Express 5.1: Express 5 Finally Becomes the 'Latest' Release — After a period of some dormancy, Express 5.0 was released last year, but remained a somewhat experimental ‘edge’ release as it went through a security audit and process of building up new governance. With 5.1, however, Express 5.x finally becomes the ‘latest’ tagged release on npm, so be careful with those upgrades (luckily there’s a migration guide).

Express Technical Committee

ThePrimeagen's Dev Setup Is Better Than Yours — See why simpler dev tooling is better by hand-crafting an environment with bash scripts. You'll learn common Unix tools for managing libraries, interacting with the OS, window management, and more in this course.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Land Ahoy: Leaving the Sea of Nodes — A deeply technical post from a core member of the V8 JavaScript engine team that explains the limitations of Turbofan, one of V8’s optimizing compilers. If you don’t care for the internals of how your JavaScript is compiled and run, just be assured the V8 team is working to make it run even faster!

Darius Mercadier (V8)

Teable: Open Source Airtable Alternative atop Postgres — Airtable is a popular data table database SaaS, but here’s a NestJS-powered open-source alternative in a similar manner that sits atop Postgres. GitHub repo.

Teable Team

Nōdo: A Way to Call Node.js from Ruby — A mechanism for letting Ruby scripts make calls to Node.js-based functions via a Unix socket-based IPC approach. (We also learn that “ノード” means “node” in Japanese.)

Matthias Grosser

Playwright MCP: Connect LLMs to Browsers with Playwright — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions on systems outside of their usual sandbox. This new project from Microsoft enables such LLMs to interact with Web pages via Playwright.

Microsoft

Neutralinojs 6.0: Alternative Cross-Platform Desktop App Approach — Neutralinojs offers an interesting lightweight alternative to something like Electron, as it still lets you build apps that run on Linux, Windows and macOS, but Chromium isn’t bundled – instead the existing installed browser engine is used.

CodeZri