#​403 — September 2, 2021

Read on the Web

Node Weekly

Deploying a Cloud Spanner-Based Node AppCloud Spanner is an ‘unlimited scale’ managed relational database service Google offers (and which was spun out of an internal database system Google used for numerous services). This post covers the practicalities of building a simple app with a Spanner database and spinning it up on Google Cloud.

Stefan Serban (Google)

Electron 14.0.0 Released — The latest major version of the popular cross-platform desktop app framework is here. It’s moving to an 8 week stable release schedule, so Electron 15 is due in just three weeks.. but for now you get Chromium 93, Node.js 14.17, and V8 9.3 support, experimental cookie encryption support, and a few removals (such as the remote module).

GitHub

Don’t Let the Bad Bugs Bite! — Manage errors with your team. Assign incidents, mark severity, and send incidents to GitHub. AppSignal also provides ridiculously deep debugging data for your Node.js errors. Hunting bugs was never easier.

AppSignal sponsor

Best Practices for Logging in Node — Nine tips walking through the essentials if you’re getting serious about logging - things like avoiding logging sensitive information, writing descriptive messages, and using logging levels correctly.

Ayo Isaiah

August 31 2021 Security Releases for Node 12.x and 14.x — If you’re on Node 16.x, scroll on, but the Node 12.x and 14.x branches have received v12.22.6 and v14.17.6 respectively to resolve some vulnerabilities (all around file overwriting, symbolic link abuse, and problematic path sanitization) in node-tar, arborist, and the npm cli modules.

Node.js Team

How to Use Puppeteer to Automate Chrome in an API with Netlify Serverless Functions — A walkthrough that brings together a few ideas: running serverless functions on Netlify (which are ultimately powered by AWS Lambda underneath), automating Chrome, and offering it all up as an HTTP accessible service. It’s simple stuff but if you’ve never joined all these parts together, tuck in.

Colby Fayock

'Software Development Topics I've Changed My Mind On After Six Years in the Industry' — An Amazon engineer reflects on his shifts in opinion which includes liking typed languages and the following (or not) of best practices.

Chris Kiehl

[Free Workshop] Building an IoT Application with InfluxDB

InfluxData sponsor

Reverse Proxying Node Apps on Windows with IIS — Not being in the Microsoft space, IIS hasn’t popped up on my radar for some time, but if you want to host Node apps on Windows, maybe this will help.

Travis Horn

Building Reactive Systems with Node.js — A look at why reactive systems are especially easy to implement with Node, followed by a walk through a reactive system built with Node and Apache Kafka.

Alexandros Alykiotis

Using Passport for Authentication in Node.js — Implementing authentication from scratch can often be a headache. As such, here’s a look at using Passport, a popular module for the task.

Subha Chanda

🛠 Code & Tools

smartcrop.js: Content Aware Image Cropping — Given an image, this can help find the ‘best’ part of the image to crop down to. Works in the browser and in Node.

Jonas Wagner

node-fetch 3.0: Lightweight Module Bringing the Fetch API to Node — Minimal code for a window.fetch compatible API on the Node runtime. Now a pure ES module.

Node Fetch

JZZ 1.4.0: A MIDI Library for Node and the Browser — Brings the Web MIDI API to Node so you can send, receive and play MIDI messages from both Node and the browser on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Jazz Soft

[Guide] Ship Fast. Stay Ahead of the Competition

LaunchDarkly sponsor

file-icon: Get the Icon of a File or App on macOS as a PNG Image — Yes, macOS only for this one.

Sindre Sorhus

on-change 4.0: Watch an Object or Array for Changes — The package is now pure ESM and can now handle typed arrays and dataviews.

Sindre Sorhus

Fiddly: Create Beautiful and Simple HTML Pages From Your readme.md FilesGitHub repo.

Sara Vieira

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