WebGL is closer to OpenGL.

This API makes it easy to do computations on the GPU instead of wrapping it to graphics calls or a shader. That enabled AI and other purely mathematical use cases that benefit from the parallel processing of the GPU to work efficiently. And, for cooler and faster graphics.

Jobs

If you have an open Job Posting relevant to the members of our community, please send an email to events@torontojs.com.

We’d love to link it in our next newsletter at no cost.

Summer!! Sunshine!! In-person events??? Time outside?? The heat though.

Lots of awesome upcoming events in the city either in-person or online, check them out below!

If you have anything to share for the next edition, find us on the Toronto JS slack.

Upcoming events

• JS Code Club: Group Programming - July 15 (Online)

• JS Social - July 26 (Online)

• JS Tech Talk: Web Fonts, Web Components, Svelte! — with venue support from Sentry - July 27 (In-person)

• JS Social — hosted at Priceline - July 28 (In-person)

Also happening in Toronto:

• Beyond Markdown: Enhancing Developer Docs with MDX on GitHub Pages hosted at Loopio (In-person) - August 3

Projects from the community

Marcelle Rusu (they/them) has been working on building their own language called Coil. They intend it to make web programming simple, expressive, and powerful. Through building a web based structural editor they have shown what Coil is capable of.

What’s new in JavaScript?

NextAuth.js is becoming Auth.js! NextAuth is an open-source authentication library that provides a simple and easy-to-use solution for adding authentication and security to web applications. It was created specifically for Next.js, a popular React-based framework, but can also be used with other frameworks and libraries.

Now with the update to v4, it will come with a few breaking changes from the last major version (3.x). This gives developers the ability to test states much more cleanly with the new status option, to have at most two parameters when using the logger API, customization options to built-in pages and much more! Read more on the changes/upgrades happening and how to implement Auth.js into your next project!

Jobs

If you have an open Job Posting relevant to the members of our community, please send an email to events@torontojs.com.

We’d love to link it in our next newsletter at no cost.

Upcoming events

We got a packed schedule the next few weeks, with 4 Toronto JS events:

• JS Social: Online - June 28 - TODAY!

• JS Technical Interview Prep - June 29

• JS Code Club: Online - July 15

• JS Tech Talk: Web Fonts, Web Components, Svelte! - July 27

Also happening in Toronto that might be worth a look:

• The React Developer's Guide to OAuth2 - June 29 - TOMORROW! - Organized by the React + Native group.

• Refactor DX - July 12-13 - A conference in Toronto about Developer Tooling. Use the “TORONTOJS” coupon code to get 30% off your ticket!

Projects from the community

Peter Liu made a Runescape-inspired Minesweeper game. Did anyone else not know you could right-click to mark squares as bombs? When I first played this I just randomly pressed anywhere in hopes I would get it right.

Elizabeth McCready talks about creating desktop layouts from first principles in her article “Creating a Simple Desktop Layout in CSS with Just an H1 and One Paragraph”

Philippe Schwyter shared that he’s working on a slack bot for generating images like Giphy, but instead using DALL-E.

Marco Campos wrote about “Web Components: A (Not So) Gentle Introduction”.

What’s new in Javascript?

We’re getting a new keyword using, existing alongside var, let and const, which has the unique property that it lets library developers ‘do something’ when a symbol goes out of scope.

The news is that this will be part of the next Typescript 5.2 release, and sparked some interesting discussions on the Toronto JS Slack. Read all about it on: Total Typescript.

Last week, Svelte released version 4 of their frontend framework. The release seems mostly incremental with a focus on performance improvements and the Developer experience.

Jobs

If you have an open Job Posting relevant to the members of our community, please send an email to events@torontojs.com.

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