Bookmarks (177)

AWS Lambda Turns Ten: Looking Back and Looking Ahead — AWS Lambda, Amazon’s cloud function service, essentially launched the term ‘serverless’ and had a big impact on the use of Node.js in the cloud with Node v0.10 being the first and only runtime supported (till Java was added a year later).

⚙️  DBngin: Simple Postgres, MySQL and Redis on Mac and Windows — It’s not Node-specific, but if you’d like to spin up different versions of various common databases using a simple UI, this could fit the bill.

Node-OracleDB 6.7: Oracle's Official Database Driver for Node — I’m not an Oracle Database user myself, but I like the amount of effort Oracle puts into maintaining their Node.js driver. v6.7 adds OpenTelemetry support and settable V$ session attributes.

wacat 1.2: Tests Your Webapp Against 'Cat Chaos' — Uses a virtual ‘cat walking across your keyboard’ approach to tormenting apps with random clicks and form submissions. v1.2 adds LLM integration to detect and handle error states along the way.

SVG To Font 6.1: Read SVG Icons and Output a Font File — Both a CLI tool and Node library that can read in a set of SVG documents and output WOFF2, WOFF, EOT, TTF and SVG fonts. Useful for generating a Web font from a set of icons, perhaps, as in this demo.

💬 Discordeno v19: A Powerful Discord API Library — A long standing way to work with, and build bots for, the popular Discord chat system. v19 is a big update with breaking changes. GitHub repo.

Explore Sentry Launch Week: New Products and Community Highlights — Join us for daily video drops on YouTube at 9am PT, and on Discord to chat live with the engineers building Sentry.

npmpackage.info: Detailed Package Info on a Single Page — Give this online tool the name of an npm package and you get a quick ‘dashboard’ style view of the project’s main statistics, covering areas like quality scores, commits, open issues, releases, bundle size, and more.

Talk to ChatGPT via a Phone Call — It requires some third party services like Twilio, AssemblyAI and, of course, OpenAI’s GPT 4, but you can tie all of these together with Node for a pretty neat demo.

Node v18.20.5 (LTS) Released — Node v18 remains in its ‘Maintenance LTS’ phase (until May 2025) and while you can’t expect anything big, this release updates a lot of key dependencies and marks import attributes and JSON module support as stable.

Memetria K/V: High-Performance Key-Value Hosting — Boost your Node.js apps with Memetria K/V, providing portable, easy-to-use hosting for Redis OSS and Valkey. Scale your applications with ease and achieve high performance. Includes detailed analytics and large key memory tracking.

Val Town: A Social Way to Write and Deploy TypeScript — Staying on a serverless-ish theme, “If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun” is a fitting description for this online platform where you write short functions (the so-called ‘val’s) and they get run in V8 isolates. You can connect them together, schedule them, serve them up over HTTP, and more.

🎵 music-metadata: Stream and File-Based Music Metadata Parser — Supporting formats like MP3, FLAC, Ogg, WAV, WMA, AAC and AIFF, this library extracts metadata like ID3v1 and iTunes tags for processing however you want. Supports streaming and has an async API for efficiency.

Node v23.2.0 (Current) Released — On paper, a relatively minor release that updates the root certificates, adding five new ones, but development of TypeScript support has now moved into active development (as opposed to ‘early development’) and there’s a new module.stripTypeScriptTypes API.

Introducing the vlt Package Manager — Made up of an incredibly experienced team, including npm’s creator Isaac Schlueter, Vlt set out to ‘build the future’ of JS package management. The vlt tool, explained here, is the first fruit of the project and acts as ‘a drop-in replacement’ to whatever you’re using now.

Key Learnings From the State of DevSecOps Study — To understand the state of DevSecOps adoption in 2024, Datadog evaluated real-world data from thousands of applications. Read the report for key insights on secure application development techniques to improve your security posture.

Node.js v22 Enters Long Term Support (LTS) — This happened in the past couple of weeks, but Lizz has put together a useful update on Node 22’s recent transition to becoming an LTS release and the key features it has baked in.

JavaScript Import Attributes (ES2025) Explained — Import Attributes (currently stage 3 at TC39 but supported in Node) add a way to supply useful metadata about modules you’re importing.

Node Implementing Stricter Policies for Pull Requests — To help bolster the stability and security of major releases, the Node team has introduced a stricter policy around semver-major PRs. If such a PR lands on the default branch within a month prior to a major release, it’ll be far less likely to make it in.

Immutable.js 5.0: Immutable Collections for JavaScript — Provides numerous persistent immutable data structures including a list, stack, map, ordered map, set, ordered set, and records.

Automate Embedding Creation and Syncing in Postgres with pgai Vectorizer — 🚀 pgai Vectorizer automates embedding creation and syncing in Postgres with one SQL command — keeps embeddings updated, no tools needed.

Cron 3.2: Cron-Syntax Job Runner for Node — Execute functions whenever your scheduled jobs (defined using standard cron format) triggers.

WebAssembly Audio Decoders — Targeting both browser and Node.js use cases, this is a collection of WASM-powered audio decoding libraries for formats like MPEG I/II/III, FLAC, Ogg Opus, Ogg FLAC, Opus, and Ogg Vorbis.

graphql-subscriptions: GraphQL Subscriptions for Node.js — Wire up GraphQL with a pub/sub system (e.g. Redis) to implement subscriptions in GraphQL.

Why Code Security Matters - Even in Hardened Environments — A nicely diagrammed deep dive (and it really is deep) into a technique that allows malicious parties to turn a file write vulnerability in a Node app into a remote code execution exploit even when the file system is mounted read-only.

