#337 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

✍️ With a few of the links today, this is a good time to note we sometimes link to things we disagree with or that are controversial if they are newsworthy or of relevance to our community. Inclusion is not always endorsement but you can read any summaries we write alongside items to get our take on things 😁

Node Weekly

Node v14.2.0 (Current) Released — The latest version of Node gains a new experimental way — assert.CallTracker — to track and verify function calls and the amount of times they occur. Also, require('console').Console now supports different group indentations

Node.js

Deno 1.0: What You Need to Know — Two years ago Ryan Dahl, the original creator of Node, gave a popular talk called 10 Things I Regret About Node.js where he revealed Deno, his prototype of how he'd build a better V8-based JavaScript runtime. With 1.0 due next week, Deno is poised to be a particularly exciting release and this article does a good job of cruising through the reasons why.

David Else

Enhance Node.js Performance with Datadog APM — Debug errors and bottlenecks in your code by tracing requests across web servers and services in your environment. Then correlate between distributed request traces, metrics, and logs to troubleshoot issues without switching tools or contexts. Try Datadog APM free.

Datadog APM sponsor

Deno Weekly: Our Newest Newsletter — We really like what we see from Deno (above) so far, so we're launching a new newsletter all about it! 😁 Rather than keep mentioning Deno in Node Weekly, we'll be giving it its own space. Even if you're not planning to use Deno, feel free to subscribe for a while, see what happens, then unsubscribe if it doesn't suit you — the next issue will drop on 1.0's release (due next Wednesday).

Cooperpress

Controlling GUIs Automatically with Nut.js — Write Node code that clicks on things, opens apps, types, clicks buttons, etc. Works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Hit the GitHub repo to learn more or check out some examples.

Simon Hofmann

A Practical Guide to Node Buffers — You’ll often encounter Buffer objects for holding binary data in the form of a sequence of bytes during interactions with the operating system, working with files, network transfers, etc.

DigitalOcean

💻 Jobs

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

ℹ️ If you're interested in running a job listing in this newsletter, there's more info here.

📚 Articles & Opinions

How to Build a REST Service with Fastify — How to build a basic RESTful service using Fastify, a popular Node Web framework focused on performance/low overheads.

Wisdom Ekpot

▶  How to Use Node.js for Load Testing — A straightforward tour of an approach for hitting a Web site over and over from multiple child processes.

Tom Baranowicz

How to Fix ESLint Errors Upon Save in VS Code — A quick fire tip.

David Walsh

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Avoiding Memory Leaks in Node: Best Practices for Performance — Covers very similar ground to another memory leak article we linked recently.

Deepu K Sasidharan

'Some thoughts on the npm acquisition..' — The creator of Hapi and an investor in npm Inc. shared his thoughts on GitHub’s acquisition of npm. I disagree with his conclusion (and his views have also caused concern on Twitter) but it’s nonetheless interesting to get views from behind the curtain.

Eran Hammer

🛠 Tools, Resources and Libraries

npm 6.14.5 Released — Just a couple of minor bug fixes.

The npm Blog

actions-cli: Monitor Your GitHub Actions in Real Time from the Command Line

Tommaso De Rossi

SQL Template Tag: Tagged Template Strings for Preparing SQL Statements — For use with pg and mysql, for example.

Blake Embrey

webpack-blocks: Configure webpack using Functional Feature Blocks

Andy Wermke

JavaScript Error Tracking with AppSignal v1.3.0 is Here

AppSignal sponsor

FarmHash 3.1: A Node Implementation of Google's High Performance Hash FunctionsFarmHash is a family of non-cryptographic hash functions built by Google mostly for quickly hashing strings.

Lovell Fuller

do-wrapper 4.0: A Node Wrapper for the DigitalOcean v2 API

Matthew Major