JavaScript Weekly Highlights: Friday Picks #27
A curated batch of fresh articles, tools, and experiments for modern JS developers.
Welcome back to another edition of our JavaScript Roundup! This week’s collection brings you a mix of new frameworks, performance insights, and creative experiments that push the limits of what’s possible in modern front-end and back-end development. Whether you’re deep into Next.js, experimenting with animations, or curious about the latest ecosystem updates, we’ve got something for you.
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Google’s Nano Banana AI Draws 10M New Gemini App Users
Google’s Nano Banana (formerly Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) quickly hit 10M new users in the Gemini App, generating over 200M images. Similarweb reports daily visits to Google AI Studio jumped from ~3M to 4.5M after launch.
On Lmarena, Nano Banana ranks #1 for image creation and editing — ahead of Flux-1-kontext-max by a record 171 points. Users highlight its speed and precise edits that only affect prompt-specified areas.
Nano Banana is free in Gemini App, Google AI Studio, and Vertex AI, with an API priced at $0.039 per image. Google also introduced an image generator on X (Twitter) — just tag NanoBanana in a post to use it.
📜 Articles & Tutorials
Build an AI Assistant with LangGraph and Next.js: Use Your APIs and Google Calendar as Tools
Using Grok 4 in the frontend development: Here’s what I’ve learned
Gemini CLI + VS Code: Native diffing and context-aware workflows
Why LLMs struggle with analytics
Letting Playwright MCP Explore your site and Write your Tests
Multiple GitHub Accounts — A Must-Have Skill for Developers
Connecting AutoGen Agents to Any MCP Server
How AI Agents Remember Things: The Role of Vector Stores in LLM Memory
Building AI Agents with Docker MCP Toolkit: A Developer’s Real-World Setup
The Fundamentals of CSS Alignment
Boost Your Copilot Collaboration with Reusable Prompt Files
Why I Ditched Docker for Podman (And You Should Too)
This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5
⚒️ Tools
An open-source project called SeedBox Lite has appeared on GitHub — a self-hosted alternative to Netflix. It builds a content library from torrents, giving free access to virtually any movie. Streaming starts instantly, with no need to wait for downloads. The player feels like a real streaming service: subtitles, fullscreen, gestures, and cross-platform support (smartphone, tablet, PC — anywhere with a browser). You can lock it with a password, and installation takes just a few minutes following a simple guide.
A new service, Kira.art, lets you edit images directly in chat without layers, brushes, or complex tools. You just upload a picture and describe the changes you want.
You can adjust eye color, add or remove backgrounds and objects, create artwork, or apply styles like anime. The platform also includes a built-in upscaler to boost image quality several times. No complex prompts required — everything works through natural language dialogue.
Better Auth Starter - Better auth starter with Drizzle, Neon, and Shadcn
Potion - 🔮 Potion is an AI-powered note-taking platform that transforms your thoughts into intelligent, searchable knowledge. Leveraging MindsDB’s advanced AI capabilities, Potion enables semantic search, AI-generated summaries, and intelligent chat assistance to make your notes truly smart.
OverType - The Markdown Editor That’s a Textarea
Memos - A modern, open-source, self-hosted knowledge management and note-taking platform designed for privacy-conscious users and organizations.
Readme Studio - is an advanced AI that generates clean, structured, and professional READMEs for you. Save time, ensure clarity, and elevate your documentation with intelligent automation.
CodeX - Build webapps in minutes for completely free
Dyad - Dyad is a local, open-source AI app builder. It’s fast, private, and fully under your control — like Lovable, v0, or Bolt, but running right on your machine.
FrameZero - Create motion in minutes. All in your browser, no sign-up.
SiYuan - A privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software, written in typescript and golang.
Webiny - Open-source serverless enterprise CMS. Includes a headless CMS, page builder, form builder, and file manager. Easy to customize and expand. Deploys to AWS.
DBeaver - Free universal database tool and SQL client
Slidev - Presentation Slides for Developers
kubewall - is a Open-Source, Single-Binary Kubernetes Dashboard with Multi-Cluster Management & AI Integration.
