Node.js Digest #26: Deno + Node.js = ❤️, Staged Publishing, Node.js in Enterprise, pprof-to-md
Node.js Digest #26 by Oleksandr Zinevych
Hello, community! Oleksandr Zinevych here. I'm back from a sliiightly longer January vacation, and here's a new digest — the first of 2026 — with news from the world of Node.js and server-side JavaScript.
A Few More Quick News Items
🔸 Some details about the Node.js fix that helps mitigate a vulnerability related to stack overflow and the inability to handle it.
🔸 Vercel continues to stay on the pulse and switches its Vercel Sandbox to Node.js 24 by default.
🔸 Express as one continuous pain point in the world of server-side JavaScript and backend frameworks. That and much more in State of JavaScript 2025.
🔸 Salesforce is shutting down Heroku and moving it to a support model.
🔸 Astro is now part of Cloudflare — interesting to see what this will bring to the framework.
🔸 MySQL seems to be dying, because there's no other way to explain such community passivity.
🔸 Deno and Oracle are still fighting over who will hold the trademark rights to JavaScript.
Something to Read
🔸 Practical case studies are always interesting, and a practical case study on optimizing a large TypeScript project even more so.
🔸 The soft delete approach has long become something commonly accepted in the world of large and not-so-large projects. Who knows when this or that piece of information might come in handy, right? But have you thought about the challenges you'll face when using this approach? Here's a good article about it.
🔸 How you can use AWS Lambda to process stream events from DynamoDB.
🔸 Here's a good updated guide on how to create a Node.js package. It's all pretty straightforward and basic, but if you haven't created packages before, it's definitely worth checking out.
🔸 Some viral and timely tweets from Ryan Dahl. What do you think — is the era of people writing code really coming to an end? While this tweet is rather clickbaity, Matteo Collina picks up on the idea and adds some nuance. His take is that code is cheap, but understanding context is expensive. Developers who simply pick up a task from Jira and write code — that's truly something that will be dying out. But people who have context, understand the business and its logic, and can review AI-generated code — that's where everything is heading.
🔸 Matt Smith writes about all the benefits of using and why it's worth trying right now.
🔸 The Node.js team continues to follow ideas from Bun and now offers us a native replacement for chalk. You can read a bit more about which features are supported here.
🔸 Do you know which architecture is best for ETL pipelines? If not, hurry up and read this article.
🔸 We must mention security. Here's what was fixed in Node.js this January.
🔸 Once again, some of what Amazon considers good practice and the right approach to architecture. This time about Durable Functions.
🔸 Joyee Cheung explains how creating Single Executable Applications is finally becoming reasonable thanks to the --build-sea flag. No more external workarounds.
🔸 Stephane Modreau reminds us in his blog about common architectures. I think many people already know this, but for those who haven't been to a System Design interview in a while, I recommend refreshing your memory.
🔸 Yet another comparison of cold starts among the top players in this segment. Cloudflare is faster on the Edge, but most people still choose Vercel because developer experience (DX) sells better than milliseconds.
🔸 Jeff Morhous reflects on which Node.js job queue is best to choose.
🔸 Is the good old for loop really that bad? Here are some benchmarks that prove it's not.
Something to Watch
Rafael Gonzaga knows an awful lot about Node.js. Here's a podcast where he talks about where Node.js is heading and what to expect from such an important platform for backend development.
On the Low Level channel, a relevant video about the vulnerability I mentioned above:
When was the last time you thought about concurrency? Maybe now's a good time:
If you're even a liiiittle bit full-stack and you're interested in understanding how the front end works, and if you know at least a bit of React, check out this "short" stream (only six hours from Ryan Carniato):
No surprise that using AI tools dulls our skills. More on the official Anthropic research on Theo Browne's channel:
Updates/Releases
Runtimes: Bun v1.3.9, Node.js v24.13.1, Node.js v25.6.1
Libraries: jsdom, typegoose, openai-node, better-sqlite3
A Few More Interesting Things
OpenClaw has been making a lot of noise in recent weeks. Here's an interview with the author of this interesting project:
And here's how Cloudflare is trying not to miss the hype and shows how you can deploy a multi-bot on their infrastructure:
Fireship reflects on what awaits us in 2026:
Of course, we can't do without AI. Andy Kuszyk talks about AI usage practices at Typeform:
To Stay on Top of the Memes
