Node.js Digest #16: JavaScript vs Oracle, 10 Years of AWS Lambda, Ghost Engineers, Prisma 6

Hey, community! Oleksandr Zinevych here, Engineering Director at Avenga. Welcome to the last digest of the year, where as always you'll find the most interesting news from the world of server-side JavaScript and beyond.

Key Highlights

🔹 Node.js v22 is now available on AWS Lambda, though with certain limitations. For example, not all experimental features will work, and there are some performance specifics — more details in the AWS blog. Vercel has done the same.

🔹 The year is coming to an end, so traditionally the State of JavaScript 2024 survey has kicked off. I'll fill it out myself and encourage you to do the same, because I want content for upcoming digests — and I hope you do too 😅

🔹 The Node.js team is making their PR policy before releases stricter to ensure more stable and controlled releases.

🔹 For those chasing the latest TypeScript updates, right after reading this digest go ahead and upgrade to version 5.7.

🔹 Node.js has traditionally rolled out a few new versions, namely v23.3.0 and v20.18.1.

🔹 Wasmer SDK now supports Node.js and Bun.

🔹 The Bun team never sleeps and regularly publishes new versions of their JavaScript runtime. This time it's version v1.1.38 with various minor fixes and improvements.

🔹 If anyone ever needed to compile JavaScript to WebAssembly, a new tool has arrived that lets you do just that — Jawsm.

🔹 Prisma 6: performance, flexibility, type safety — these and other great words describe the new Prisma release.

AWS Lambda Turns 10

Remember a world without Serverless architecture? If you're as old as I am, I'm guessing yes. A world without AWS Lambda functions, where you always had to deploy and efficiently manage your own infrastructure. If you remember, that was roughly 10 years ago, because this November marks exactly 10 years of AWS Lambda.

During this time, the service went from something like a startup within AWS to an Enterprise-grade service that helps solve problems of varying complexity for clients worldwide. The official AWS blog published a short article celebrating the anniversary of AWS Lambda — a service that owes its life to Node.js, as it was the first technology supported by the platform.

As of today, the service has not only grown and become extremely popular but continues to develop and charge ahead into the future. Because the further we go, the more important it becomes to cover integrations between various AWS services or solve all kinds of infrastructure tasks without involving DevOps.

So let's raise our glasses to the birthday celebrant and wish it to keep staying on trend and always support Node.js as one of the most popular technologies 😉

Free JavaScript

Remember in one of the previous digests I wrote about a movement aimed at freeing the JavaScript trademark from Oracle's ownership? Well, recently Ryahn Dahl decided to speed up the process a bit. Together with the Deno team, they filed a petition with the USPTO trademark registry requesting the cancellation of Oracle's ownership of the JavaScript trademark.

The fact that JavaScript is an Oracle trademark means many conferences and communities cannot use this name (example here). As Ryahn Dahl describes in his post, there has been no meaningful contribution from Oracle to the development of the JavaScript ecosystem or Node.js for a long time. They essentially do nothing that could qualify as developing the trademark they own. Instead, everything is developed solely through community support and other independent companies, which by law means it cannot remain a trademark. Additionally, Oracle used not entirely accurate information to renew their ownership in 2019, which is also grounds for cancellation.

We'll be watching how events unfold and hope that Oracle simply ignores this petition by January 5, 2025. Then the cancellation could happen automatically and, accordingly, quite peacefully. If not, it seems that Ryahn Dahl is determined to go toe-to-toe with a giant like Oracle to free JavaScript.

Node.js Collaboration Summit

In early November, the latest Node.js Collaboration Summit took place in Dublin, right after NodeConf EU, whose recordings we eagerly await. Luke Karrys put together a brief overview of what happened here. A more detailed write-up can be found on the official Node.js blog — here.

Many topics were discussed, including:

• Attention to collaborators — specifically improving onboarding for new collaborators, recognizing achievements, and implementing a buddy system for newcomers.
• Results from the Next-10 survey, which you can review here. Working groups will continue processing the results.
• Various ways to attract funding: GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective.
• Improving documentation and promoting ESM adoption.

This is just a small part of it — you can read more at the link above. It's great to see the platform actively developing and setting strategic questions and goals for itself.

