Subject
51 entries
Javascript
Bookmarks
OpenAuth
OpenAuth is a universal, standards-based auth provider from the SST team — framework-agnostic, runs on any JS runtime, and follows OAuth 2.0 spec rather than inventing custom auth patterns. An alternative to Auth.js, Clerk, and hosted auth services for teams who want standards compliance without vendor lock-in.
React Docs Beta
The beta rewrite of the React documentation — hooks-first, with interactive examples and a complete rethinking of how React concepts are taught. This eventually became the official react.dev site.
Volta — The Hassle-Free JavaScript Tool Manager
Volta is a hassle-free JavaScript tool manager written in Rust — pins Node, npm, and yarn versions per project automatically, with no manual .nvmrc management or shell shim fiddling. Faster than nvm with cross-platform consistency.
Agoric: JavaScript Smart Contracts with Object-Capability Security
Agoric is a smart contract platform built on JavaScript with a hardened security model — uses object-capability security to make contracts composable and safe by construction. An unusual approach in a space dominated by Solidity and Rust.
Grok {Shan, Shui}* — Understanding Generative Art Code
Viktor Zverok's deep-dive into understanding the Shan, Shui* generative art codebase — a JavaScript program that generates ink-wash style Chinese landscape paintings. An 'advent of understanding' tracing how algorithmic art is constructed from procedural noise and layered rendering.
Noise in Creative Coding
Varun Vachhar's deep dive into noise functions for creative coding — covering Perlin noise, simplex noise, domain warping, and fractal Brownian motion with beautiful visual examples. The go-to reference for understanding how noise generates organic, natural-looking patterns.
Flowy: The Simple Flowchart Engine
Flowy is a minimal JavaScript library for creating drag-and-drop flowchart UIs in the browser — designed to be embedded in web apps, not as a standalone tool. Lightweight alternative to React Flow or jsPlumb for simple workflow builder features.
Visualizing High-Dimensional Data in the Browser with SVD, t-SNE and Three.js
Datacratic's exploration of rendering high-dimensional data in the browser using SVD and t-SNE for dimensionality reduction and Three.js for 3D visualization. An early example of interactive ML visualization before dedicated tools like TensorBoard existed.
Message Systems in Programming: Callbacks, Events, Pub/Sub, Promises, and Streams
Jesse Warden's survey of async communication patterns in programming — callbacks, events, pub/sub, promises, and streams. A clear taxonomy of a domain where the terminology is often muddled, especially relevant to JavaScript's async evolution in 2014.
Interactive Data Visualization with D3.js — Zipfian Academy
Zipfian Academy's workshop on interactive data visualization with D3.js, taught by Rachel Binx — part of Zipfian's expansion beyond the main cohort into standalone workshops. D3.js was the dominant library for browser-based custom data visualization at the time.
Zipfian npm Package — Zipf Distribution Generator for Node.js
An npm package for generating Zipf-distributed random numbers in Node.js — useful for modeling rank-frequency phenomena like word counts, city sizes, and website traffic. A small utility from Will Scott born out of a paper deadline.
C3.js — D3-Based Reusable Chart Library
C3.js is a reusable chart library built on top of D3.js that provides a higher-level API for common chart types. It removes the need to write D3 directly while still exposing D3 objects for customization.
Fast Interactive Prototyping with D3.js — Part II
Snips' second post on fast interactive prototyping with D3.js — practical techniques for rapidly building interactive data visualizations without getting bogged down in D3's verbose API. Useful for data scientists who want to demo without full front-end engineering.
Voronoi Diagram of the World's Airports
Jason Davies' interactive Voronoi diagram of the world's airports — a D3.js visualization showing the nearest-airport region for every point on Earth. Technically elegant and a canonical example of geographic Voronoi tessellation.
ConvNetJS Demo: Classify Toy 2D Data
Andrej Karpathy's ConvNetJS demo for classifying 2D toy datasets — a real-time browser visualization of a neural network training on user-drawn boundaries. One of the first compelling interactive deep learning visualizations.
The PourOver Book — NYT's In-Browser Filtering Library
PourOver is an NYT-open-sourced JavaScript library for fast in-browser filtering and sorting of large collections. Built for news apps that need to let users slice thousands of items without server round-trips.