Wasmer Adds Node.js and Bun Support — Wasmer is a fast, Rust-powered WebAssembly runtime and as of Wasmer 5.0, it has (experimental) V8 backend support, meaning you can try all sorts of curious things like, say, running Clang or Python inside Node.

Move Fast and Fix Things with Honeybadger — Honeybadger transforms your logs into rich events and helps you fix issues before your users know what happened. Get notified instantly and find the root cause faster with your application errors and logs in one place. Try our free plan!

📈 NPM Chart: Search for a Package to See Its Download Stats Over Time — The tool allows you to customize the data by selecting a color theme, monthly or weekly view, and a start date. You can download as SVG or PNG or share as a direct link. The charts are attractive and well suited to dropping into a blog post, README, or presentation.

Building My Resume in HTML with Eleventy — Eleventy (a.k.a. 11ty) is a popular Node.js-based static site generator and gives you a very familiar feeling developer experience.

Revamping a Five-Year Old Node.js Project — It’s a tale as old as time. Your company has built a fast and reliable app which has done its job so well that it hasn’t been touched in years and suddenly you’re asked to rewrite it.

Reduce Your Apache Kafka Costs by 80+% — Kafka with no local disks or interzone fees, zero ops auto-scaling and in your cloud with no cross-account access.

Faker 9.2: Generate Massive Amounts of Fake Data — Names, bios, addresses, zip codes, dates, monetary amounts, transactions and, as of v9.2, pet names and roman numerals! I love the guided DevTools console based demo you can try – an idea other projects should consider. GitHub repo.

📂 Yauzl: Yet Another Un-ZIP Library for Node — One of those libraries you might not have heard of but which is getting 15 million downloads a week due to being depended upon by popular projects. Yauzl keeps it simple and just provides safe, async unzipping of ZIP archives. Yazl is its counterpart for making ZIPs.

Edge.js: Run .NET and Node.js Code In-Process — Call .NET functions from Node.js and Node.js functions from .NET and Edge.js takes care of marshalling the data properly. Works with .NET Core on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Fraction.js: Library for Working with Rational Numbers — The imprecise representation of floating point numbers can lead to all sorts of problems, so if you’re working with fractions at all, you might want a little more precision, which Fraction.js offers.

💬 The Lounge: A Modern, Self Hosted Web-Based IRC Client — It’s been a few years since we linked to this, so we felt it was about time. It’s a self-hostable Node-powered webapp that acts as a client to IRC chat servers (potentially handy to roll your own self-hosted community chat or support channel).

🐘 pg-dump-parser: Parses Postgres Dump Files into Arrays of Schema Objects — Takes a Postgres database dump, splits it up, and turns the table and view structures into a format you can more easily work on from code (or just use as a reference or check into version control).

AutoCannon 8.0: A Fast HTTP/1.1 Benchmarking Tool — Inspired by wrk and wrk2 with support for HTTP pipelining.

Wireit: Extends npm/Yarn Scripts to Make Them Smarter, More Efficient — Working with npm run, Wireit extends your scripts with features like result caching, parallelization, and watching/re-running on changes. There’s a VS Code extension to help you write such enhanced scripts too.

Dependency Cruiser 16.5: A Way to Visualize Dependencies — If you want a look at the output, there’s a whole page of graphs for popular, real world projects including Chalk, Yarn, and React.

parse-xml 4.2: A Fast, Compliant XML Parser — Its goal is to be fast, robust with good error handling, and to have no native dependencies. v4.2 boasts being up to 28% faster than previous versions.

Tinybench 3.0: A Tiny, Simple Benchmarking Library — Uses whatever precise timing capabilities are available (e.g. process.hrtime or peformance.now). You can then benchmark whatever functions you want, specify how long or how many times to benchmark for, and get a variety of stats in return. GitHub repo.

Transformers.js v3: Now You Can Run Transformers in Node.js — A JavaScript port of Hugging Face’s transformers Python library that makes it possible to run natural language, vision, and audio machine learning models. v3 adds WebGPU support and now supports Node (plus Deno and Bun) as well as the browser. 1200+ models are ready to run in areas like embeddings, text generation, and speech...

Run GitHub Actions Up to 2x Faster at Half the Cost — Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions up to 2x faster at half the cost. Trusted by 100+ companies like Ashby and Slope.

Bootstrapping CRUD with Pongo — Pongo is a package that uses Postgres as a database but offers a MongoDB style, document-oriented API.

Understanding npm audit and Fixing Vulnerabilities — npm audit checks your project’s dependencies for security issues by comparing them to a known vulnerability database.

Node v23.1.0 (Current) Released — Node 22 takes a breather, but Node 23 picks up the ‘Current’ baton and will get all the juiciest new features until Node 24 arrives in April/May 2025. In v23.1, JSON modules and import attributes are now stable, the MockTimers test runner API is stable, and Buffer objects created from resizable ArrayBuffers will now update their size properly.

Master Performance and Speed Up Your Site — This detailed video course shares the fundamentals of web performance, covering key Core Web Vitals metrics such as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). You'll learn how to best use Lighthouse, WebPageTest and other tools in order to make your site lightning.

Node v22.11.0 'Jod' Released; Becomes Active LTS Release — With this release, Node 22 flips from being the ‘Current’ cutting edge release to being a dependable release with the all-important LTS (Long Term Support) designation. It is, however, broadly the same as Node v22.10.