Hi /r/javascript!

My name's Tim and you might remember me from my old post from ~10 months ago where I talked about my free open source course "Build products with javascript".
Since then I've done two more javascript courses on Electron apps and Data Science.

At some point it became apparent that large courses don't do that well - people seem to drop them mid-way :|, so I've switched to ~1h weekly livestreams and shorter (~15mins) recaps for the topics suggested by the viewers.

So far I've done:

• Recording video & audio in browser using Web Media API (livestream)

• How to contribute to open source projects (livestream)

• GraphQL with Apollo and Next.js (livestream)

• Building Node.js native addons using golang (livestream)

As usual, all materials are published absolutely free, without any ads and under permissive licenses (MIT for code, Creative Commons for videos).

There are two reasons why I'm writing here:

1. Maybe there are some people who'll find it interesting

2. I need your help to decide what to cover next!

Doing user-suggested livestreams turned out to be pretty fun. I have to learn a ton of new things myself for almost every livestream, and there's typically a lot of very interesting questions from viewers.
So I want to keep doing that.
And now I need your help to decide on what area to talk about next.
You can do that by heading over to this github repository and either adding a new issue for a new topic, or voting (just leave any reaction) on any of the existing issues.
Every Tuesday I pick the most "upvoted" issue (the one with most reactions) and livestream doing that on Wednesday.

Some links to the related resources:

• Twitch channel (programming streams happen weekly on Wed 19:00 CET)

• Project sources

• Recap videos playlist

• Livestream videos playlist

• Our cozy subreddit

• Our Discord chat (I'm always happy to answer questions and help you!)

• Facebook page with updates

• My twitter with updates (and other bonkers)

I just finished watching a talk from Netflix UI Engineering team on Youtube and I was wondering are there any other in-depth engineering case studies where they analyze the real product? Thanks.

Netflix JavaScript Talks - Making Bandersnatch source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLqc0EX8Bmg

There's so many wonderful tools in the ecosystem that make the developer's job much easier. Typescript, npm, pnpm, parcel, webpack, node, babel... but actually getting them to work together is so incredibly hard.

Typescript is very nice on its own, but having to resolve implicit type inclusion sucks so much. You don't want to include DOM types in your Node library? Well now you just disabled the import of \@types! Wanna use ES6 imports? Yeah suddenly it doesn't work because somewhere down the node_modules tree some package uses commonjs require
s.. All the solutions are some old answers on stackoverflow that don't apply anymore or don't work, and in the end, the problem is solved by removign node_modules and reinstalling.

Oh you wanna bundle libraries into your chrome web extension? Just copypaste this >200 lines long webpack config. Wait, you also want to use <insert a tool like sass, typescript>? Well then either learn the ins-and-outs of webpack or just use Parcel. But that doesn't support webextension manifest v3..

PNPM is also a really nice tool, useful when you don't want to redownload hundreds of megabytes of npm packages every time you run npm install
. The downside is that you always have to google for solutions for using it in your projects. Same applies for yarn.

And these problems go on and on and on. With each added tool and library the amount of workarounds increase and it gets more complicated.

Everything seems so simple on the surface but it's a giant mess and it breaks somewhere down the line. Nobody teaches how stuff actually works or how to set it up, they just post a template or copypaste boilerplate or a cli tool instead of making it easy to just install a library and use it (create-react-app, vue-cli comes to mind). It's just a giant mess and i don't know how to get out of it without losing my mind. Does anyone else experience this? How does one get out of this?

(btw i don't mean any disrespect to the tool developers)