Bookmarks (141)

Teable: Open Source Airtable Alternative atop Postgres — Airtable is a popular data table database SaaS, but here’s a NestJS-powered open-source alternative in a similar manner that sits atop Postgres. GitHub repo.

Land Ahoy: Leaving the Sea of Nodes — A deeply technical post from a core member of the V8 JavaScript engine team that explains the limitations of Turbofan, one of V8’s optimizing compilers. If you don’t care for the internals of how your JavaScript is compiled and run, just be assured the V8 team is working to make it run even faster!

Express 5.1: Express 5 Finally Becomes the 'Latest' Release — After a period of some dormancy, Express 5.0 was released last year, but remained a somewhat experimental ‘edge’ release as it went through a security audit and process of building up new governance. With 5.1, however, Express 5.x finally becomes the ‘latest’ tagged release on npm, so be careful with those upgrades (luckily there’s...

Neutralinojs 6.0: Alternative Cross-Platform Desktop App Approach — Neutralinojs offers an interesting lightweight alternative to something like Electron, as it still lets you build apps that run on Linux, Windows and macOS, but Chromium isn’t bundled – instead the existing installed browser engine is used.

Playwright MCP: Connect LLMs to Browsers with Playwright — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions on systems outside of their usual sandbox. This new project from Microsoft enables such LLMs to interact with Web pages via Playwright.

Nōdo: A Way to Call Node.js from Ruby — A mechanism for letting Ruby scripts make calls to Node.js-based functions via a Unix socket-based IPC approach. (We also learn that “ノード” means “node” in Japanese.)

node-rate-limiter-flexible 6.2: Limit Number of Actions by Key and Protect Apps from Brute Force Attacks — Can use Redis, in-process memory, memcached, MongoDB, Postgres or, newly, SQLite, to count actions in either a single process or distributed environment.

The Ultimate PaaS Pricing Calculator — We wanted a tool to compare prices between Heroku, Render, Fly.io, and more. So we built one.

SuperTest 7.1: HTTP Assertions Made Easy — Got an HTTP API to test? SuperTest provides a fluent API for chaining together requests and expectations. See some examples here.

Errsole.js: Collect, Store, and Visualize Node App Logs — Rather than leaning on a third-party service for log monitoring, the idea of Errsole is you just drop its package into your app and you get logging and a basic UI for looking at those logs all ‘out of the box’. It supports numerous storage mechanisms, from SQLite in dev to MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB...

Securing Node.js Express APIs with Clerk and React — Learn to secure Node.js/Express APIs with Clerk & React. Implement JWT authentication, protect routes, manage users, and handle sessions seamlessly. Ideal for scalable full-stack apps.

New URLPattern API Brings Improved Pattern Matching to Node — The Cloudflare Workers team has implemented the URLPattern API in the Ada URL parser, used by both Node.js and Cloudflare Workers. The API lets you take patterns like /blog/:year/:month/:slug and test whether URLs match against them. If you’re using Node 23.8+, you can start using it today.

Node.js TSC Votes to Stop Distributing Corepack — Corepack was introduced as an (experimental) tool bundled with Node to help with managing versions of your package managers. Corepack will live on as a separately installable tool, but will be phased out from future Node releases following a recent TSC vote.

gosync: Go-Style Channels and WaitGroup for Node — Possibly of interest to you if you’re familiar with Go and channels.

Node.js Gets an Official Community Space on Discord — While there have been numerous IRC channels and Discord and Slack servers where Node developers can congregate, the Nodeiflux Discord server has been promoted to being an official one – here’s the invite link if you’re a Discord user. There are already 15k members, so it’s hopping.

Node v23.10.0 (Current) Released — Node gains a new --experimental-config-file option for writing a JSON-based config file that contains options that would otherwise litter your command line flags – ideal for configuring the test runner, say.

Node v20.19.0 (LTS) Released with require(esm) — Node v20 is in maintenance mode, which usually means no new features, but it lands a significant one here: support for require(esm) enabled by default. This means all Node v20+ releases now support loading native ES modules with require out of the box. Ideal if you have dependencies to update and you’re still on v20.

OTPAuth: One Time Password (HOTP/TOTP) Library — When you log in to a site with 2FA and you’re asked for six digits from your authentication app, that’s a Time-based One-Time Password (or TOTP). This library for Node, Deno, Bun and the browser lets you work with both TOTPs and HOTPs (HMAC-based OTPs) from JavaScript.

Refractor 5.0: Virtual Syntax Highlighting using Prism — Wraps the powerful Prism syntax highlighter to output objects instead of an HTML string so you can manipulate and render it as you wish (e.g. in a VDOM or at the terminal). Lowlight, by the same author, offers the same functionality but backed by highlight.js.

Piscina 4.9: A Fast Worker Thread Pool Implementation — Node’s worker threads bring true multithreading to Node apps and Piscina is a pool for tracking and controlling the number of such threads.

🔐 Protect.js: 'Encryption in Use' for Data in Node Apps — Designed to work with any Node framework or ORM, Protect.js provides AES-256 based ‘encryption in use’ functionality. GitHub repo.

How to Get Deep Traces in Your Node Backend with OTel and Deno — The Deno project turns up the heat by demonstrating how to add OpenTelemetry to a Node app before showing how much easier it is with Deno (as long as your Node app runs well under it).

Small Teams Need Paas-Ops, Not DevOps — How to skip the complexity and rabbit holes of DevOps, and instead focus on shipping your product fast.

🔎 Node Modules Inspector — A tool that runs pnpm inside your browser, “installs” a package, then analyzes its dependencies. This can be useful for analyzing packages you already use, but also for simplifying your own projects, as 11ty’s Zach Leatherman did here.

