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About Nicholas C. Zakas
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Blog postNot too long ago I moved this site from a custom setup on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Netlify[1]. My AWS setup was a bit cumbersome, consisting of a Jenkins machine that pulled from a private GitHub repository, built the site using Jekyll[2], and published the result to S3. The benefit of this setup over using GitHub pages was that I could schedule posts to be published later. Jenkins was run every morning and new posts were automatically published without manual intervention. (Jenkins was a
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Blog postIf you're like me, you probably use a lot of open source tools every day without thinking about how they got started. Few projects share the "why" of their creation: the actual problem they were trying to solve and when they first came across that problem. You can, of course, benefit from open source projects without understanding their origin story, but I always find it interesting to hear about how it all started.
I recently realized that I'd never shared the origin story -
Blog postCompared to ECMAScript 6 (also known as ECMAScript 2015), ECMAScript 2016 was a minor update to the language specification for JavaScript. This was due to the decision that ECMAScript editions would now move to a yearly release cycle, effectively just a snapshot of all the features that were ready. As such, most resources list only two significant changes in ECMAScript 2016:
The addition of the exponentiation (**) operator The addition of the Array.prototype.includes() method These fe -
Blog postOne of the most long-awaited features of ECMAScript 6 is the formal definition of modules as part of the language. For years, JavaScript developers have struggled with organizing their code and needing to decide between alternate ad-hoc module formats like RequireJS, AMD, and CommonJS. Formally defining modules as part of JavaScript will eliminate a lot of heartache in the future, but right now, there is still a lot of confusion about how modules work. The confusion exists partly because, as
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Blog postI'm a big fan of npm scripts[1] and have been using them in all of my projects instead of a standalone build system. The feature I like the most from npm scripts is the ability to run command line executables that are installed in your project's node_modules/.bin directory. That allows you to, for example, install ESLint[2] locally in your project:
$ npm i eslint --save-dev Then create a "lint" script in your package.json file that looks like this:
{ "name": & -
Blog postIt's hard for me to believe, but I first conceived and created ESLint[1] in June 2013 and first announced it's availability in July 2013[2]. As frequent readers might recall, the primary goal of ESLint was to create a linter with rules that could be loaded at runtime. I had seen some problems in our JavaScript at work and really wanted some automation to validate those mistakes weren't repeated.
In the two and a half years since ESLint was introduced, its popularity exploded. This pas -
Blog postI've been doing web development since 2000, and in that time I've seen eras marked by libraries and frameworks come and go. The Ajax era began around the same time as the jQuery era began, the Backbone era began several years later, and the React era really began about two years ago. Each of these eras brought with it a new realization about the way we can build dynamic web interfaces based on the tools available. jQuery made it clear that browser abstractions and CSS querying were important
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Blog postWhen you think of open source software, you might think of a few specific projects depending on your area of interest. If you work on web applications, the term "open source" might conjure up visions of Apache or Node.js; if you're into big data, then perhaps Hadoop comes to mind; if you care a lot about security, you might think of OpenSSL; if you're a front-end developer, then maybe jQuery and React pop into your head. In all cases, you're thinking about those projects that have s
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Blog postI've recently been working on a project to port Espree[1], the parser that powers ESLint[2], to use Acorn[3]. In so doing, I ran into an interesting performance problem related Object.defineProperty(). It seems that any call to Object.defineProperty() has a nontrivial negative affect on performance in V8 (both Node.js and Chrome). An investigation led to some interesting results.
The problem I noticed the problem the first time I ran ESLint's performance test, which showed a 500ms slo -
Blog postWith all of the new syntax in ECMAScript 6, you're bound to periodically find something that is confusing (likely as you're hunting down an error). Recently, I've seen an uptick in the reporting of a specific type of error as it relates to destructuring assignment[1] using object patterns.
Destructuring basics Before you can understand the problem, it's helpful to look at a few examples of destructuring. Here's a simple one:
var node = { type: "Identifier", value: "
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The Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript
Feb 14, 2014
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Professional JavaScript for Web Developers
Dec 20, 2011
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Maintainable JavaScript: Writing Readable Code
May 10, 2012
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