JS startup performance / WebAssembly performance / React Native at Instagram

This week's JavaScript news — Read this e-mail on the Web JavaScript Weekly Issue 321 — February 9, 2017 JavaScript Start-Up Performance A look at what’s involved in the process of getting your code running in the first place. What slows it down, how can you measure it, and what can you do to lower parse times? Addy Osmani Mnemonist: A Curated Collection of Data Structures From queues and heaps, to bloom filters and vantage point trees. Guillaume Plique How MooTools Was Built 10 Years Ago A trip down memory lane for anyone who was working with JavaScript in the late 00s as MooTools was a popular JS utility library at the time. Between the Wires Rethinking the Periodic Table with a JavaScript Sunburst Control Ideal for visualizing hierarchical data, sunburst charts display categorical data “tiers.” Walk through four steps, from preparing the data model to building the chart view, to display the periodic table of elements as a sunburst chart on the web using Wijmo. Wijmo   Sponsor How Instagram is Using React Native React Native has come a long way since it was open-sourced in 2015. Instagram reflects on the successes some of its teams have had with it. Instagram Engineering An Introduction to GraphicsJS, an SVG-based Graphics Library GraphicsJS makes it easy to create vector based graphics easily across browsers as far back as Chrome 1 and IE 6. Roman Lubushkin A First Look At WebAssembly Performance Work on WebAssembly continues to march ahead, but are the promised performance gains coming to light? In Firefox, most definitely. Stefan Krause DejaVue: Vue.js App Visualization and Debugging Chrome Extension A Chrome extension that helps you see how your Vue.js app is running. Setting Up Your First Angular Project Using Angular Material2 The first in a 4 part series (part 2 is also out) walking through the process of building an Angular(2) app with Angular-CLI and Material Design. Tracy Lee Tectonic: A Declarative REST Data Loader for React and Redux Queries data via your existing REST APIs, stores state and data within Redux reducers automatically, manages caching, and more. Tony Holdstock-Brown Jobs JavaScript Developer at X-Team (Remote)We're looking for a developer with an extensive knowledge of JavaScript and skills in different frameworks and libraries. We are 100% remote and we provide the funding needed to help you achieve your goals and grow. X-Team JavaScript Application Developer (m/f) - Berlin/UmgebungCivey is seeking an experienced developer with strong JavaScript skills and is familiar with HTTP, REST and Web Applications. Civey Can't find the right job? Want companies to apply to you? Try Hired.com. In Brief It's Time to Vote On An Official WebAssembly Logo news Voting is open for the next two weeks. The logo with the most ‘thumbs up’ will then be deemed the official WebAssembly logo. WebAssembly ForwardJS: Live Angular 2 & React workshops in San Francisco, Feb 25-Mar 5 news Last chance for Advance tickets to 9 days of JavaScript lectures and workshops by industry experts. ForwardJS & Forward Swift  Sponsor A Toast to ES2015 Destructuring tutorial “a real life use case for destructuring” Phil Nash Filtering and Chaining in Functional JavaScript tutorial Sitepoint Intro to Vue.js: Rendering, Directives, and Events tutorial The first in an introductory series. Sarah Drasner Setting up an Angular 2 Development Environment tutorial Prosper Otemuyiwa Why Webpack 2's Tree Shaking Is Not As Effective As You Think opinion 10 Reasons Why I Moved From Angular to React opinion Robin Wieruch WebPack Is Not The Only Way (a.k.a. Introducing FuseBox) tools FuseBox is a “new generation bundler and module loader”. Feras Khoursheed Lepton: A Desktop GitHub Gist Client Built on Electron tools node Cosmo Front-end ♥ npm; npm ♥ you tools Unblock collaboration, quit reinventing the wheel, and build amazing things. Unleash the awesomeness, bring npm to work. npm, Inc.  Sponsor Between: ES6 Proxy-Based Animation Library Inspired by Cocoa code Gibon: Functional UI Router in ~600 Bytes, Built on HTML5 History API code Simple Statistics: Statistical Methods in Readable JavaScript code Averages to variance to probabilities to Bayesian classification. Tom MacWright Preact-Starter: Webpack2 Boilerplate for Building SPA Apps with Preact code Luke Edwards dot.dom: Tiny (510 Byte) Template Engine That Uses Virtual DOM code Ioannis Charalampidis GWIS (Graphing Water Information System) Released by US Government code A library developed for creating time-series plots of data measured at water flow sites. United States Geological Survey Curated by Peter Cooper and published by Cooperpress. Like this? You may also enjoy: FrontEnd Focus : Node Weekly : React Status Stop getting JavaScript Weekly : Change email address : Read this issue on the Web © Cooperpress Ltd. Office 30, Lincoln Way, Louth, LN11 0LS, UK

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Denis Smirnov

The coolest load transition along with a perfect background video choice in this personal page for Cryptocurrency enthusiast, Denis Smirnov.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Dependent / Cascading Select List with Select2

Select2 Cascade is a jQuery plugin to create cascading /dependent select list by using Select2 - one of the most popular select list plugin.

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Scrum Artifacts: Sprint Backlog

The following is an extract from our book, Scrum: Novice to Ninja, written by M. David Green. Copies are sold in stores worldwide, or you can buy it in ebook form here. The sprint backlog is the set of developer stories that the team has committed to working on during the current sprint. A sprint […]

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by M. David Green via SitePoint

How to Customize the SitePoint WordPress Base Theme

SitePoint recently released a new WordPress base theme. It's very easy to customize and you can quickly and easily build advanced WordPress themes to suit your needs.

