Bookmarks (180)

Zero Ops Apache Kafka Replication and Data Mirroring — Moving to WarpStream to reduce your Kafka costs by 80+% and simplify ops is easy with 1:1 replication provided by Orbit.

Inside Bluesky’s Engineering Culture — An interesting writeup from May 2024 that’s perhaps become more relevant with Bluesky’s recent rapid ascent. Node.js sits at the heart of the social network’s backend (along with other technologies).

Prisma 6: Better Performance, More Flexibility and Type-Safe SQL — Prisma is a popular, powerful ORM for Node.js and TypeScript apps that takes pride in doing things a little differently to most. You can now use it easily with serverless database platforms like PlanetScale and Neon, as well as in edge function platforms like Cloudflare Workers. D1 and Turso are now supported, and you...

❤️ Postgres — You need a database provider that loves Postgres as much as you do. We'll take care of all the hassle - monitoring, backups, HA, disaster recovery so you don't have to. Want amazing support? We'll be there when you have questions.

Skia Canvas 2.0: A Browserless Canvas Environment for Node — Based on Google’s Skia graphics engine and offers end results similar to Chrome’s own canvas system. It’s GPU accelerated and can render images, paths, fonts, shapes, and (almost) everything you’d expect. v2.0 adds support for WOFF/WOFF2 fonts, WEBP exporting, and more. GitHub repo.

Oniguruma-to-ES: Convert Patterns from the Oniguruma Regex Engine to Native JS — Oniguruma is a powerful regex engine used by Ruby, TextMate, and other projects. This could be useful if you need to share regexes between Ruby, TextMate grammars, and JavaScript, say. There’s a demo.

png2embeddedjson: Convert PNGs to Base64-Encoded RGB565 in JSON — Niche, but has utility in embedding images directly into apps used on microcontrollers to drive small RGB displays. Both a library and CLI tool.

A Way to Call Node.js Functions from Elixir — Elixir is a Ruby-inspired, Erlang VM-based language and this provides a way for Elixir apps to call Node functions.

Kaluma: A Tiny JS Runtime for the Raspberry Pi Pico — Can a JavaScript runtime squeeze into the 64KB necessary to run on the RP2040-based Raspberry Pi Pico? Kaluma can, all while offering some Node.js-like niceties.

VineJS 3.0: Form Data Validation Library for Node Apps — A fast validation library for data received by your backend app, providing both runtime and static type safety, and handling form data and JSON payloads. v3.0 has a few breaking changes to be aware of.

Undici v7: The Modern HTTP Client Library for Node — A major release for a fundamental Node.js project. This release brings RFC-9111-compliant client-side HTTP caching, stricter fetch() spec compliance, WebSocketStream, and a new way to completely customize the lifecycle of requests.

Math.js 14.0: An Extensive Math Library for Node and Browsers — Work with complex numbers, fractions, units, matrices, symbolic computation, etc. A long standing library now, but continuing to get frequent updates. GitHub repo.

DOMPurify 3.2: A Fast, Tolerant XSS Sanitizer for HTML — Supports all modern browsers and is heavily tested, but also works in Node thanks to jsdom. There’s a live demo here.

Crawlee 3.12: Web Scraping and Browser Automation Library — A mature library to handle Web crawling and scraping while appearing ‘human-like’ and supporting multiple switchable backends, such as to support JavaScript rendering on sites that demand it.

🌐 country-to-iso: Convert Country Names and Codes into ISO Codes — Unexciting, but incredibly useful when you’re bombarded by inconsistent country names and you need to use standardized ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 or 3 references (e.g. Germany is DE or DEU, Angola is AO or AGO).

🔥 0x 5.8: Single-Command Flamegraph Profiling for Node — A tool that can profile and generate an interactive flamegraph for a Node process in a single command.

Better SQLite3 11.6: Fast and Simple SQLite3 Library — We remain big fans of this easy way to get running with vanilla SQLite3 because it just makes everything simpler. It has good docs too. v11.6 bumps us up to SQLite 3.47.1 (which is a bigger release than the version number implies).

Deno v. Oracle: Cancelling the JavaScript Trademark — Did you know Oracle formally owns the ‘JavaScript’ trademark? There have been a few efforts to change this over the years (most recently via this open letter) but Oracle isn’t listening. The Deno team has now formally filed a petition to cancel the trademark which Deno claims is fradulent because Oracle used screenshots of Node.js, a...

A Complete Introduction to SQLite — Join Brian Holt for this video course and get to grips with the world's most widely-deployed database. You'll create Node.js app with SQLite — learning about queries, table management, optimization, and much more.

Node.js 22 Runtime Now Available in AWS Lambda — AWS’s popular serverless platform, which initially launched with only Node.js support, has just turned ten, and this week adds official support for the latest Node LTS release too.

Exploring JavaScript Symbols — Symbols were a new ‘quirky little primitive’ (as Trevor puts it) that arrived with ES6 ten years ago, but they continue to be poorly understood. Trevor boils them down really well, including a little side quest into the likely-to-be-deprecated ‘species.’

Avoiding False Positives in Node.js Tests — Specifically, avoiding loose/unstrict equality checks, overly general assertions, shallow equality, and misunderstandings over what assertions are doing.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

💬 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.

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.

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.

⚙️  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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

🎵 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 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.

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.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.

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.

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.

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.

📈 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.

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.