Lately I had too much time and wanted to entertain myself by making a small game. Coincidentally, the js13k 2019 game jam was about to start. It’s themed around games made for popular web browsers that would fit in 13 kB (after compressing to .zip file). Since I am not a fan of JavaScript I decided to explore a topic I was interested in for a long time. WebAssembly. What’s the state of it, how does it work and what can we expect from it by coding in C++?

This is the 2nd part of knowledge about rivets.js - a small JS library that binds data in web. While the first one was an introduction, this one treats about the details.

→ Part 1: My small secret web weapon to bind things - rivets.js

Hey, I need something. Uumm. Yeah, I need… JavaScript template engine! No? Something more? A small library that would bind data to existing DOM, locally! Yes!

rivets.js - it’s not too popular but it works and it’s only 26 KB minified without gzipping (which would go to just 6 KB!). Let’s go through it’s features and see some snippets I’ve developed through few months.

I have stopped using Angular 2 in the beginning of this year - near before the Angular 4 release. I’m not trying to convince anyone about the future but I’d like to express my thoughts after gaining some experience. Not only about syntax and performance but about whole thing as a development tool.

Forget Grid Layout, forget the Flexbox, remember old browsers. I’ll show an example for frontend-based relayouting. No more stupid IFs in backend templates!

Some people are fascinated about spreadsheets. This lovely type of software was offered in Apple II computer back in 1979. Every cell could contain either data (text, numbers) or formula. What’s so special about it? Formulas are reactive. And that introduces the idea of reactivity.

Let’s have a look at few examples in some experimental technologies touching this idea.

Once upon a time one usually desires to add Bootstrap into one’s project. Adding support for Bootstrap might seem a little hard without understanding Webpack or even despite the understanding. I started working with Vue.js (by the way, it’s great!) using the official webpack template and indeed - I struggled for a few hours.

Thus, I describe foreseen steps for the weary travelers who want Bootstrap-ify their Vue.js project.

EDIT: Look down into comments for current solutions.

Probably the best starting point for Angular and Meteor combo is angular-meteor.com website. There’s a neat tutorial for both AngularJS versions - 1.x and 2.0. But it’s still JavaScript and we want TypeScript (because of reasons), right?

What really tormented me was a real usage of TypeScript with Meteor and some quirks about it, as for beginner. Spent some time around it, so I’m going to share the final result.

Trello. Tasks. I was tired of seeing this blue-ish default color every single day. I know, there’s palette to change a background but I needed something more fancy - since I work with it everyday, it could also look different everyday!

So I made a simple script using Tampermonkey extension under Chrome web browser. On Firefox you could go similiar way with Greasemonkey.

When I’ve seen Grunt (a build system) I have imagined that it would be awesome to have such setup making my code easy to maintain and optimized production version at the same time. When I tried to create my n-th Gruntfile.js, after some more play with Grunt, I realized that this system didn’t work as well as supposed to. That was the moment I gave a chance to gulp - “the streaming build system”. I’m gonna talk about why and why so much “yes”!

My latest Cordova application neeeded to read app files such as XML or CSV. During research due to embedding them as resource files I have found that there isn’t needed any platform-specified behaviour.

Ever wanted to write code in CoffeeScript? It surely is great but you wonder why is this not automated or smaller. Actually there are two options:

1. include CoffeeScript so it will compile to JavaScript when page is loaded
2. include pure JavaScript - generated from CoffeScript code.

First option is very easy but may vary on performance. Second is better in performance bad worse in usage. I’ll teach you how to automate that process so it will be both fast on page load and easy too.