Importing a frontend Javascript library without a build system

I like writing Javascript without a build system and for the millionth time yesterday I ran into a problem where I needed to figure out how to import a Javascript library in my code without using a build system, and it took FOREVER to figure out how to import it because the library’s setup instructions

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Talk to ChatGPT on a Phone Call

The integration of voice communication and AI represents a big step forward in human-machine interaction that can potentially transform traditional methods of communication. For instance, in the context of a phone call, you no longer need another human to be present on the other end of the line.

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When is the right time to share our excitement about new web features?

When we share content about emerging web platform features, we have to be careful that we aren’t frustrating people with things they can’t use yet. However there is a place for talking about new things, and people who enjoy hearing about them.

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Why Typed Linting Needs TypeScript Today

Linting with type information, also called “typed linting” or “type-aware linting”, is the act of writing lint rules that use type information to understand your code. Typed linting as provided by typescript-eslint is the most powerful JavaScript/TypeScript linting in common use today. Lint rules that use type information are significantly more capable than traditional, AST-only rules.

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How to Set Up Next.js 15 for Production in 2024

I've worked on Next.js applications that scaled to over 100k monthly active users and landing pages with millions of monthly visitors. In this article, I'll share all the lessons I've learned through countless iterations.

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The Journey of ClearBank From Start-Up To Scale-Up

Gray: Has anyone ever been to a powerboat race in their life before? I went to a powerboat race when I was a little kid, and I vividly remember this by being in awe of the speed and the agility of these boats. The way they could turn the corners. The way they could accelerate.

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Will we care about frameworks in the future?

I've been building lots of apps by using LLMs and Agents. I'm currently up to about 17 tools, utilities and demos over the duration of a couple of weeks. I build them for me and because tools like Replit have enabled me during my small spots of free time to build fully working sites and apps that solve the immediate problem that I have. I've felt incredibly productive.

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Self-contained Executable Programs with Deno Compile

Since Deno v1.6, the deno compile command has empowered developers to turn JavaScript and TypeScript programs into single, standalone binaries that run on all major platforms—no dependencies, no additional installs. This has big implications:

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Exploring DORA: 9 Steps on the Path to Compliance

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) is a significant regulatory framework introduced by the European Union to enhance the operational resilience of digital systems within the financial sector. The regulations are slated to go into effect January 17, 2025.

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React useCallback() - A complete guide

Performance optimization is crucial for creating a smoother user experience in modern web development. React, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, provides several Hooks to help developers manage state and side effects efficiently.

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Validating your react-intl applications

When working with react-intl we would like to ensure that our JSON translations are valid and up to date. What we want is to avoid our translation files containing outdated keys and translations and broken target translations.

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Next.js to htmx — A Real World Example

Over 6 years ago, I created an open source URL shortener with Next.js and after years of working on it, I found Next.js to be much more of a burden than a help. Over the years, Next.js has changed, and so did my code so it can be compatible with those changes. My Next.

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Build a Database App with Drizzle ORM and Deno

Drizzle ORM is a TypeScript ORM that provides a type-safe way to interact with your database. In this tutorial, we’ll set up Drizzle ORM with Deno and PostgreSQL to create, read, update, and delete dinosaur data: You can find all the code for this tutorial in this GitHub repo.

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Using Shadcn UI without a Tailwind Config File

The upcoming release of Tailwind CSS v4, we can return to styling that, at its core, emphasizes CSS-native solutions. This approach enables maintainable and performant styling systems that work seamlessly with Shadcn UI components.

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Partial Prerendering for Everyone with Cloudflare Workers

Next.js has a great feature called “Partial Prerendering” that allows you to prerender the external “shell” of your app, and defer rendering other parts until they are requested by the client. (Vercel refers to as “PPR”.

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StackBlitz achieves $4M ARR in 4 weeks for their AI web development platform with Claude

StackBlitz transformed web development by integrating Claude into Bolt (bolt.new), their browser-based development platform. This enabled anyone to create sophisticated web applications through natural language—no coding experience required.

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How Bun supports V8 APIs without using V8 (part 2)

We're hiring systems engineers in San Francisco to build the future of JavaScript! In the first part of this series, we compared the C++ APIs used to interact with JavaScriptCore and V8, which are the JavaScript engines used by Bun and Node.js respectively.

