Article Roundup - Week of 8/20/17

APIs as infrastructure: future-proofing Stripe with versioning
Stripe’s main product is payment processing, something you can’t afford to break for your clients. They recently wrote an article about how they version their API and why. It is well worth a read. I haven’t used their API before, but it sounds like a dream come true to work with.

How JavaScript works: an overview of the engine, the runtime, and the call stack
This is part one of a two part series, here is the second part. If you do a lot of work with JavaScript I highly recommend reading this, it will help you better understand how it works which can help you create more performant applications. The series doesn’t cover the event loop in as much detail as I wish it did, so here is a link to MDN’s page on the event loop.

async/await Will Make Your Code Simpler
ES2017 added the new async/await feature that builds on top of Promises and makes working with Promises far less confusing. This article is a nice summary, for a little more depth check out Google’s article.

Towards a JavaScript Binary AST
A joint team from Mozilla and Facebook is working to define a binary AST for JavaScript with the aim of significantly improving performance. They are not far along yet, but want people to be aware of their efforts and wish to keep developers in the loop.

Using the Paint Timing API
Chrome 60 added a new feature to the Performance API that allows you to get information about how long it takes to paint your content. This article is a short tutorial covering how to use the API.

Introduction to Preact — a smaller, faster React alternative
With all the hubbub around React’s licensing Preact has gained a lot more exposure. Preact is largely similar to React, but a lot smaller and with some small changes here and there. They even have an extra library you can add that attempts to maintain full compatibility with React. This article is a nice introduction to the differences between React and Preact.