![]() This week we got hired as Vercel’s marketing agency (kind of), GitHub is taking over the world (still), and we have a JavaScript quiz because you don’t get enough opportunities at work to figure out what arbitrary code someone else wrote is doing. Welcome to #61.
Developers👏developers👏developers👏developers👏 Is GitHub Codespaces the future?Microsoft’s been on a mission to WTF is Codespaces? It’s a fully-featured dev environment in the cloud that basically combines all of Microsoft’s developer tools into one. It provisions your storage and compute resources from Azure, pulls your code from GitHub, and gives you the editing power of VS Code (including extensions) — right in your browser. But don’t cloud-based IDE’s mostly suck? Yes, that’s true (at least it used to be). We’ve seen three main categories of cloud IDE’s emerge over the years, and most of them are pretty limited at best:
But Codespaces changes everything. It lets you do everything that your local machine can do (access a terminal, run servers, execute tests, sync your local VS Code settings, etc.) — but from any computer in the world. That also means a single config change can upgrade your dev environment from a dinky 1 CPU 8GB RAM server to a beefy 32 core, 64GB RAM monster. Bottom Line: Codespaces is a paid product (free trial ends September 10), so it’s hard to predict how many developers will ultimately end up using it. But just like The One Ring, it’s hard to not be tempted by its power. Want to give it a shot? Head over to this repo and press
Just ship it. [sponsored] Retool can help you build internal tools 10x fasterIt finally happened. Your boss approached you and needs some “internal tools thrown together” because the suits upstairs want to make some “data-driven decisions.” No problem, you think, should only take a few days. But then you spend the next month hacking together a wide variety of your company’s data sources, only to realize at the last minute that you never considered auth, and (oh crap) the whole thing looks terrible. Should’ve used Retool. Retool started when a few developers realized that all internal tools are made up of the same basic pieces — tables, lists, charts, forms, maps, wizards (I’m a wot?), etc. So they made a rad product that abstracts away all the annoying parts of building those tools, while still giving you the flexibility to write custom JavaScript anywhere in the app. And thanks to their pretty generous free tier, I can finally tell my mom that I’m a 10x (internal tools) developer.
Vercel needs to buy this van from MTV and start touring the world ASAP Next.js supports ESM nowWhen Next.js released v11.1 last week, it (sadly) didn’t come with an MTV Cribs-style tour of Guillermo’s house this time around (guess we’ll have to wait for Next.js Conf to see his bathroom). But the v11.1 release did bring some other big news — headlined by the fact that the team is now working on “extensive ES Modules support” in Next.js. For now, you can experimentally import npm packages using ESM, but Along with that big win for ESM stans, Next.js 11.1 has some other cool new stuff:
Business Talk: Drake dropped a banger on us back in March with his single, “What’s Next”. So Vercel’s next order of business (after buying the MTV van) should be to pay Drizzy whatever he wants to write a new song in time for the Next.js 12 release — “What’s next, Next?” Did we just become Vercel’s marketing agency? Jobs2x Sr. Frontend Engineers - React | 100% RemoteClose.com is looking for two experienced individuals that have a solid understanding of React and want to help design, implement and launch major user-facing features. They are a 100% globally distributed team of ~45 high-performing, happy people that are dedicated to building a product our customers love. JS Quiz - Answer belowWhat will be logged to the console after the code is finished executing?
Cool Bits
JS Quiz - AnswerWe get For more info (and to see a cool GIF on how the JS interpreter evaluates the code above that I would include here but honestly I’m not sure how different email clients support GIFs), visit The Ultimate Guide to Hoisting, Scopes, and Closures in JavaScript |