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How We Built the BFCM 2023 Globe

Every year for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), we put together a real-time visualization of purchases made through Shopify-powered merchants worldwide. This year we're cooking up something big, and in anticipation we wanted to show you how we built the globe last year.

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Automation Platform v2: Improving Conversational AI at Airbnb

Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) are a rapidly evolving sector at the forefront of technological innovation. AI’s capacity for logical reasoning and task completion is changing the way we interact with technology.

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Centering things: a solved problem?

In Chrome and Edge, the following code can be used on block layouts to center child elements. align-content works without the need for flexbox or grid — and it works in all browsers! justify-items on a parent element and justify-self on a child also work without flexbox or grid, but only in Chromium for now.

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Being a Responsible Developer in the Age of AI Hype

Key Takeaways AI is code, not magic: AR-LLMs only generate plausible text based on statistical patterns, not true reasoning or understanding. The current AI landscape is filled with exaggerated claims: it’s crucial to set realistic expectations to avoid contributing to AI hype.

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A Map of Sync

In the words of a recent tweet from Rocicorp’s Aaron Boodman, “[the local-first/sync space] is a big, beautiful, hot mess.” Between the local-first movement, a bounty of new database startups, academic research like CRDTs, and internal app frameworks powering products like Linear, it’s hard to know what’s going on and how everything relates to each other.

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Create a Full-Stack App With Go and React

As a language that emerged over 14 years ago, Go has many use cases. From web development, APIs, and CLIs to Wasm, cloud technologies, and even AI-powered tools, its applications are broad. The same goes for demo projects, which have countless variations and purposes!

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How to Create an AI-Powered Newsletter Aggregator with React and AI Agents

As a developer, you’re likely subscribed to a dozen newsletters, blogs, and RSS feeds, all competing for your attention. When you’re focused on building projects or learning new tech, finding time to sift through all that content can be a challenge.

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How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill

IPC is something that is rarely top-of-mind when it comes to optimising cloud costs. But it turns out that if you IPC 1TB of video per second on AWS it can result in enormous bills when done inefficiently.

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HTML Form Validation is heavily underused

HTML Forms have powerful validation mechanisms, but they are heavily underused. In fact, not many people even know much about them. Is this because of some flaw in their design? Let’s explore.

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A Friendly Introduction to Container Queries

For a very long time, the most-requested CSS feature has been container queries. That’s been our holy grail, the biggest missing piece in the CSS toolkit. Well, container queries have finally arrived. They’ve been supported in all major browsers for almost two years.

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Building My Resume in HTML using Eleventy

In this article, I'll walk through some of the decisions I made as well as some challenges I faced along the way. The immediate benefit of building my resume with web-native technologies is that I can host my resume online! Web-native documents permit flexible layouts, enabling my resume to look good across a wide variety of browser and font sizes.

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How headless components became the future for building UI libraries

In the past few years, a new trend has emerged in React development: headless components. These are unstyled building blocks for UI development, including elements like buttons, dropdowns, and date pickers.

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Why Code Security Matters - Even in Hardened Environments

Infrastructure hardening makes applications more resilient to attacks. These measures raise the bar for attackers, making exploitation more difficult. However, they should not be seen as a silver bullet, as determined attackers can still leverage vulnerabilities in the source code.

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The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineering Salaries in the Netherlands and Europe

This article was originally written in April 2021. In July 2024, I published an updated version with more data and new observations: The Trimodal Nature of Tech Compensation Revisited.

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I just tested Google vs ChatGPT search — and I’m shocked by the results

With OpenAI’s new real-time search feature, ChatGPT is positioning itself as a competitor to traditional search engines like Google. Known for its conversational responses, ChatGPT delivers real-time, contextual information without ads.

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The most effective ways to improve Core Web Vitals

Note: This document has been adapted from a 2023 blog post to reflect the latest best practices. It will be kept up to date as our guidance evolves, with major changes noted in the Change log section. Over the years, the web community has built up a wealth of web performance optimization knowledge.