ConvNetJS: Deep Learning in Your Browser
Andrej Karpathy's JavaScript library for training neural networks entirely in the browser — no install, no GPU, instant demos. In 2014 it made deep learning tangible for anyone with a web browser.
D3.js Examples Gallery (christopheviau.com/d3list)
Christophe Viau's curated gallery of D3.js examples — a comprehensive browsable index of D3 visualizations in 2013 when the official documentation lacked a searchable example library. The go-to reference for learning D3 by seeing what was possible.
Directed Graph Editor in D3
A D3.js bl.ocks example implementing an interactive directed graph editor with drag-to-create nodes and edges, arrow rendering, and selectable/deletable elements. A canonical reference for anyone building graph editing UIs in D3 before dedicated libraries like Cytoscape.js were widely adopted.
Data Hacking and Coffee
A coffee tasting experiment turned into a data project: 80 samples, 4 bean varieties, 3 brewing methods, TF-IDF scoring of flavor descriptors, and a Meteor/MongoDB web app for collection. A clever example of applying text analysis methods to sensory rating data.
How D3 Selections Work
Mike Bostock's definitive explanation of D3's selection model — how data joins, enter/update/exit selections, and subselections actually work under the hood. Essential for anyone who wants to go beyond copying D3 examples to understanding why they work.
Vega — A Visualization Grammar
Vega is a declarative visualization grammar built on D3.js by Trifacta (Jeffrey Heer's group) — JSON specifications describe charts rather than imperative D3 code, making visualizations more composable and shareable. The foundation for what later became Vega-Lite and Altair.
Getting Started with Three.js
Paul Lewis's introductory Three.js tutorial on Aerotwist — setting up a renderer, camera, and scene to build browser-based 3D graphics. The canonical 2013 entry point for WebGL development via the Three.js abstraction layer.
Create a Web App from Scratch in Under 5 Minutes with Meteor & Mailgun
Mailgun's tutorial on building a web app in under 5 minutes using Meteor.js and Mailgun for transactional email — a 2013 demonstration of how reactive JavaScript frameworks were collapsing development time for simple web applications.
Markov Chains: The Sad Case of Mr. Markov and What's His Face
A practical JavaScript tutorial on Markov chains for text generation — building a next-word predictor from a corpus. A good introductory implementation of a probabilistic sequence model that predates the LLM era by a decade.
slitscanner.js by Sha Hwang
Sha Hwang's slitscanner bookmarklet applies slit-scan photography to YouTube and Vimeo videos in the browser — collapsing a spatial slice through time to produce streak-style images. A clever application of a classic experimental film technique to browser video.
Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools
Datavisualization.ch's curated selection of data visualization tools — a 2013 reference for the ecosystem of charting libraries, mapping tools, and visualization frameworks available before the current consolidation. A snapshot of what practitioners were using.
CanvasXpress: Scientific Data Visualization
CanvasXpress — a JavaScript library for scientific and genomics data visualization, specifically designed for bioinformatics use cases like expression heatmaps, scatter plots with gene annotations, and interactive exploration of multi-dimensional biological data.
Top 7 Backbone.js Alternatives
A 2012 roundup of Backbone.js alternatives — Ember, Knockout, CanJS, Spine, and others — capturing the moment when JavaScript MVC frameworks were proliferating rapidly. The JS framework wars of 2012-2014 look very different in retrospect: most of the contenders are gone.
Timeline JS — Beautifully Crafted Timelines
Timeline JS by Veríte — an open-source tool for building interactive timelines from a Google Spreadsheet. Widely adopted by journalists and educators in 2012-2014 for its zero-code approach to narrative data visualization.
NodeBots: The Rise of JS Robotics
Chris Williams argues that Node.js and JavaScript's event-driven model make it a surprisingly natural fit for physical computing and robotics. A 2012 manifesto for what became the Johnny-Five ecosystem.
TodoMVC
TodoMVC is a project that implements the same Todo application across every major JavaScript framework, letting developers compare syntax and architecture side by side. It became the de facto benchmark for evaluating JS frontend frameworks.
Kittydar: JavaScript Cat Face Detection
Kittydar is a JavaScript library for cat face detection in images — a real implementation of neural-network-based object detection in the browser, released in 2012 when running ML in JavaScript was novel and this kind of project showed what was becoming possible.