Node Added TypeScript Support, But What Does That Mean for Deno? — The Deno team, learning from previous experiences with Node, went ‘all in’ with TypeScript from day one. Now, Node can work with TypeScript too, but the experience is still very different, and the Deno team explains how here.

ThePrimeagen's Dev Setup Is Better Than Yours — See why simpler dev tooling is better by hand-crafting an environment with bash scripts. You'll learn common Unix tools for managing libraries, interacting with the OS, window management, and more in this course.

Updates on CVE for End-of-Life Versions — Back in January, the Node.js project decided to issue CVEs for end-of-life versions of Node to warn people of the security impacts of using old versions of Node. This didn’t go down well and so the Node project has a new plan going forward.

PGlite: Run Postgres in WebAssembly — PGlite packages a WASM build of Postgres into a TypeScript library that can be run directly from Node.js (or Bun, Deno, and even the browser) and it’s only a few megabytes in size.

Electron 35.0: The Cross-Platform Desktop App Toolkit — You can now attach a preload script to Service Workers. Dependencies are also bumped to Chromium 134 and Node 22.14.

zx 8.4.0: A Tool for Writing Better Scripts — A minor bump for a package that sweetens the process of using Node for shell scripting tasks. If it’s new to you, these docs will give you the idea.

Systeminformation: A System Information Library for Node — If you want to query what environment your Node program is running in, this is for you. Get info about audio devices, Bluetooth devices, printers, USB, CPU, architecture, wifi, and more.

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 — Four months in the making, TypeScript 5.8 lands with a strong Node focus. You can now use require() for ES modules in the nodenext module, there’s a new node18 module for developers who want to keep targeting Node 18, and most notably there’s now an --erasableSyntaxOnly option to ensure no TypeScript-only runtime semantics can be used (ideal if you’re using...

Malibu: Framework-Agnostic CSRF Middleware — ESM only, zero-dependency, and TypeScript types are included. It’s compatible with Express, Tinyhttp, and most modern frameworks based around the core HTTP package.

InversifyJS 7.0: Inversion of Control Container — A lightweight inversion of control (IoC) container to help you adhere to OO best practices.

Jira.js 4.1: A Wrapper for Atlassian Jira's Cloud APIs — Are you lucky enough to use Jira? Increase your joy even more by interacting with it from code. Further docs and examples.

fast-png 6.3: Pure JS PNG Image Decoder and Encoder — Pass it a PNG to decode via a TypedArray or Buffer, or a Canvas ImageData (or compatible object) to encode into PNG.

Electron App Boilerplate with Modern Dependencies — A basic template app that uses React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, shadcn/ui, Electron Vite, Biome, and includes a GitHub Actions release workflow.

Harnessing Data at Scale: Character.AI's Transition to WarpStream — Character.AI used WarpStream to make a 3 GiB/s Apache Kafka-compatible data pipeline and reduced their analytics costs.

Web Scraping with Playwright — I’d be surprised if you got away with scraping YouTube like this for long (let’s say Google aren’t big fans of the approach) but the techniques demonstrated are useful more generally too.

Turbocharging V8 with Mutable Heap Numbers — The V8 team uses the JetStream2 benchmark suite to investigate performance issues and has implemented a new optimization yielding not just a 2.5x improvement in the async-fs benchmark but in other areas too. A demonstration that not only does the Node team make Node faster, the V8 team does too.

Instrument, Monitor, Fix: A Hands-On Debugging Class — Join us live for a hands-on session where you’ll build it, watch it break, debug it, and go from “no idea what’s wrong” to fixing issues—all in one go. Save your spot here ».

Node v23.8.0 (Current) Released — You can now tell Node to use the system’s trusted CA certificate store with --use-system-ca and there’s an implementation of the URL Pattern API (URLPattern will become a global in Node 24). Other minor enhancements include an update to Node’s timezone data and initial support for the zstd compression algorithm (via node:zlib).

♟️ Chess.js 1.1: A Library to Manage a Chess Game — Move generation/validation, piece placement, check/checkmate/stalemate detection – “basically everything but the AI”!

Mastra: A TypeScript AI Framework from the Gatsby Team — From some of the folks behind the Gatsby React framework comes a new way to build LLM-powered agents that perform various tasks, use knowledge bases, and hold memory. Think a meta-framework like Next.js but for AI agents. GitHub repo.

upfetch: An Advanced fetch Client Builder — A TypeScript library to enhance fetch with schema validation, automatic response parsing, and type-safety, while maintaining the familiar fetch API.

Why TypeScript 5.8's --erasableSyntaxOnly Matters — “It disables a bunch of features that I don’t think should ever have been part of TypeScript.”

A Demo of Running TypeScript Directly in Node.js — “I have published the repository nodejs-type-stripping which demonstrates how to implement a package with a bin script that is written directly in TypeScript (no transpilation).”

Migrating 160K Lines of Production JS to TypeScript Without Downtime — A quick look at the motivation, strategy developed, and a few of the tools that made it a less painful process. But was it worth it? “Absolutely,” Ben says.

Functional JavaScript First Steps, v2 — A friendly, practical introduction to functional programming fundamentals in JavaScript. Learn the power of the pure function while exploring functional programming paradigms.

Subverting Control with Weak References — Node supports WeakMap and WeakRef for working with weak references and James is a big fan of the extra abstractions they unlock. A weak reference differs from a normal reference in that it doesn’t prevent a referenced object from being garbage collected – this might sound like it has limited value, but is quite useful in certain scenarios.