In this blog post, we explore how arbitrary ASCII text can be encoded as Unicode clock faces:

> clocksToPlain('🕔🕘🕖🕕🕖🕜🕖🕜🕖🕟🕒🕑')
'Hello!'

I’m explaining ideas by Maggie Pint and @FakeUnicode.

In this blog post I present Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) and how they can be used as an alternative to async generators. In the process, we will also take a look at the ECMAScript proposal that async generators are a part of: “asynchronous iteration”

The feature set of ECMAScript 2018 was finalized during the latest TC39 meeting (23-25 January 2018). This blog post describes it.

babel-preset-env is a new preset that lets you specify an environment and automatically enables the necessary plugins.

The ECMAScript proposal “Shared memory and atomics” by Lars T. Hansen has reached stage 4 this week and will be part of ECMAScript 2017. It introduces a new constructor SharedArrayBuffer and a namespace object Atomics with helper functions. This blog post explains the details.

A proposed “spec mode” for Babel makes transpiled ES modules more spec-compliant. That’s a crucial step in preparing for native ES modules. You’ll also learn how ES modules and CommonJS modules will interoperate on Node.js and how far along ES module support is on browsers and Node.js.

Occasionally, you want Web Workers to communicate with each other. Doing so is not obvious as most Web Worker examples are about communicating between the main thread and a Web Worker. There, one uses postMessage() to send messages directly to the Worker. Alas, that doesn’t work for communicating between two Workers, because you can’t pass references to Workers around.

The ECMAScript proposal “import()” by Domenic Denicola is at stage 4 and part of ECMAScript 2020. It enables dynamic loading of ECMAScript modules and is explained in this blog post.

I got my new MacBook Pro this week. These are my first impressions of the machine. I’ve moved from a MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook Pro 13".

My dream notebook would have been a 13" version of the 12" MacBook. It’s a shame that Apple didn’t introduce such a machine, but I understand the decision to keep things simple. Accordingly, I changed the planning for my setup:

• from iMac plus MacBook
• to MBP plus LG UltraFine 5K display (as a docking station).

One benefit of this switch is that I won’t have to wait until new iMacs come out in order to have a large high-resolution display at home.

The following function evalCode() traces the global variables that are accessed while evaluating a piece of JavaScript code.