#​573 — April 8, 2025

Read on the Web

Together with  Memetria
Node.js Weekly

Node.js Testing Best Practices — A detailed guide to modern testing in Node from a group of developers who know all about it. It’s on GitHub but is essentially written like a free book covering over 50 battle-tested tips covering areas as diverse as the ‘Testing Diamond’, testing microservices, checking contracts, verifying OpenAPI correctness, and simulating flaky network conditions.

Goldberg, Salomon, and Gluskin

Memetria K/V: Efficient Redis & Valkey Hosting — Memetria K/V hosts Redis OSS and Valkey for Node.js apps, featuring large key tracking and detailed analytics to manage and optimize application data effectively.

Memetria sponsor

A Practical Guide to Llama Stack for Node Developers — Red Hat’s Node team has been digging deep into LLM coding in recent months, and now shares its discoveries in using Meta’s Llama Stack (not to be confused with their Llama LLM) – it’s a unified set of APIs for working with numerous parts of the modern LLM-powered stack including models, evals, RAG, tool calling, etc.

Michael Dawson

How the Node Team Makes Node.js Downloads Reliable — I’m sure most of us rely on just clicking and downloading Node.js (or having a package manager or CI process do it) and it Just Works™. Turns out there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to keep Node.js quick and easy to download and this tells the full story of an operation that serves up over 3 petabytes(!) of traffic a month.

flakey5

💡 We're also reminded that Node.js has a live status page, just in case you ever do encounter problems.

Could JavaScript Have Synchronous Await? — Our favorite JavaScript doctor explores the idea of a synchronous await to erase the divide between sync and async code, explains why it’s enticing, and digs into why performance hits and concurrency headaches make it impractical.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

IN BRIEF:

📄 How to Easily Reproduce a Flaky Test in Playwright Nicolas Charpentier

📄 Unstructured-ish DOCX Parsing in Node Thành

🛠 Code & Tools

Bare: A New Lightweight Runtime for Modular JS Apps — Imagine something like Node.js but really stripped back: bare, if you will. Like Node, it’s built on top of V8 and libuv, but Bare’s approach is to provide as little as possible (a module system, addon system, and thread support) and then rely upon userland modules that can evolve independently of Bare itself. It’s an interesting idea – more details here.

Holepunch

java-bridge: A Bridge Between Node.js and Java — Last week we were bridging Ruby and Node, this week we’re going between Node and Java using a Rust-powered bridge. Yes, running System.out.println('Hello world!'); directly in Node could well be in your future..

MarkusJx

🍜 Tonkotsu Makes You the Tech Lead for a Team of AI Agents — We just started our FREE early access program for JS/TS developers and want to hear directly from early adopters. Sign up today.

Tonkotsu sponsor

🎵 Communicate with Ableton Live via WebSocketsAbleton Live is a popular DAW (digital audio workstation) and this opens up a way to control it from Node.js code.

Ricardo Matias

📢  Elsewhere in JavaScript

A roundup of some other interesting stories in the broader JavaScript landscape, in case you've missed them: