---
title: Frontend & JS Digest — Week 16
date: Tue Apr 14 2026 17:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
---

My favorite from this week is the hanging promises technique—the idea of awaiting a promise that never resolves to cleanly interrupt async execution is one of those "you can do that?" moments. Elegant abuse of garbage collection.

## Links

### Article

[MDN Front-End Deep Dive](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/mdn-front-end-deep-dive/) - How MDN replaced React+Webpack with Web Components (Lit) + Rspack—dev server went from 2 minutes to 2 seconds; CSS is now scoped per component; JS loads lazily only when the custom element is present in DOM. Detailed walkthrough of a real-world migration away from SPA architecture.
[What to Know in JavaScript — 2026 Edition](https://frontendmasters.com/blog/what-to-know-in-javascript-2026-edition/) - Solid annual overview of the JS ecosystem—ES2025/ES2026 features (Temporal, Iterator Helpers, RegExp.escape, explicit resource management with `using`), framework updates, runtime landscape including Bun's acquisition by Anthropic, and TypeScript reaching
[How Does React Fiber Render Your UI](https://inside-react.vercel.app/blog/how-does-react-fiber-render-your-ui) - Clear technical breakdown of React Fiber's four-phase rendering cycle (trigger/schedule/render/commit) and how the linked list tree structure of fiber objects enables interruptible rendering—with lane-based priority and smart bailout strategies. Good reference for understanding why heavy updates don't freeze your UI.
[Hanging Promises for Control Flow](https://www.inngest.com/blog/hanging-promises-for-control-flow) - Clever technique from Inngest's workflow runtime—await a promise that never resolves to pause async execution without throwing exceptions; the garbage collector cleans up the suspended function when it goes out of scope. Surprisingly elegant solution for serverless long-running workflows.
[Stuff Everybody Knows](https://stuffeverybodyknows.com/) - Comprehensive 15-chapter web dev guide by Laurie Voss covering the unspoken fundamentals—developer psychology, security, UX, debugging, and more. Originally a bootcamp talk, but the content is timeless for any experience level.
[Intl Can Localize Units, Too](https://www.stefanjudis.com/today-i-learned/intl-can-localize-units-too/) - Quick reminder that Intl.NumberFormat handles unit formatting—km/h, kilobytes, etc.—adapting both notation and terminology per locale (French uses "kilooctets" for kilobytes). Stop writing custom unit formatting logic.
[Email Obfuscation — Testing Techniques Against Spam Harvesters](https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/) - Systematic test of 15+ email obfuscation techniques in 2026—HTML SVG and CSS display:none both block 100% of harvesters; even simple JS conversion is "frighteningly effective." Good reference if you're still putting raw email addresses in HTML.

### Library&tools

[OpenCode](https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode) - Open-source terminal AI coding agent with build and plan modes, first-class LSP support, and client/server architecture that allows remote operation—provider-agnostic, works with Claude, OpenAI, Google, or local models. 143K+ GitHub stars already. Desktop app in beta.
[JSIR](https://github.com/google/jsir?tab=readme-ov-file) - Google's MLIR-based intermediate representation for JavaScript—bridges high-level AST reconstruction and low-level dataflow analysis (taint tracking, constant propagation). Used internally for decompiling Hermes bytecode and deobfuscating JavaScript, now with LLM assistance.
[Boneyard](https://boneyard.vercel.app/overview) - Auto-generates skeleton loading screens by snapshotting your real UI DOM and extracting a flat list of positioned rectangles—no manual measurement, no layout shift. Supports React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and more.
[Marked.js](https://marked.js.org/#demo) - Low-level Markdown-to-HTML compiler built for speed; supports CommonMark 0.31 and GitHub Flavored Markdown, runs in Node.js and browsers. Worth knowing—no built-in sanitization, pair with DOMPurify for untrusted input.

### Other

[MonoSketch](https://monosketch.io/) - Browser-based ASCII art and diagramming tool—rectangles, lines, text boxes with ASCII styling. Good for architecture diagrams and inline code documentation. Open source (Apache 2.0).
[WireText](https://wiretext.app/) - Design tool where everything renders as Unicode box-drawing characters—create wireframes, diagrams, and mockups, then share them as plain text. The ASCII aesthetic is real.
[CSS or BS?](https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/css-or-bs/) - Game—is this a real CSS property or did we make it up? CSS has 600+ properties, so the line between real and fake blurs fast. Humbling if you think you know CSS well.