As the year draws to a close it’s the perfect time to reflect and look back over the past 12 months to see what projects got people talking and what JavaScript topics got folks clicking.

To do this we’ve taken a dive into the JavaScript Weekly archives — If you’re not familiar, it’s a weekly email newsletter that goes out to over 130,000 developers and programmers. Each week it pulls together the best JavaScript news, articles and tutorials from the past seven days.

Here, we’ve pulled together a dozen or so items from this year for you to check out, or revisit. So, here’s a reminder of what proved popular in the world of JavaScript in 2017.

Ten Things A Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn

Ben McCormick| Shared in July’s Issue 345

One developer’s take on a question asked on Reddit earlier this year — the question attracted plenty of debate over what priorities JS developers should have.

A Modern JavaScript Cheatsheet

Beaudru Manuel | Shared in September’s Issue 353

This thorough guide explains plenty of JS terminology, along with helpful code examples.

Web Frameworks: Conclusions

Kitson Kelly | Shared in November’s Issue 362

The conclusion of an 11-part series comparing Aurelia, Ember, Dojo, Vue, React and Angular. This finale, looking at the pros and cons of each, proved highly popular.

A Set of Best Practices for JavaScript Projects

hive | Shared in July’s Issue 342

British design studio Hive collected together guidelines for working on JavaScript projects. With over 10k stars on GitHub, the guide covers documentation, dependencies, testing, code structure and more.

Await and Async Explained with Diagrams and Examples

Nikolay Grozev | Shared in October’s Issue 355

This detailed tutorial explains the await/async features in ES2016.

Familiarity Bias is Holding You Back: It’s Time to Embrace Arrow Functions

Eric Elliott | Shared in April’s Issue 331

An explainer on how ES6’s arrow functions are useful and why you should become very comfortable with them.

How JavaScript Works: Memory Management + How to Handle Four Common Memory Leaks

Alexander Zlatkov | Shared in September’s Issue 352

A good primer for anyone not familiar with the depths of memory management.

Async/Await Will Make Your Code Simpler

Patrick Triest | Shared in August’s Issue 348

How Patrick Triest learned to stop writing Callback Functions and love JavaScript ES8.

JavaScript Factory Functions with ES6+

Eric Elliott | Shared in July’s Issue 344

Smoke Art Cubes to Smoke — MattysFlicks — (CC BY 2.0)

Part of Eric Elliott’s series on learning functional programming and compositional software techniques in JavaScript ES6+ from the ground up.

“In JavaScript, any function can return an object. When it does so without the new keyword, it’s a factory function.”

What the f*ck JavaScript?

Denys Dovhan | Shared in August’s Issue 346

Around 40 examples of ‘quirky’ JavaScript code with unexpected results or outcomes. Mostly interesting to learn about odd edge cases.

Enjoyed this roundup? Be sure to give it a 👏 clap or three — oh, and if you have any standout JavaScript reads from this year that you want to share, please jump in the comments and do so!

Thanks for reading! 😊