Bookmarks (140)

Bare: A New Lightweight Runtime for Modular JS Apps — Imagine something like Node.js but really stripped back: bare, if you will. Like Node, it’s built on top of V8 and libuv, but Bare’s approach is to provide as little as possible (a module system, addon system, and thread support) and then rely upon userland modules that can evolve independently of Bare itself. It’s...

Could JavaScript Have Synchronous Await? — Our favorite JavaScript doctor explores the idea of a synchronous await to erase the divide between sync and async code, explains why it’s enticing, and digs into why performance hits and concurrency headaches make it impractical.

How the Node Team Makes Node.js Downloads Reliable — I’m sure most of us rely on just clicking and downloading Node.js (or having a package manager or CI process do it) and it Just Works™. Turns out there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to keep Node.js quick and easy to download and this tells the full story of an operation that serves...

A Practical Guide to Llama Stack for Node Developers — Red Hat’s Node team has been digging deep into LLM coding in recent months, and now shares its discoveries in using Meta’s Llama Stack (not to be confused with their Llama LLM) – it’s a unified set of APIs for working with numerous parts of the modern LLM-powered stack including models, evals, RAG, tool...

Memetria K/V: Efficient Redis & Valkey Hosting — Memetria K/V hosts Redis OSS and Valkey for Node.js apps, featuring large key tracking and detailed analytics to manage and optimize application data effectively.

Node.js Testing Best Practices — A detailed guide to modern testing in Node from a group of developers who know all about it. It’s on GitHub but is essentially written like a free book covering over 50 battle-tested tips covering areas as diverse as the ‘Testing Diamond’, testing microservices, checking contracts, verifying OpenAPI correctness, and simulating flaky network conditions.

🎵 Communicate with Ableton Live via WebSockets — Ableton Live is a popular DAW (digital audio workstation) and this opens up a way to control it from Node.js code.

java-bridge: A Bridge Between Node.js and Java — Last week we were bridging Ruby and Node, this week we’re going between Node and Java using a Rust-powered bridge. Yes, running System.out.println('Hello world!'); directly in Node could well be in your future..

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.)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

🔐 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

🔎 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.

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 ».

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.

♟️ 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”!