📚 Libs
Chatterbox Multilingual Introduced: Free Voice Cloning in 23 Languages
The Chatterbox Multilingual project can clone any voice from a short recording and bring text to life with emotions. It supports 23 languages, including Russian, and lets users add emphasis, pauses, word highlights, and control pitch and tone. A built-in voice library is also available for projects.
abogen - Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text with synchronized captions.
The System Prompts Leaks repository has been updated with guides for most modern AI models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Perplexity, xAI, and other top developers. It includes a database covering all models — how they were trained, what’s under the hood, benchmarks, capability limits, and the reasoning rules they follow. The repo also shares hacks to bypass restrictions, censorship, and bottlenecks, plus step-by-step instructions on creating custom AI models for specific tasks, helping save dozens of work hours on routine processes.
hrms - Open Source HR and Payroll Software
rule-engine - The ultimate JSON-based rule engine that turns complex business logic into declarative configurations. Built for developers who believe code should be expressive, not repetitive.
EmbedPDF Viewer - A PDF viewer that seamlessly integrates with any JavaScript project
The Serverless Framework - ⚡ Serverless Framework – Effortlessly build apps that auto-scale, incur zero costs when idle, and require minimal maintenance using AWS Lambda and other managed cloud services.
Novel - Notion-style WYSIWYG editor with AI-powered autocompletion.
Docling - Docling simplifies document processing, parsing diverse formats — including advanced PDF understanding — and providing seamless integrations with the gen AI ecosystem.
Rasterizer - A GPU accelerated 2D vector graphics engine
Le Chat. Custom MCP connectors. Memories.
⌚ Releases
A Google engineer released a free tutorial covering everything about AI agents — from basics to advanced prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and teaching agents to use a browser with practical code examples.
Microsoft releases lightweight Office taskbar apps for Windows 11
Apollo Client 4.0: A Leaner and Cleaner GraphQL Client with No Compromises
📺 Videos
Next.js + n8n Might Be The Ultimate Combo (+ Self-Host On VPS W/ Coolify!)
Build & Deploy an AI-Powered Ecommerce Search Engine with Next.js 15, Hugging Face & Pinecone
Fullstack AI Chatbot with AI SDK 5 & Vercel’s New AI Elements
MERN Stack Project: Video Calling Slack Clone with React & Node.js
NEW Next.js TypeScript Features
3 Amazing New TanStack Query Features!
How to Bake Lighting with Blender for Three.js
Intro to Fine-Tuning Large Language Models
Glowing Corner Hover Effects | CSS & Javascript
Best NextJS Folder Structures | Beginner - Intermediate - Advanced
Summarize Hacker News with Hono + Cloudflare
Better-Auth - Full Guide (OAuth, Emails, Roles, Hooks, Authorization, Prisma, Next.js 15, Resend)
UI Design 5 Years Ago vs Today (Shocking Transformation!)
🎤 Talks & Podcasts
Ex-OpenAI and Meta Exec: AI Pay Gap Widens
Former OpenAI and Facebook executive Peter Deng said the race for AI talent is driving a sharp pay gap between top researchers and other tech employees.
Speaking on the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Deng noted that leading AI experts are offered multimillion-dollar contracts from giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI, while many engineers who also contribute significantly earn far less.
Deng compared AI researchers to sports stars fought over by top teams, echoing Databricks VP Naveen Rao, who called them the “LeBrons of tech.” This imbalance, Deng warned, risks dissatisfaction and tension within companies.
🗞️ News & Updates
Developers are now branding themselves as “Vibe code cleanup specialists” — offering paid services to fix and polish the messy code produced by AI systems.
That’s a wrap for this week’s roundup! As always, the JS community continues to surprise us with innovation, clever hacks, and resources that make coding more enjoyable. Try out a tool that caught your eye, dive into a new guide, or bookmark a library for your next project. See you in next week’s edition with even more discoveries.