Issue 58

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News

How and why we removed jQuery from GOV.UK

GOV.UK have been working on removing jQuery from the entirety of the gov.uk websites. This was recently completed and a full write-up has been done. It's an interesting read, with some nice results.

JavaScript

Speech Recognition with JavaScript

The speech recognition API was added to browser specs some time ago, and we've since got partial support from the main browsers. The article goes through how it works and includes some examples (be sure to open the examples in a new window so you can accept the permission dialog).

nivo - data visualisation components

Built using D3 and React, nivo is a collections of reusable charts, maps, graphs and visualisations that can be dropped into your project to add various interactive visualisations.

Flamethrower, a static sites router

A router for static sites built for speed and for its low footprint (2kb-ish). A new tool, but seems fairly interesting, from the guys at fireship.io.

Frontend

CSS border animations

A look at various ways to style borders using CSS, along with the various browser support for each method.

Laravel

How to find the slowest query in your application

This handy tutorial goes through a method of finding the slowest query in your app. It works by listening to all queries that don't originate from your vendor folder (although you can easily add those too), and logs them to a logging channel.

Laravel 9.26 Released

The Laravel team released 9.26 with a Vite asset helper, Closure support to dispatch conditionals, min and max digit validation rules, and more.

Tools

Visual Studio Code's New Editor Sticky Scroll Feature

I love this. It's a subtle change but a really useful one. VS Code now supports a stick scroll, which locks the name of the method and class that you're currently editing as you scroll down. It's an experimental feature that you need to enable (details on how in the article).

maps.earth - open source maps for everyone

The maps.earth project is a free and open-source alternative to the big players in the mapping industry. Maps.earth is the full version of Headway, which allows you to easily bundle your own mapping server. It's open source and easy to get set up using Docker.

VDP - Vidual data preparation. A visual data ETL

Visual Data Preparation (VDP) is an open-source tool to integrate Vision AI with the modern data stack. It's a slightly niche tool, as it's only going to be useful if you're using AI tools like PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc, but it's still an interesting project.

Tell the story of your Git project by creating video animations (.mp4) of your commit history directly from your Git repo.

Apparently this project has been built to help share various parts of your workflow and to help newer developers learn git. I can't really think of a viable use-case in my day-to-day life but it's still interesting. In a nutshell, the tool creates a YouTube video of your full commit history on a git repo.