JS Crossword: All the Answers are JavaScript — This hand-crafted puzzle will seriously stretch your JavaScript knowledge. I’ve seen so many people on social media either cheering having finished it or cursing being stuck…

Lyra Rebane

💡 I've put some (educational!) tips at the end of this issue.

Expo UI Hits Stable: Native iOS & Android from One Import — From a single import, @expo/ui ships SwiftUI on iOS and Jetpack Compose on Android with the real platform components underneath. SDK 56 also lands native drop-in replacements for seven common React Native community packages.

Expo

💡 In this broader writeup, GitHub also introduced npm's new --allow-* options to control over where npm is allowed to source packages from.

IN BRIEF:

• Firefox has added Web Serial support in Firefox 151 so you can connect to microcontrollers, 3D printers, and other serial-connected hardware from JS.

• Mozilla's Ryan Hunt says goodbye to asm.js as Firefox's JS engine now disables optimizations for it by default.

• 🤖 Modern Web Guidance is a suite of expert-vetted skills to guide agents in building modern web experiences, e.g. "begin preloading pages when users hover over important links."

• TC39 held its latest meeting last week – a roundup is due soon.

RELEASES:

• Storybook 10.4 – the frontend component workshop – has added first-class TanStack React support and the ability for agents to set up Storybook in complex apps.

• Node.js v26.2.0 (Current) and v24.16.0 (LTS)

• pnpm 11.3 – Adds pnpm stage for staged publishing, trustLockfile for setting controls around application of trust policies, native pkg, repo and set-script commands & more.

• npm 12.0 Prerelease, Apache ECharts 6.1 (Demos.)

🤖 AI-Assisted Engineers are Burning Out: Is This Fine? – A look at the negative effects of AI-assisted coding and how to avoid burning yourself out. Ivan Chepurin

📄 A Simple Clustering Algorithm for Lists – Some algorithm fun. Cassidy Williams

• 📊 Perspective 4.5 – Analytics and data viz component for large and streaming datasets.

• Partytown 0.14.0 – Relocate resource-intensive scripts into Web Workers.

• atproto TypeScript SDK Upgrades – Every package in the @atproto namespace has been rebuilt, and all are now shipped as ESM.

• Kysely 0.29.0 – Popular type-safe SQL query builder.

• Svader 1.0 – Create GPU-rendered Svelte components.

The JS Crossword (featured at the top of the issue) is tough, so I have some educational tips and JS quirks to help you on your way:

• The crossword runs in the browser, so the window global object is in play. For example: find(0) and name return things in the browser, but not in Node.

• Look at the 'playground' beneath the puzzle. While a clue may say object, the expected result may be more detailed.

• A number like 67 can be represented multiple ways. For example: 0103 == 67 and 0x43 == 67

• You can go further with prefixes and suffixes on numbers. For example: 123., +123, and +123. all equal 123

• Assignments evaluate to the value that was assigned.

• Tagged template literals offer a… quirky way to call functions. Consider that this works in JS: console.log`hi` (though this is not equivalent to console.log('hi')).

• ' is not in the allowed character list.