A Tasty Treats NEWSLETTER for Web Developers

Issue #53:

HTML tips so good you’ll wonder why no one told you sooner
jQuery refuses to die — and it might outlive us all
Color-shifting CSS tricks to make your UI look like it’s in a Marvel movie
Hot take: What’s harder - front-end or back-end?
Did you see we dropped the first batch of limited-edition web dev pin packs???

🚨🗞️ BREAKING NEWS

The maintainer of 18 widely used npm packages (over 2 BILLION downloads per week in total) including debug, chalk and color - got hacked and his credentials were used to publish malicious versions of these packages.

You might not use these dependencies directly BUT your dependencies might use these, so you should check if you have any of the listed versions installed (see below for scripts).

For a detailed timeline of what happened and an analysis of the malware see this post by Aikido.

TLDR: maintainer got phished, attackers published crypto stealing malware with his credentials, npm removed the packages after 1 hour, compromised packages still got downloaded millions of times within that hour, the included malware was just crypto stealing that only worked in the browser 🤦‍♂️ (no machine persistence, RCE or other credentials stolen).

To check if you've been impacted:

Check your local node_modules to see if it contains the malware: grep -R 'checkethereumw'
Check your npm cache with this script by phxgg
Check your project with this script by AndrewMohawk

Thanks to this post by Security Alliance for the remediation links.

Stay safe out there - don't click links in emails, pin your package versions, eat your veggies.

- CJ

HTML tips you won’t find in most tutorials

FROM CJ

Sick tips for all you HTML programmers out there.

jQuery - The Library That Won't Die

CJ'S LINK

Why jQuery is still relevant in 2025

Color Shifting in CSS

HAND selected by cj

An exploration of color animation techniques with CSS.

just for fun:

slideventura.com - Ace Ventura sliding door simulator

fun PROVIDED by cj

Slide your mouse to re-live a classic movie scene.

All Hail The Algorithm

Some good stuff™ from the socials

The Feed

New episodes 2×/week + other new video content!

Is there a crisis in Open Source software? - Open Path #3

Summarize Hacker News with Hono + Cloudflare

I Made A Sega Game in 2025

Realtime LED Wall With React + Websockets (I Let Strangers Control It)

SHAMELESS PLUG

SvelteKit observability just got 10x better,
and we’re here for it

The Svelte team just rolled out full observability and tracing support for SvelteKit — making it the first ESM-based meta-framework with built-in instrumentation.

Great news for Sentry users, and a big step forward for the JavaScript ecosystem.

READ MORE

Rhys

@RhysSullivan

I’ve come around to the opinion that frontend is harder than backend and it’s not even close https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1963980011460804629

Armin Ronacher ⇌

@mitsuhiko

Software engineering is 90% database and 10% frontend.

9:51 PM • Sep 5, 2025

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What’s harder - front-end or back-end?