The SitePoint Base Theme gives you full permission to edit and modify the base theme. After downloading this theme, I customized it to build a theme for my WordPress blog.

There are two different ways to customize this theme:

• Create a child theme.
• Use SitePoint Base Theme to kick off your own awesome theme.

In this tutorial, I am going to explain, how to create a child theme and modify the SitePoint Base theme.

[author_more]

Getting Started

I prefer to use a local WordPress installation to create and test new WordPress themes. A local development environment can make your development workflow much faster and simpler.

I'm using WAMP Server for Windows. You can use any tool of your choice to set up local WordPress development environment. MAMP for MAC, WAMP for Windows, XAMPP and Bitnami are cross platform tools to install WordPress locally.

• Install WordPress locally with WAMP Server
• Download Sitepoint Base Theme
• Download a code editor. I prefer SublimeText.

After setting up a local WordPress installation, run your local WordPress site, install and activate SitePoint base theme.

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by Tahir Taous via SitePoint

Learning from Long-Time Community Leader DSKY

[special]This post was previously published on the 99designs blog. Want the best designs to revamp your business? Consider launching a design contest on 99designs![/special]

Pillar of our Platinum Community, designer Konstantin Yastrebov – known here as DSKY – has been dominating contests for almost five years now. He was one of the first batch to be designated the Platinum label (way back when we came up with it!) and has continued to expand his amazing portfolio of designs ever since.

A winner of Top 9 at 99, and a winner or runner up in a whole bundle of community contests (such as the Pelican’s Logo, 99designs Habla Espanol and Brazilian World Cup), he’s also been unfailingly supportive of the larger community at 99designs — like the time he told us all about his Winning Design Process on the blog.

Learn a little bit more about his design background and how he’s gotten so far in our interview.

Name: Konstantin Yastrebov
99designs handle: DSKY
Location: Kherson city,Ukraine

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by Kaitlyn Ellison via SitePoint

Awesome Front-end Resources and CSS Animation Course

Here are our latest front-end treats:

• 20+ free front-end learning resources from Louis Lazaris
• A brand new course on CSS animation by Donovan Huchinson

Front-end Learning Resources

As front-end developers, it's our job to stay abreast of the techniques and tools that make our final products easy to use, accessible and, why not, beautiful.

Louis Lazaris shares with us the 11th installment of his list of free 20+ docs and guides for front-end developers.

The list is impressive and includes resources on functional programming, ES6, Progressive Web Apps, accessibility, and more. Feel free to pick your favorites. As for me, the CSS Reference and the the Typography Handbook are the ones I immediately checked out.

CSS Reference

The CSS Reference is a visual guide where CSS properties are organized into:

• Animations
• Backgrounds
• Box model
• Flexbox
• Positioning
• Transitions
• Typography

You can also access a list of all CSS properties in alphabetical order.

The guide explains each property and possible values in clear and simple terms and offers great visuals to illustrate the results.

The Typography Handbook

Any tool that teaches principles, best practices and code for great web typography in a practical and accessible way has my vote. It seems to me that The Typography Handbook does just this.

This is an open source project on GitHub covering:

• Typographic Design
• Fonts
• Web Style Guide

The last part in particular shows a fair amount of code samples focusing on topics such as relative units, vertical space, font size, color, etc.

If you find most resources on web typography a bit intimidating and jargon-laden, The Typography Handbook will surprise you (totally in a good way).

Web Animation

We've evolved to be really good at noticing movement. ... Observing movement and visual cues enable us to understand complex actions and ideas in a nonverbal way.

Animation on the web can be leveraged to the same effect and can add extra depth and meaning to the conversation between our users and the User Interface.

Bringing Websites to Life with CSS Animations — Donovan Hutchinson & Guy Routledge

Animation has become a key ingredient in web design and development. User interface designers teach us how subtle animation effects help users perform tasks on a website, prevent boredom when visitors wait for a resource to load, guide readers' attention as they scan web content.

At this time, the most common ways of animating web content are:

• CSS transitions and @keyframes animation
• JavaScript

To learn more about web animation, SitePoint Premium offers a brand new course — Animating with CSS — by animator rockstar Donovan Hutchinson.

The course covers the principles of effective user interface animation and their implementation using CSS transitions and @keyframes, easings and timing functions, multiple animations, animations on scroll, browser support and accessibility.

If you prefer articles, below are just a few of my favorite ones from SitePoint:

• Animation Advice from a CSS Master. This is the transcript of SitePoint's live Q&A with Tiffany Brown, presented by Angela Molina
• 4 Tips for Using Animation in Design by Gabrielle Gosha
• Understanding the CSS animation-fill-mode Property by Louis Lazaris
• Animations: Using Easings to Craft Smarter Interactions by Daniel Schwarz
• Bringing Pages to Life with the Web Animations API by Dudley Storey.

Using CSS for web animation remains my preferred way of doing things, but there are instances when you need a robust JavaScript library to get the job done.

For complex web animations requiring a JS solution, check out my series Beyond CSS: Dynamic DOM Animation Libraries. The first installment is an introduction on how to work with Anime.js and the second installment is about animating the DOM with KUTE.js, a modular and open source animation engine with lots of capabilities.

Stay tuned, more is to come.

If you have a JavaScript animation library you'd like to see in this series, get in touch!

Continue reading %Awesome Front-end Resources and CSS Animation Course%

by Maria Antonietta Perna via SitePoint