Node Congress

Node Congress 2022

I was seeing some code that was written a few years ago, that was considered the "super clean" and "intuitive", and I realised that the JavaScript that we write today is very different from the one that we used to write just five years ago. If you've been around for some time, you know the feeling of writing "this = that", and taking days debugging why that variable is set to null. The new node syntax, with esm, new bundlers, faster refreshes. The code was never so easy to write and understand. You can check the slides for Pedro's talk <a href="https://node-like-its-2022.vercel.app/">here</a>. <a href="https://www.froala.com/wysiwyg-editor?pb=1"> </a>

Write Node like it's 2022

Hi. Let's write Node like it's 2022. Well, first of all, who am I? My name is Pedro and I'm a software engineer at Blockchain.com. And well, I was looking at the code I wrote a few years ago, like 10 years ago, and I saw that my life was very, very challenging and fun. But now, nowadays, it's just fun. I wrote a bunch of this equals that and I used a lot of low dash underscores and everything else that you can think of. Let's make some stuff that work as expected today. Node evolved and I've been evolving with it and I'm very proud of it. So let me tell you how to write code Node like it's 2022.

Look at this example, for example. We had to use multiple methods to iterate over an object. So in this get total score, we had to use object keys and a for each to access the property inside of the object and then assign the value to the totals. But now we can do a for in and we can access the key of the object very easily and with only one method. So it's way easier to read. It's easy to reason about. I know what I'm reading as soon as I put my eyes on it. Way better.

Well, we had to concat strings to get phrases with variables. And we started with multi lines. These were like very, very hard to create. In this example, I just created one that puts together three strings in this case. I had to use like this strings to spaces because I hated to add space in the end of this one. And here I really needed because I can't add anything to this string correctly. But now I can use template literals and I can just make it work. I can do multi lines easily and everything I see is exactly what appears in a screen.
So much easier. We had to use the hack to stringify and parse objects to clone them. This wasn't the case for simple objects. You could do like other stuff. And in Lodash we had clone deep that made exactly like the same thing as this code does. That is basically get an object with complex and nested data. Add it in another variable. As JavaScript would use a pointer to this one. If I only get like B equals A, I would get the value assigned as just a pointer to A and not actually a value of A. So I had to transform it in a string and then parse it to actually clone the value of the object. Well, that's a very complicated explanation to just copy an object. But now we can use structured clone. That is exactly what it says. It's a structured clone with all the properties nested once. And it just works as expected. I mean, it's very nice. What about the default parameters? Oh, this one, everyone that writes JavaScript in 2022 knows that the default parameters are very, very nice. Back in the day you had to in the top of every function you would have the variable equals variable or something. Just like here. A equals A or 1. And in some cases, in cases of objects, you would have a bunch of them listed on the top of the function, making it very hard to read. But today it's not the case. Because today you can do it like A equals 1 and B equals 2 in the top. So on the function, you can literally pass the default parameters right there without any other fuss. And again, we started with Async await.

That now you don't need callbacks to handle HTTP requests and Async code. You can use Async await. I'm a Async await person, but you can use like then. That is very helpful to write like Async code. You have arrow functions that don't have the scope and they inherit the scope. So you don't have to write this equals that in a bunch of cases. You have const that doesn't let you reassign the variable. You have let that makes it easier to see the errors before you see them. Because with the var, it would hoist to the top and you would get a bunch of cannot read A often defined, for example. And the rest of the things that I don't remember right now, but are very, very important. So I'll do a favor to everyone and write like it's 2022. It's not that hard. Well, that's my GitHub and my Twitter. And that's all, folks. Hit me up with some questions. See ya. Thanks for watching.