Speeding up the JavaScript Ecosystem: Polyfills Gone Rogue? — Marvin has been on a mission to speed up popular libraries – first blogging about speeding up the JS ecosystem, one library at a time last year. Earlier this year he tackled npm scripts, and now he’s looking at the role of ‘unnecessary polyfills’ play in making node_modules folders so large. There are two sides to every story, though, as this Hacker News thread dug into.

Marvin Hagemeister

GitHub Actions Could Be So Much Better — GitHub Actions provides a fantastic and useful service, but the developer experience leaves a lot to be desired, particularly when debugging them. If you’ve been frustrated with figuring out Action and setting up your own workflows, you’ll find a lot to nod along to here.

William Woodruff

Memetria: Secure, Scalable Redis 7 Hosting — High performance Redis hosting with large key tracking, detailed metrics, and a superior uptime record.

Memetria sponsor

Token Based Authentication with JWTs in Fastify — Learn how to build secure authentication systems with Fastify, JWT, and TypeScript with this guide. (BTW, there should be more posts about Fastify – if you write any yourself, send them in to us!)

Arif Imran

Why the Temporal API is Awesome — It’s still sat in stage 3 as a proposal, but the Temporal API aims to work around a lot of Date’s limitations without needing to rely on third-party libraries.

Taro Dragan

JavaScript Minification Benchmarks — A frequently updated benchmark suite and results comparing the speed and quality of JavaScript minification approaches across a variety of tools including esbuild, Babel, Bun, SWC, and Uglify.

Hiroki Osame

Gitify: GitHub Notifications From Your Menu Bar — If you get too many GitHub notifications, this utility aims to ‘tame’ them by collecting together said notifications into a single app for macOS, Windows and Linux. Built using Node and React as an Electron app. Is it open source? Of course.

Manos Konstantinidis

Release Please 16.0: A Release Automation Tool from Google — A Google API team project that automates CHANGELOG, GitHub release, and release PR generation for projects that use Conventional Commits style commit messages.

Google APIs

Fully Managed Postgres + Great Support — We love helping people Postgres. Build your database knowledge with responses tailored to your environment.

Crunchy Bridge sponsor

Envalid 8.0: Environment Variable Validation — Ensure your program only runs when all of its environment dependencies are met. 8.0 is technically a ‘minor bump’ in terms of features, but the types have been changed enough to warrant it.

Aaron Franks

RDB: A Database Agnostic ORM for Node — Around for many years, RDB nonetheless sits amongst a wide range of options, but the homepage includes lots of examples of its API, so it’s easy to see if its particular flavor is to your taste. It supports both JS and TypeScript, ESM and CJS. GitHub repo.

Lars-Erik Roald

Jazzer.js 2.0: Coverage-Guided, In-Process Fuzzing for Node — Instrumentation-powered mutation for the JavaScript ecosystem by way of libFuzzer. If you’re upgrading, there’s a migration guide.

Code Intelligence

Simple Git 3.20: Run git Commands in Node Apps — Not a Git reimplementation (such as isomorphic-git) but an interface/abstraction for using the standard git client from your Node code.

Steve King

Critical 6.0: Extracts and Inlines Critical Path CSS from HTML — A Node powered tool for when you want to optimize a page’s rendering to the max by inlining above-the-fold CSS.

Addy Osmani

The Canary in the Gold Mine v9.0 — A core tool that lets you pull down any module of your choice and test it using a specific version of the Node runtime. It’s used by the Node.js Project itself to test releases and ‘controversial changes.’

Node.js Project

node-poppler 7.0: Async Wrapper for the Poppler PDF Renderer — Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on xpdf. Note that Windows binaries come with this package but Linux and macOS users have some dependencies to install.

Frazer Smith