~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (140)

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 ».

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.

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).

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.

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.

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).”

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.”

Optimize Your BullMQ Workers — Queues backed up? Workers over-provisioned? Automatic scaling based on queues is the answer!

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.

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.

Opus 0.10: Native Opus Bindings for Node — Bindings for libopus, a library for working with the Opus lossy audio codec.

♟️ 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”!

web-worker 1.5: Consistent Web Workers for the Browser and Node — Want to publish npm modules that use Web Workers and that work in both Node anbd client-side? In Node, it works as a web-compatible Worker implementation atop worker_threads. In the browser, it’s an alias for Worker.

How to Publish ESM-Based npm Packages with TypeScript — Now that you can use the ES modules (almost) everywhere, it’s worth understanding how to package them up for use with npm. Axel digs into everything you need to know and shares some useful tools too.

Node v22.14.0 (LTS) Released — The latest stable/LTS release of Node gets the usual raft of bug fixes and tweaks. Among the more notable ones are TypeScript support for code evalled via stdin, a new --disable-sigusr1 flag, assert.register(), and t.assert.fileSnapshot().

Troubleshoot Node.js App Performance with Datadog APM — Datadog’s distributed tracing provides end-to-end visibility into requests wherever they go, across hosts, containers, and service boundaries. With rich dashboards, and algorithmic alerts, Datadog provides your team with the tools they need to optimize modern applications.

Why to Move On to 'ESM-Only' — The march to using ES modules has been going on for years now and if you’re still holding out, there’s probably a good reason why. While you can maintain packages that support both ESM and CommonJS approaches, Anthony thinks it’s finally time to go ‘ESM only’ and explains why here.

Node v20.18.3 (LTS) Released — The main update is the backporting of import attributes and JSON modules is now considered stable.

Want to Roll Your Own Autoscaling? Here Are Our Secrets 🤫 — Does it make sense for us to write this guide? No! Did we do it anyway? Yes! We did it for you ❤️

import-in-the-middle: A Module Loading Interceptor — Back in my day Malcolm was in the middle, but now you can intercept the loading of ES modules in Node with this – handy if you want to modify them in some way. There’s also require-in-the-middle if you’re a bit more oldschool.

ffast: An Experimental Node.js FFI Library — A proof of concept for bringing all the low level bindings necessary into JS-land for creating FFI wrappers from JavaScript itself, without needing things like libffi. Works (with many caveats, the author says) on Linux x64/ARM64 and macOS/ARM64.

Human Regex: Human-Friendly Regular Expression Builder with English-Like Syntax — After 8 years of Perl, regexes are my bread and butter, but I’d say most developers aren’t big fans ;-) This library offers a more natural fluent-style option. Magic Regexp and Super Expressive are other options in this space.

Pundit-TS: Organize Your Authorization Logic with Full Type-Safety — Inspired by Ruby’s Pundit library, Pundit-TS offers a TypeScript flavored way to implement role-based and attribute-based access control models in your app.

Start Selling to Enterprise Faster with WorkOS — Add SSO, SCIM, and RBAC to your B2B SaaS app in minutes—not months.