Top 20 Data Visualisation Tools (2012)
Net magazine's 2012 roundup of the top 20 data visualization tools — a snapshot of the ecosystem just as D3.js was establishing dominance. Covers both code-based libraries and drag-and-drop tools across the complexity spectrum.
Machine Learning: Genetic Algorithms in JavaScript
Burak Kanber's accessible tutorial implementing genetic algorithms in JavaScript from scratch — part of a machine learning series aimed at web developers. One of the early 'ML for JS devs' resources that predated the current wave of browser-based ML by several years.
Node and Express Tips
A collection of practical tips for building web applications with Node.js and Express in 2012, covering middleware patterns, error handling, and performance. Reflects the early period when Node's non-blocking I/O model was still novel to most web developers.
Brunch: HTML5 Application Assembler
Brunch was a fast, opinionated JavaScript build tool from 2012 — file watching, compilation, concatenation, and minification with a plugin-based pipeline. Preceded webpack but established the asset pipeline patterns that webpack later generalized.
Getting Started With Ember.js
Andy Matthews' getting started guide for Ember.js, written in early 2012 when Ember was still called SproutCore 2.0 and the framework was in flux. Ember was the ambitious option in the Backbone vs Ember vs Angular debate that defined frontend JS frameworks in 2012.
Spine.js vs Backbone.js
A 2012 comparison of Spine.js and Backbone.js — the two leading JavaScript MVC frameworks before Angular, Ember, and React. Both aimed to bring structure to increasingly complex client-side web apps.
Beginning Node.js and Express
An introductory Node.js and Express tutorial from 2012 — part of the wave of content that helped JavaScript developers cross from browser scripting to server-side web development. Node.js was two years old and just starting to find its production audience.
Modern Web Development, Part 1
Jamil Taber's 2012 post on modern web development practices — covering the emerging toolchain of Git, package managers, testing, and JavaScript frameworks that were redefining what 'professional' front-end development looked like.
Underscore.js
Underscore.js homepage bookmarked in 2012, when JavaScript lacked built-in functional programming utilities. Underscore provided map, filter, reduce, and dozens of other collection helpers that are now standard in ES6+ but were missing from pre-2015 JavaScript.
Socket.IO
Socket.IO homepage bookmarked in 2012, when real-time web apps required elaborate workarounds. Socket.IO abstracted WebSockets with cross-browser fallbacks (long-polling, Comet), making bidirectional communication practical before WebSockets were universally supported.
Node.js
Node.js homepage bookmarked in 2012, when server-side JavaScript was still a novel and contested idea. Node's event-loop architecture and npm ecosystem would go on to reshape backend development across the industry.
iScroll — Mobile Scrolling Library
iScroll homepage bookmarked in 2012 — a JavaScript library that fixed momentum scrolling for mobile web apps, particularly on iOS where fixed-position elements and overflow scrolling were badly broken. A workaround for a platform limitation that browsers eventually solved natively.
Express — Node Web Framework
Express.js homepage bookmarked in 2012, when it was the de facto web framework for Node.js. Express's minimal, middleware-composable design made it the starting point for almost every Node web project and set patterns that persist in modern frameworks.
CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript homepage bookmarked at its 2012 peak — a language that compiles to JavaScript, borrowing syntax from Ruby and Python. Preceded Babel and TypeScript in proving that transpilation was a viable path to better JS.
Introduction to Backbone.js: Models
Introduction to Backbone.js tutorial bookmarked in 2012, when Backbone was the leading client-side MVC framework. A historical reference point for how JavaScript frontend architecture was organized before React and virtual DOM changed everything.
Firebase: Real-Time Backend as a Service
Firebase (founded 2011, acquired by Google in 2014) was a real-time backend-as-a-service that synced data across clients via WebSockets — eliminating the need to write server-side code for data storage and live updates. It became the template for the 'serverless' and BaaS movement.
A Baseline for Front-End Developers
Rebecca Murphey's 2012 benchmark post defining what a serious front-end developer should know beyond jQuery — version control, testing, build tools, and real JavaScript fundamentals. The article that forced a conversation about professional standards in frontend development.
The Node Beginner Book
The Node Beginner Book is a free, comprehensive tutorial that teaches server-side JavaScript with Node.js by building a real web application — not a toy. Written for experienced developers from other languages who need to unlearn some assumptions about JavaScript before they can use it well.