npm weekly #33: improved npm On-Site features, classic mobile questions, new awesome human

what’s new with npm On-Site?

This article has been deprecated. For up-to-date information on npm Enterprise, please refer to these resources:

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

how viable are JS frameworks on mobile?

Henrik Joreteg reflects on the bandwidth requirements of some common tools and frameworks and wonders,

Are all these heavier tools/frameworks even viable for mobile use? I’m not convinced they all are.

The post serves less to flog any specfic frameworks than to recommend,

I don’t want your experiences as a developer lead you to think the mobile web isn’t viable just because sending a megabyte of JS made the app slow. Maybe the mobile web is fast enough and we just need to stop pretending we can get away with ineffeciencies that we don’t feel on a desktop. I think we need to be much more minimalist from the start.

Namely, pre-rendering HTML and seeing how much you can accomplish with React + Redux.

It’s hardly the end of this topic, but we think it’s an interesting perspective. Give it a read.

what tools can help with building for devices?

We ♥ web development, but an increasing number of users are turning to apps, and app stores, before searching the web for you & your stuff. What web developent tools can be leveraged to build apps for devices? Jeff Burtoft contributed a post to the npm blog with pointers to some helpful tools, including some neat Cordova plugins.

Check it out and share your thoughts too.

who’s ag_dubs?

The first of two (!) new humans to join this week,

ag_dubs

joins npm to help manage documentation, tutorials, and communication as our developer community and content manager. She’s based out of NYC and comes to us from the backend ops and services team at the Mozilla Foundation.

When she’s not teaching the world how to use npm, she’ll talk your ear off about philosophy and neuroscience, and maybe — maybe — the Weekly will come out once a week again. [GitHub, twitter].

why didn’t someone think of this sooner?

Building web applications is hard! Is the network reliable? Will bandwidth be constrained? Fortunately, there’s all-other-things-being-equal.

All other things being equal, everything should work. Will all other things remain equal? The assertions in these helpers offer a perfect simulation of a production environment for a JavaScript application, in Node or in the browser! They are compatible with every testing library and they are guaranteed to be accurate in all cases.

Oh?

const assert = require('assert');
const allOtherThingsBeingEqual = require('all-other-things-being-equal');

assert.ok(allOtherThingsBeingEqual.networkIsReliable());

assert.ok(allOtherThingsBeingEqual.networkIsSecure());

assert.ok(allOtherThingsBeingEqual.latencyIsZero());

assert.ok(allOtherThingsBeingEqual.bandwidthIsInfinite());

assert.ok(allOtherThingsBeingEqual.codeCoverageEqualsTestCaseCoverage());

assert.ok(allOtherThingsBeingEqual());

Write your code to target environments where these assertions pass, et voila.

Not sure why it took this long for someone to think this up.

sponsored [?]

hungry for a new job?

Hired connects software developers, data scientists, designers, and sales talent with over 2,500 vetted tech companies in 13 major tech hubs, probably including yours. Developers on Hired receive an average of 5 interview requests within a week. Looking for a job? Check them out.