Weekly Digest #9: Everything you need to know about Deno

TL;DR: Deno is a new ECMAScript based runtime (like NodeJS) created by Ryan Dahl (who also created NodeJS). It brings a lot of improvements to nodeJS: secure by default, TS default support and built-in utilities (dependency inspector, code formatting, bundler, etc).

Deno 1.0 was recently released and today I will give you all the resources you need to get yourself started.

Tip: list NPM scripts

NPM scripts are super popular these days and they are usually the main way of executing tasks in any JS repo. The challenge is that there is no standard and every project will have different options. In this quick-tip I will show you how to list scripts from the terminal.

Debugging IE11 with VirtualBox

IE11 is still alive and a lot of us have to maintain support for it in our web apps. There are 2 things I never like about issues in IE:

1. It is hard to setup an environment.
2. The dev tools are not as friendly!

I don’t have a solution for item #2 but today I will share how I use VirtualBox to always have a setup available! It removes the friction and helps with my predisposition to fix this edge (no pun intended) cases.

Weekly Digest #8: On building games

It has been always in the back of my head to develop some games. A while back I developed an android game called Drink or Dare with some friends, but that’s about it.

Today, I want to share a list of resources I have been bookmarking to help me develop games.

via giphy

Tip: Syntax Highlighting with BAT

Terminal command cat is a standard tool to print file contents to the console. I use it all the time but recently I found bat and it changed my life!

Testing VSCode Extensions with Cypress and code-server

Recently I started working on a Visual Studio extension: a dependency visualizer for js/ts projects (still in early alpha). While working on it I started digging on how to test extensions.

Visual Studio has a nice setup to do unit testing but I was looking to go further. I wanted to do some BDD and define test cases closer to my acceptance criteria.

So, I ended up playing with Cypress and setting up a way to test extensions E2E. There are 4 steps involved in this setup and I’ll explain in detail how to do it.

Weekly Digest #7: On Javascript books

Whether you are learning JS from scratch or have been working with it for a while now, I believe you will find great value on the following list of books.

I have read lots of them and some are still in my backlog but every-time I learned something new out of them.

Here is the list:

Create Quick & Stunning graphs

As software developers communication is a key skill. We not only communicate with code, but also we document, share and present ideas on a daily basis.

Personally I take pride in preparing documents, diagrams and presentations to share architectures, processes, designs and ideas. I sometimes tend to spend more time than needed 🙂

I want to share with you my favorite tool I use to help me create these assets.

Weekly Digest #6: Learning Git from novice to expert

Recently I have been helping to create content to onboard new developers. One of the topics I prepared was Git. I have been using git for more than 12 years, and while doing research I was surprised to learn new things. So I decided to share some useful links with everyone.

React Summit Remote Edition Highlights

When the year started I was looking to attend to React Summit in Amsterdam. So I was super happy to hear that they were doing a remote edition. Woke up at 5:30 am to attend and it was totally worth it! Specially the workout break!!!

Let me show you some of the highlights: