Node.js Digest #5: Node.js 21, Official Mascot Contest, Node.js Collab Summit, Bloomberg and Open Source
Node.js Digest #5 by Oleksandr Zinevych
Welcome to the new digest covering October. This month had a lot of interesting news in the Node.js world, so let's dive right in 👇
Key Highlights
🔹 Yarn v4.0 -- after more than a year of work, the team published a new version of their package manager. This version improves the user interface, adds protection against today's popular attacks, of course improves performance, and more.
🔹 Deno v1.38 -- a new Deno version, as always with performance improvements, Node.js compatibility enhancements, and more.
🔹 Bun v1.0.10 -- a new version that, as usual, improves the performance of one of its modules. This time it was node:http, which became 14 percent faster.
🔹 Netlify added support for npm in their Edge Functions.
🔹 Heroku now uses Node.js v20.x by default.
🔹 TypeScript 5.3 RC was announced -- bringing some new type narrowing capabilities, optimizations, improved code hints, and more.
Node.js 21
Node.js 21 was released on October 17, thereby moving Node.js v20 to LTS. The new version brings a lot of new things: improvements to the native test runner, experimental WebSockets, an updated V8 engine, performance improvements, and more. You can check the full list of what's included in the release here.
A Mascot for Node.js
On the official Node.js account on platform X, a competition to choose a mascot for Node.js ran until November 6. Among the options that users proposed publicly in this thread, you can find recycled popular memes, references to Bun, and simply nice photos of dogs. Want to brighten your mood? I recommend browsing through it 😉
Bloomberg's Contribution to Node.js
On the Nearform platform, an article by one of Bloomberg's engineers was published, where they share their experience not only of using Node.js but also of how their engineers contribute to the platform's development.
The article is about Bloomberg employee Joyee Cheung, who had been contributing to Node.js in her free (and later not only free 🙂) time outside of work. The company noticed this and decided to invest in open source by increasing the number of work hours that Joyee could dedicate to working on Node.js. As a result, Joyee developed a feature that speeds up Node.js startup through the use of snapshots, added various utility flags, improved memory management, and much more over the past few years.
I can only add my respect for this approach, and hope that more talented developers will use their skills to advance open source, and that companies will encourage this.
Node.js Collab Summit
A bit more about open source. The OpenJS Foundation posted videos from the Node.js Collab Summit. You can watch all the videos on the official channel.
Among the interesting highlights -- the summit presented the results of the latest survey, which provides a better understanding of the typical developer and contributor in the Node.js ecosystem:
As well as which new initiatives and features of the Node.js platform the community is most interested in:
You can review all other questions and answers in the official Node.js Next-10 repository. There, you can also follow not just the survey results but other news and initiatives as well.
Also interesting is the result of the brainstorming session, where the team came up with current technology trends that should in one way or another affect the Node.js ecosystem over the next 10 years, as well as Node.js features that are either missing or need improvement. The board with the results is here.
They also discussed how to publish Node.js news, how to encourage people to contribute to Node.js on a long-term basis, and about the new HTTP parser Node.js Milo.
So for anyone interested in how the platform is evolving, this is recommended viewing.
Something to Watch
-- First and foremost, of course, it's worth watching the recordings from the Nodeconf EU 2023 conference. There's a lot of interesting content, so set aside plenty of time. I personally highly recommend two talks:
Matteo Collina | Networkless HTTP
Bryan English | A New Way to Call Native Code in Node.js
-- On the Web Dev Cody channel, a video was released about why it's important to build a centralized approach to logging and how to do it using modern tools:
This is why you need a centralized logger on your software systems
-- Not exactly about Node.js, but since Rust is becoming more and more prevalent, both in individual packages and in Node.js itself, it's worth getting familiar with what this beast is all about. A new video from Chris Biscardi can help with that:
Why is the JavaScript ecosystem switching to Rust?
-- Amazon recently released their new service Amazon Bedrock. To see how to work with it through AWS Lambdas and Node.js, watch the new video from FooBar:
-- A talk by Kevin Whinnery about which frameworks work with Deno and how:
-- A new episode of Tekhreveni about the zoo of technologies we encounter in JavaScript development:
Something to Read
🔹 Amazon released updates for AWS Lambda that significantly improve scaling when working with SQS. More details in this article.
🔹 On the official Node.js website, an article was published about how to properly work with and avoid blocking the Event Loop. A must-read for anyone building anything more complex than a simple command-line script (according to the article's authors 🙂).
🔹 A new installment in the series of articles about performance in JavaScript projects by Marvin Hagemeister. This time it's about so-called barrel files and how they impact performance.
🔹 Some news from Deno. Deno KV now supports self-hosting and also supports backups to S3.
🔹 Recently on my LinkedIn, I ran a poll asking colleagues which framework they use. Nest.js turned out to be the winner, but many people still use Express on their projects. Here's a good thread about Express and what the community thinks about it.
🔹 Not directly related to the Node.js world, but definitely interesting. GitHub announced the winners of js13kGames 2023.
🔹 AppSignal traditionally publishes a lot of educational content for Node.js developers. This time they cover how to properly work with timeouts.
🔹 Why shouldn't you use npm install in your CI/CD pipeline? Robert Maier-Silldorff explains in his article.
Library of the Month
This time, the library of the month is serverless-offline, which recently received another update. This library will simplify your life and help you emulate AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway for efficient Serverless development.
