Honey, I Shrunk the npm Package! — Compression is under the hood of everything on the Web today, including npm packages. But could the standard gzip approach be showing its age in both speed and effectiveness? Jamie runs a package through a few alternative options and gives an update on efforts to modernize npm’s compression defaults.
Jamie Magee
New Introduction to Node.js Course — Take your JavaScript skills to the server and gain all the skills you need to develop professional Node apps. The course covers CLIs, modules, CRUD operations, async code, testing, and more.
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Node v20.8.0 (Current) Released — With only three more weeks to go until v20 becomes the active LTS version, a lot of work has been going into making Node faster. v20.8 gains some key performance improvements with regards to streams.
Integrating Slonik with Express.js — Slonik is a type-safety focused Postgres client library for Node and its author gives a basic introduction to integrating it with an Express app. Useful snippets if you’re just getting going.
API for establishing TCP connections from Cloudflare Workers and now engineers from Cloudflare and Vercel have created a spec of this API, along with a Node-compatible implementation you can use straight away if you want to create universal experiences.
instant.dev: A New Postgres-Focused ORM for JavaScript — We teased it last week, but Instant now has an official homepage. Joining a pretty busy ORM ecosystem, Instant is a newly released ORM (spun out of the Autocode platform) providing a more Ruby on Rails/ActiveRecord style experience.
Tesseract.js 5.0: Pure JS OCR for 100+ Languages — A port of the C++-based Tesseract library commonly used for extract text from images. v5.0 is a pretty big deal as there are huge file size reductions resulting in a 50% decrease in runtime size, similar reductions in memory use, and it’s now iOS 17 compatible too. GitHub repo.
Tesseract Team
Gluegun: A Toolkit for Building Node-Powered CLIs — For when you want to build a CLI app and want a lot of features available ‘out of the box’. Areas covered include templating, sub-command support, colorful output, argument parsing, etc.
Vavite 3.0: Develop Server-Side Applications with Vite — Vite is best known as a build tool closely associated with (but that doesn’t require) Vue.js but it supports transpiling server-side code too and Vavite takes advantage of this.
#565 — February 4, 2025 Read on the Web Announcing TypeScript 5.8 Beta: A Big One for Node Developers — It’s unusual for a TypeScript beta to be exciting for Node developers in particular, but while Read more…
#564 — January 28, 2025 Read on the Web A Failed Attempt to Shrink All npm Packages by 5% — What if you could shrink all npm package sizes by 5%.. wouldn’t that benefit all Read more…
#563 — January 21, 2025 Read on the Web NodeBB v4.0.0 Released: Node.js Powered Forums — Now almost 12 years old, NodeBB continues to offer a classic forum experience in a modern Node.js-shaped guise. The Read more…
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