Pony Foo Weekly

Web/JS-focused newsletter. Usually has really great content. No spam either, I always sign up for this on new email accounts.

Google Web Fundamentals

There is a ton of stuff in here, pick something from the left sidebar that you don't know about and check it out. There's interesting stuff on PWAs, performance, security, etc..

Also if you go to the updates tab and select "BY YEAR". You will find the developers web blog which just has a ton of articles. A lot of it is about brand new Web APIs in coming to Chrome.

Philip Roberts: What the heck is the event loop anyway?

Overview of Javascript's Event Loop and Message Queue. Watch this until you have a good understanding of how Javascript programs are executed. This will give you a detailed understanding of how asynchronous code works in Javascript. Knowing this stuff will also help in diagnosing why computationaly heavy functions make pages slow down. (it's cause they're hogging the stack)

function a() {
  console.log("a");
}

function b() {
  setTimeout(() => console.log("b"), 0);
}

function c() {
  new Promise(resolve => resolve(console.log("c")));
}

a(); // what
b(); // the
c(); // fuck?

This is also really helpful to know cause people might ask you tricky questions like the above in interviews.

Introduction to the DOM

Learn how the DOM works on a basic level if ya don't. Even better would be to try to recreate DOM methods on your own. Since the DOM is represented by the Tree data structure this will get you some practice doing stuff like Depth/Breadth-First-Search and other Tree algos.

I think in general this is good to know but since we're React ppl this is all abstracted away. But you may get an interview question one day that's like "given a DOM node find it's children with this class name".

Testing Javascript

I didn't really understand testing until I finished this course. Made me realize a lot of the tests in our codebase are brittle and testing the wrong stuff. Buy this and expense it!!

Chrome DevTools

Debugging is honestly the most useful skill you can know as a developer, period.