JavaScript

The JavaScript midlife crisis

Thirty years in, Maroun Baydoun reflects on JavaScript’s midlife moment: an ecosystem eyeing younger, leaner languages, and what that restlessness means for the web’s default programming language.

Essay · Programming · JavaScript · Opinion

LLM Attention VisualizationA visualization of the attention mechanism in LLMs.

Isham Faizal built a browser-based tool that shows which past tokens a language model draws on when generating each new token. The implementation uses a custom generation loop with Transformers.js and a modified ONNX model to expose internal attention values, combined with pre-generated prompts to avoid multi-hundred-megabyte download waits.

Blog post · LLMs · Machine Learning · Visualization · Transformers

React Now Rusted All The Way Out

Master.dev describes switching a 1,036-file React Router codebase from the Babel-based React Compiler to the new Rust-native version available via oxc, achieving a 17.6x speedup in the compiler phase and a 2.4x overall build improvement. The post also covers how to migrate using both the official Vite plugin and an alternative for React Router framework mode.

Blog post · React · Rust · Vite · JavaScript

Music theory for programmers

Luke Haas derives music theory from first principles — starting from the physics of sound and working up through frequencies, harmonics, the twelve-tone scale, intervals, chords, and progressions — entirely through code examples. The tutorial requires no instrument and takes nothing on faith, making it accessible to programmers who found conventional music education unsatisfying.

Tutorial · Music Theory · Programming · Tutorial · Audio