In the first article, we’ve covered how async/await helps with async commands but it offers little help when it comes to asynchronously processing collections. In this post, we’ll look into the reduce function, which is the most versatile collection function as it can emulate all the other ones.

The new async/await is an immensely useful language feature that hides the complexity of asynchronous code and makes it look like it’s working in a synchronous way. The code example below does not look complicated at all, just a few awaits here and there. But under the hood it’s sending commands to a separate process and controlling its lifecycle in an event-driven way:

One upside of using low-end hardware is that I’m the first to notice when something is slow and I’m kinda forced to do something about it. Usually, companies follow Joel’s advice and give programmers the best tools money can buy, in which case there is a separation from end-users. On a high-end smartphone using WiFi with a fiber connection, nothing is slow, but your average visitor might not have that.

For quite some time now, I’ve been writing the JS Tips newsletter, which is a WebDev-related tip sent out every week. Initially, I scheduled the tips manually, creating an email campaign on MailChimp every week. The emails are in Markdown, so I needed to generate the HTML, insert it into a new mail, fill in the title and optionally the preview text, and finally set the time. It didn’t take a lot of time, but it’s tedious to do it by hand. No wonder I wanted to automate it, both the Markdown -> HTML conversion and the scheduling.