~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (141)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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 ».

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

♟️ 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.

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.

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).