Nova

How many JavaScript engines can you name? Everyone has heard of V8 or JavaScriptCore, and some may even know about SpiderMonkey or the relatively new Hermes. Besides these well-known ones, there are plenty of other engines that either lack the backing of major corporations or don't offer the performance modern businesses need, so I'll skip those.

However, there's a new addition to the JavaScript engine family — Nova. It brings improved data handling through specialized vectors, better memory and cache management, and much more that outperforms V8 in certain areas. You can read more here.

Whether this engine will take off and claim a spot in the top three or even top five most popular engines remains to be seen.

Ghost Engineers

I'm sure this doesn't apply to any Node.js specialist, but Stanford Research published their statistics on the productivity of technical specialists and engineers. According to their findings, approximately 9.5% of developers essentially do nothing at their jobs.

They even coined a special term for them — ghost engineer. Much like quiet quitting, this is a consequence of remote work, where it's harder to observe and evaluate each team member's engagement. A ghost engineer does the bare minimum to avoid getting fired, which not only drags the team's overall efficiency down but also costs the business money by receiving full compensation for their so-called work.

Before you start scrutinizing your teammates a bit more closely, you can read a detailed article on this topic here.

Something to Read

🔹 The end of the year is approaching and everyone is trying to make predictions about what awaits us in 2025. If you're interested in security and everything related to it, check out the Phylum team's predictions here.

🔹 A story about how to update and refactor a five-year-old Node.js project.

🔹 The Cloudflare team talks about how they added authentication to AI Gateway.

🔹 You can never know too much about architecture. I recommend checking out Denys Poltorak's book on Architectural Metapatterns.

🔹 Part two of the story about how Bun supports V8 APIs without actually using V8.

🔹 I love reading and analyzing technical case studies from large companies that they occasionally share on their tech blogs. This time there's an interesting example of implementing a distributed counter abstraction.

🔹 Haven't heard about Heroku in ages? Neither have I, but the service is alive and even has a tech blog where they wrote a solid article about how to build properly documented REST APIs — complete with Fastify-based authentication.

🔹 And here's a case study from Reddit about how they achieved 100 thousand reads per second in their architecture.

🔹 How to type process.env? If you already know, feel free to skip. If not, this new article by Matt Pocock will be useful.

🔹 John Reilly talks about azdo-npm-auth.

🔹 The AssemblyAI team blog published a post about how to use their service and Twilio to talk to ChatGPT as if on a phone call.

🔹 The Deno blog published an article about one of the most interesting features — deno compile. For those who aren't aware, this is how you can build applications ready to run on different platforms. You can read about how it works in the article and the official documentation.

Something to Watch

🔹 An excellent talk by Peter van Hardenberg about why we can't build simple software:

Why Can't We Make Simple Software? — Peter van Hardenberg

🔹 Recordings from the EDA Days Warsaw conference have been published:

Observability in an Asynchronous World • James Eastham • GOTO 2024

🔹 An interesting conversation about Serverless by Ben Ellerby and Julian Wood:

Innovations in Serverless & Event-Driven Solutions • Ben Ellerby & Julian Wood • GOTO 2024

🔹 A new video from Fireship mentioning ghost engineers and other tech news:

Sketchy Stanford study says 9.5% of programmers are «ghosts»...

🔹 A bit about Type Safety in Prisma:

Write Raw SQL with Type Safety | Prisma TypedSQL

🔹 A super quick example of how to work with sockets in Deno:

🔹 Erick Wendel chatted with Node.js TSC member Marco Ippolito about native TypeScript support in Node.js:

Node.js now supports TypeScript natively (feat Marco Ippolito — Node.js TSC)

🔹 A conversation with Ryahn Dahl about Deno and the future of JavaScript:

Creator of Node talks Deno 2.0 and the Future of JS

🔹 If you already know Node.js but don't know Nginx yet and need to learn it, this video is for you:

Full NGINX Tutorial — Demo Project with Node.js, Docker

Library of the Month

If anyone misses middleware hell, here's a great library that will help you recreate it when working with AWS Lambda — middy.js.org.

And for those who still have energy left this year, you can participate in this awesome initiative and solve some puzzles.

That's all — the last Node.js digest of this year has come to an end. Unwrap your Christmas presents, enjoy the holidays, and see you in 2025 😉

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