~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (144)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

🔎 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.