As a web developer, I love Mastodon:

• Since Twitter became X, there are enough web dev people here.
• I’m happy with the web app – it even has several nice touches where it is better than Twitter.
• I’m not locked into an ecosystem that is controlled by a single company.

That being said, Mastodon still has several major weaknesses. In this blog post, I collect those and explain what’s being done to fix them. It is not meant to be exhaustive: If there is a weakness that affects you and isn’t mentioned here, then please let us know in the comments.

On 26 June 2024, the 127th Ecma General Assembly approved the ECMAScript 2024 language specification (press release, GitHub release), which means that it’s officially a standard now.

This blog post explains what’s new.

In this blog post, we examine ArrayBuffer features that were introduced in ECMAScript 2024:

• “In-place resizable ArrayBuffers”, proposed by Shu-yu Guo
• “ArrayBuffer.prototype.transfer and friends” proposed by Shu-yu Guo, Jordan Harband and Yagiz Nizipli

In this blog post, we take a look at the ECMAScript 2023 feature “Symbols as WeakMap keys” – which was proposed by Robin Ricard, Rick Button, Daniel Ehrenberg, Leo Balter, Caridy Patiño, Rick Waldron, and Ashley Claymore.

In this blog post, we take a look at the ECMAScript 2025 feature “Duplicate named capturing groups” which was proposed by Kevin Gibbons.

It’s a feature for regular expressions that enables us to use the same capturing group name more than once.

In this blog post we take a look at the ECMAScript 2024 feature “Promise.withResolvers” (proposed by Peter Klecha). It provides a new way of directly creating Promises, as an alternative to new Promise(...).

In this blog post, we examine the ECMAScript proposal “Set methods for JavaScript” by Michał Wadas, Sathya Gunasekara and Kevin Gibbons. It introduces new methods for Sets.

In this blog post, we look at the ECMAScript proposal “Iterator helpers” by Gus Caplan, Michael Ficarra, Adam Vandolder, Jason Orendorff, Kevin Gibbons, and Yulia Startsev. It introduces utility methods for working with iterable data: .map(), .filter(), .take(), etc.

The style of the proposed API clashes with the style of the current iteration API. We’ll explore how we can fix that.

When it comes to TypeScript code:

• There are many options for testing its behavior at runtime.
• There are far fewer options for testing its compile-type types.

In this blog post, we look at the latter.

This blog post is about the ECMAScript proposal “Array.fromAsync for JavaScript” by J. S. Choi. It introduces a static method for converting asynchronous iterables to Arrays.