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Doing support makes you a better engineer

Welcome to Product for Engineers, a newsletter created by PostHog for engineers and founders who want to build successful startups. Product engineers do support at PostHog. They log into Zendesk, respond to users, debug their issues, and ship fixes.

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Simplifying Islands Architecture – Preact

This guide is a simple walkthrough to understand how island architechture works and being able to setup your own using tools you already have around you. For a lot of devs who've worked with server rendering for a while, we kinda expected frontend tech to take a turn towards server rendering at some point in time since data fetching and processing is almost always faster on the server where you are closer to the data.

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How to successfully adopt serverless in large organizations

Volvo Group Connected Solutions’ cloud journey began approximately a decade ago. We did a replatforming when we migrated to AWS and designed and implemented our services to be cloud agnostic by deploying them in VMs. Over time, our customers came with more requirements.

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State of Cloud Security

Long-lived credentials—i.e., those that are static and do not expire—are well-known as a major cause of cloud security breaches, and they continue to be a widespread issue in cloud environments.

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Incremental adoption of micro-frontends with Cloudflare Workers

Recently, we wrote about a new fragment architecture for building Web applications that is fast, cost-effective, and scales to the largest projects, while enabling a fast iteration cycle.

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How to Build an Image Search Application With OpenAI CLIP & PostgreSQL in JavaScript

With over 3.2 billion images shared online daily, the demand for efficient image search capabilities has never been higher. The opportunity to create a powerful image search engine spans many fields, from e-commerce to social media, driven by this high-velocity data.

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Engineering Managers' Guide to Effective Annual Feedback

As we’re entering the last quarter of the year, the time has come when many tech companies start their yearly feedback cycles, providing formal feedback on the performance of their employees.

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How we shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size by 94%

This isn't click bait. We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. It's large not only in terms of GB, but also in terms of sheer volume of code and contributions.

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Stop Building the Wrong Tools: How Developer Surveys Transformed Our Focus

We spent two years building an internal developer portal—only to discover it wasn’t solving our developers’ biggest pain points. Here’s how a simple developer survey changed everything.

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Architectural Metapatterns

Too much information is no information or, as they say, what is not remembered never existed. There are literally thousands of patterns described for software and system architecture.

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Knowledge-as-a-service: The future of community business models

The internet is changing once again: it is becoming more fragmented as the separation between sources of knowledge and how users interact with that knowledge grows. Looking back a few decades, search-based navigation of knowledge was rocky for knowledge producers.

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Tales of Performance Engineering

At Mercado Libre, creating value for our users is a principle that defines our culture. For this reason, optimizing the performance of our systems is a key aspect, since it allows us to improve the experience of our users. These optimizations also allow us to reduce costs by increasing efficiency.

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A Scalable Solution for Hosting Multiple Micro-Frontend Applications with Git Submodules and AWS

In large-scale front-end projects, managing multiple micro-frontend applications efficiently is a common challenge. By leveraging NX Module Federation along with Git submodules, AWS S3, CloudFront, and Docker, we can create a scalable and maintainable architecture that allows independent teams to own, build, and deploy their micro-frontends while maintaining consistency across the system.

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In the future using top-level await might be a BC break in Node

Node 23 was released this week, and the hot ticket item probably is the fact that you can now require() files that use ESM (import/export). This is called a dynamic import and it’s extra annoying, because you can’t just put this at the top of your file.

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The story of web framework Hono, from the creator of Hono

Hono is a fast, lightweight web framework that runs anywhere JavaScript does, built with Web Standards. Of course, it runs on Cloudflare Workers. It was three years ago, in December 2021.

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Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components

Because this essay is over 11 000 words long(!) I’ve made a convenience EPUB file for offline reading. (EPUB only! No PDF this time.) You can download it over on the fulfilment service I use, Lemon Squeezy, with the option to pay what you want if you feel the urge to support my writing.

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Build A Static RSS Reader To Fight Your Inner FOMO

RSS is a classic technology that fetches content from websites and feeds it to anyone who subscribes to it with a URL. It’s based on XML, and we can use it to consume the feeds in our own apps. Karin Hendrikse demonstrates how to do exactly that with a static site you can use as your personal RSS reader.

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