#​609 — January 29, 2026

Read on the Web

Together with  Clerk
Node.js Weekly

🌊 Improving Single Executable Application Building in Node — First introduced two years ago, Node has a (still experimental) feature to build single executable applications that can be deployed to machines that don’t have Node installed. This week’s Node.js 25.5 release, with its --build-sea flag, moves the final injection step into Node itself, eliminating the need for external tooling and turning what was a multi-step, low-level process into a single command.

Joyee Cheung

Node.js 25.5.0 (Current) Released — The new --build-sea command-line flag is the headline feature (see above). node:sqlite also enables defensive mode by default, and fs.watch gains an ignore option to filter filesystem events.

Antoine du Hamel

Clerk MCP Server for AI Coding Assistants — Your AI assistant hallucinates auth code because it's working from stale training data. The Clerk MCP server fixes that — connect Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to current SDK docs and get working implementations for middleware, protected routes, organizations, and RBAC.

Clerk sponsor

📊 Node.js 16 to 25 Benchmarked Version-by-Version — It’s interesting to see the jumps in different areas between different versions. The performance for certain tasks took a massive jump up with Node 25 in particular, while other improvements are more gradual.

RepoFlow

IN BRIEF:

  • Run npx is-my-node-vulnerable right now, suggests NodeSource. It's a tool, backed by the Node.js project, that checks if your Node.js install is vulnerable to known vulnerabilities.

  • Want to save yourself between 2ms and 260ms when running npm scripts? The nr tool, a new 'zero-overhead npm script runner written in Rust', might be worth a try.

  • Reddit's /r/node had a popular thread about if you were starting fresh today, would you still pick Express? "I wouldn't even choose Node," said one commenter. Ouch!

  • 🔒 The OpenJS Foundation has shared an annual report covering its efforts in securing the Node.js ecosystem and other OpenJS projects.

  • Fancy quickly testing your typing speed? Try npx typex-cli

▶  Discussing Node.js in 2026 with Rafael Gonzaga — Node.js TSC member Rafael Gonzaga digs into Node runtime internals, V8-driven performance shifts, benchmarking fallacies, and why many “obvious” speedups can’t ship by default without breaking the ecosystem..

Software Engineering Daily podcast

🔒 Node's OpenSSL Security Advisory Assessment — The OpenSSL project has released a security advisory including 12 CVEs. The Node.js team concludes that three affect Node in some way, but due to a ‘limited attack surface’, they’ll be addressed in normal, upcoming releases.

The Node.js Team

Build Faster Dashboards with TimescaleDB — 95% compression, continuous aggregates, full Postgres. Query billions of rows instantly. Start for free.

Tiger Data sponsor

📄 Benchmarking Popular Node.js Redis/Valkey Clients“I benchmarked all major Node.js Redis clients … to see if we should stick with ioredis or if there are benefits to migrating …” Frank Fiegel

📄 Making GitHub Actions Suck a Little Less – With a simple auto-retry workflow to work around transient failures. Jonathan Milgrom

📄 Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare: Serverless Cold Starts Compared Punit Sethi

🛠 Code & Tools

Introducing LibPDF: PDF Parsing and Generation from TypeScriptLibPDF bills itself as ‘the PDF library TypeScript deserves’ and supports parsing, modifying, signing and generating PDFs with a modern API in Node, Bun, and the browser. GitHub repo.

Documenso

🤖 Build an Agent into Any App with the GitHub Copilot SDK — GitHub has released an SDK enabling you to use Copilot’s ‘agentic core’ and workflows directly from your Node apps.

Mario Rodriguez (GitHub)

📋 clipboardy: Access the System Clipboard — A unified API for writing to/reading from the clipboard on numerous operating systems.

Sindre Sorhus

network-default-gateway: Find Your Machine's Default Gateway — Retrieve the default gateway to which your network device is connected. Works with Node, Deno, and Bun and has OS-specific code to run on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Luca Fornerone

📰 Classifieds

🚀 Auth0 for AI Agents is the complete auth solution for building AI agents more securely. Start building today.


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📢  Elsewhere in the ecosystem

A roundup of some other interesting stories in the broader landscape: