The best articles, links and news related to Frontend Development, and more, delivered once a week. All reference in this issue are gathered from Medium, Hacker News, Reddit,Twitter, MyBridge, etc.

More Issues can be found in Frontend+ Weekly Repository.

npm v5.7.0 Release : This release brings a bunch of exciting new features and bug fixes. Package-lock git merge conflict resolution allows npm install to fix package-lock.json and npm-shrinkwrap.json files that have merge conflicts in them without your having to edit them. The new npm ci command installs from your lock-file ONLY. If your package.json and your lock-file are out of sync then it will report an error, it’s also much faster (2x-10x!) than npm install when you don’t start with a node_modules. It works by throwing away your node_modules and recreating it from scratch.

Parcel v1.6.0 Release : Parcel v1.6.0 is a huge release that comes just 3 weeks after v1.5.0, with over 15 new features and lots of bugfixes and improvements. The highlights include: Zero config ES6+ transpilation with Babel, Automatic JSX support for React and Preact, Node and Electron targets, Production bundle statistics, Node 6 support, W3C WebManifest support.

Webpack 4.0.0 Release : This week, Webpack 4 (Legato) is available; There are so many new things in webpack 4, and it is fast(up to 98% faster). Webpack 4 have deprecated and removed CommonsChunkPlugin, and have replaced it with a set of defaults and easily overridable API called optimize.splitChunks. It also introduce a new property for your config called mode, for either build size (production) optimization, or build time (development) optimization. More changelogs can be found in this .

Everything you need to know about CSS Variables: Most programming languages have support for variables. But sadly, CSS has lacked support for native variables from the very beginning. Well the web is moving fast. And I’m glad to report that CSS now finally supports variables. In this guide, I’ll show you how variables work natively in CSS, and how you can use them to make your life a lot easier. I’ll wrap things up by showing you how to build 3 projects that show off CSS variables and their ease of use: Creating Component Variations using CSS Variables, Theme Styles with CSS Variables, Building the CSS Variable Booth. More links about this can be found in Awesome Web Reference.

An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2018: This guide is intended to catch you up with the most important reasoning, terms, tools, and approaches to JavaScript testing in 2018. It combines information from many great articles, that are linked at the bottom, and adds from our own experience in Welldone Software Solutions where we implemented different testing solutions for different products for years. He uses Jest for unit and integration tests and TestCafe for UI tests. More links about this can be found in Awesome JavaScript Reference.