Below, you can find the Pony Foo Weekly newsletter issue #43 — Terrible Code, the P2P Web, v8 stats & cost of abstraction
. It was sent to our subscribers on December 29, 2016.

Pony Foo Weekly Issue #43 — December 29, 2016

Happy new year from Pony Foo Weekly!

Santa’s Retro

Let’s use const! Here’s why.

Best Practices

When reading a piece of code, others can take cues from these signals in order to better understand what we did. ES6 offers let and const as new flavors of variable declaration, are they better signals than var?

Nicolás Bevacqua — Pony Foo

How Terrible Code Gets Written by Perfectly Sane People

Best Practices

Help your team avoid some bad habits that can drive good teams to write terrible code.

Christian M. Mackeprang — Pony Foo

JavaScript frameworks & libs fade and die, great tools and acquired skills don’t.

tooling

Wallaby.js provides instant feedback from your tests and realtime code coverage right in your editor, no more context switching. Now with test analytics and coverage reports.

Wallaby.js

The Cost of Abstraction

architecture

The cost of duplicating code, of accumulating technical debt, of not having tests is often discussed and written about. The cost of abstracting things is almost never mentioned, despite it being a major factor in keeping any project maintainable.

Martin Sústrik

ES6 for Everyone — The Best Way to Learn Modern JavaScript

_{Wes came out with a premium training course to strengthen your core JavaScript skills and master all that ES6 has to offer.}

ES6 is a major update to JavaScript that includes dozens of new features. With a focus on simplicity and readability, this course is an efficient way to find out what is new in JavaScript and most importantly when and how you should use it.

Join me for a fun and approachable look at all ES6 has to offer — boost your skills and further your career.

Wes Bos

Fourth Year in Review

News

Another year, another review of how Pony Foo did in its latest twelve months online!

Nicolás Bevacqua — Pony Foo

Fountain of Youth

Animating 2048 SVG nodes in React, Preact, Inferno, Vue, ng2, and Cycle

inspiration

Ever wondered which front-end framework is smoothest to animate 2048 SVG nodes? Here are some GIFs, and a look at the code differences.

Forks provided by awesome people of the internet.

Swizec Teller

Mark Zuckerberg & Jarvis — the AI assistant he built

inspiration

Facebook’s CEO still loves to code. Here’s an exclusive peek at his new project, which plays music, makes toast, and occasionally annoys his wife. There’s also an article that Mark wrote from his own perspective.

Daniel Terdiman

What is the P2P Web?

decentralized

The P2P Web is an experimental set of technologies, APIs, and philosophies, created by members of the Node.js and Web communities, to give users more control over the Web.

It is a new way to surf, publish, and connect.

Paul Frazee

Great projects for new open-source contributors

inspiration

Projects with a history and reputation for being welcoming to new open source contributors.

GitHub

Deep Ruminations

Anatomy of a Web Request

Deep Dive

Any good web developer will know what goes on under the hood when a user enters a web address into a URL bar and hits “go”. In fact, it’s now a common interview question. In this post, we’ll have a look at exactly what happens during the web request process.

Terry Harvey

V8 Stats in Chrome

Deep Dive

Step by step instructions on how to trace V8 statistics (call stack and heap) from within Google Chrome.

Michael Lippautz

Testing with Realistic Networking Conditions

performance

When testing performance for websites or apps it is critical to test them with networking conditions that are representative of your users. That was one of the main reasons why Patrick originally created WebPageTest.

Patrick Meenan

Learning from Lego: A Step Forward in Modular Web Design

Deep Dive

Samantha dives deep into modular CSS layout design: “Pesky nesting issues are a thing of the past if we envision web content blocks as the tops of Lego bricks.”

Samantha Zhang

Web of Learning

What to learn in 2017 if you’re a front-end developer

resources

“We tend to spend our time trying the latest inventions. We should probably slow down a bit.”

Artem Sapegin

Fairytale of new Promise

Article

Mat puts on some festive tunes before recounting the tale of asynchronous JavaScript. Promises offer a robust way of structuring your code to avoid event-driven disasters of visitor-vexing jankiness. Don’t be stuck in queues this Christmas. You might miss the main event.

Mat Marquis

Flexbox Patterns

Code

Examples on how to build awesome user interfaces with CSS flexbox.

CJ Cenizal — Elastic

React “Aha” Moments

frameworks

One of Tyler’s main goals whenever he’s teaching or writing technical content is to maximize “aha” moments. We’ve all experienced them and the best teachers are able to understand their audience and adapt the lesson in order to maximize these moments.

Tyler McGinnis