Node gets a redesign (and a documentary)

#​526 — March 26, 2024

Read on the Web

🐣 A quick note to say Node Weekly is taking next Tuesday off, in celebration of Easter. We’ll be back on Tuesday, April 9 🙂
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Diving into the Node.js Website Redesign — Yes, Node’s official homepage has an all new, clean, modern design. We like it! Front end engineer Brian Muenzenmeyer gives us a bit of a peek into what went into the rebuild, which has been a long time in the making.

Brian Muenzenmeyer

▶  Node.js: The Documentary (An Origin Story) — Late last year, Honeypot released a Ruby on Rails documentary – now they’re back tackling Node. It’s an hour long, but covers the early history of Node particularly well. If you weren’t deep into the Node world in 2009-2015, this is is a fantastic way to get up to speed and flows really well.

Honeypot

Meet the Future of Data Delivery with Hasura DDN — Join us April 16 for an API innovation unveiling. Get a first look at Hasura Data Delivery Network: a unified, composable API with guaranteed performance, reliability, and security. Enable smooth collaboration across teams, no operational overhead.

Hasura sponsor

Node.js TSC Confirms: No Intention to Remove npm from Distribution — It was looking touch-and-go for a hot minute there, but Node’s Technical Steering Committee has reached consensus that removing npm from the Node distribution is not a project goal, though discussions regarding enabling Corepack by default continue.

Sarah Gooding (Socket)

IN BRIEF:

• Darcy Clarke and Ruy Adorno (both previously of the npm client team) and Isaac Z. Schlueter (who created npm) have joined forces to create vit, a new attempt to improve the JavaScript package management and registry ecosystem.

• Seokho Song, a V8 contributor, explained how he optimized

  1	Math.hypot

  – just a single method, but a cute example of why Node keeps getting faster.

• Raymond Camden shines a spotlight on three cool Node.js features he finds useful (and you might too).

is Back in Node with ES Modules — In an ES module, instead of using

or

, you can now use

and

(this came with Node 20.11.0 (LTS) released in January).

Phil Nash

Building a Micro HTMX SSR Framework — Matteo builds on an earlier tutorial about creating a ‘movie quotes’ app by exploring an alternative stack to use, based upon Fastify, Vite and HTMX.

Matteo Collina

Tuple ‘Makes Pair Programming with Co-Workers and Friends Fun Again’ — Try Tuple for free and find out why staff engineers at Figma can’t stop talking about Tuple.

Tuple sponsor

Optimizing JavaScript for Fun and for Profit — A tour of several things to avoid to keep your code fast, complete with examples. While the performance ground upon which we walk is always shifting, these are mostly common sense ideas.

Rom Grk

Migrating Away from Jest and Achieving a 90%+ Reduction in Running Time

Patrick C

🛠 Code & Tools

Slonik v38: The Sophisticated Postgres Client Library — A ‘battle tested’ framework that offers strict types, detailed logging, abstracts repeating code patterns, protects against unsafe behavior, and provides a rich debugging experience.

Gajus Kuizinas

Node SQL Parser 5.0: Parse Simple SQL into ASTs — And vice versa (turn ASTs, that you can manipulate, back into SQL).

taozhi

Phin 4.0: A Simple, Dependency-Free HTTP Request Client — We last linked to this project six years ago so it’s great to see a new major version. Being lightweight is its goal, while still offering all the key features you’re likely to need.

Ethan Davis

pgmq-js: A Client for Postgres Message Queue (PGMQ) — PGMQ is a message queue system built on top of the Postgres database.

Muhammad Magdi

• Neutralinojs 5.1 – Alternative cross-platform desktop app framework. Now with an improved clipboard API and window transparency effects.

• npm-publish 3.1 – GitHub Action to publish packages to npm.

• node-simctl 7.4 – Node wrapper around

  1

  simctl

  – Apple’s CLI tool to control the iOS Simulator.

• HyperExpress 6.15 – Fast HTTP and WebSocket server.

• node-telnet-client 2.2 – Simple telnet client library.

• node-gyp 10.1 – Node.js native addon build tool.

• dnt 0.41 – Deno to npm package build tool.

• pdfkit 0.15 – PDF generation library.