15 Recent Node Features That Can Replace Popular npm Packages — Many features that once required third-party packages are now built into the runtime itself. Here’s a look at some of the most notable that you may want to experiment with, prior to reducing unnecessary dependencies.

Lizz Parody

Awesome npm Security Best Practices — Web security expert Liran Tal has put together a handy set of best practices to consider when working with the npm ecosystem, whether or not you’re using the canonical npm tool. Plenty of good advice here.

Liran Tal

API Design in Node — Ready to build scalable APIs with Node and Express? Join Scott Moss for this video course and learn RESTful API design, testing techniques, authentication and authorization, error handling, and more. Create a production deployment and ship your next API today!

Frontend Masters sponsor

📉 Processing 14GB Files 78% Faster with Buffer Optimization — The author took on an interesting challenge for fun: how quickly could he get Node to process almost 15 gigabytes of weather data? “By the end of the weekend, what started as idle curiosity turned into a 78% speedup—but the story of how I got there is far more interesting than the numbers alone.”

Peter Mbanugo

How Deno Protects Against npm Exploits — The maintainers of the Deno runtime reflect on the recent npm ecosystem security issues, and show off how Deno’s non-permissive explicit ‘secure by default’ model can help.

Andy Jiang (Deno)

🧹 Cleaning House in Nx Monorepo: How I Removed 120 Unused Dependencies Safely — Another win (mostly) for Knip, a tool that helps you declutter projects by finding unused dependencies.

John James

Free Virtual DevSecCon on Oct 22, 2025 — Join the AI Security Developers Challenge at DevSecCon 2025 on October 22nd and learn best practices to secure AI-native apps. Register now!

Snyk sponsor

Javet 5.0: A Way to Embed Node.js and V8 in Java — The idea is you can use Node and V8 directly within the JVM. Platform support is mixed, but it's an interesting idea and the docs are good. GitHub repo.

Sam Cao

Cap'n Web: A New RPC System for Browsers and Web Servers — A ‘spiritual sibling’ to Cap’n Proto, an RPC protocol created by one of the same authors. However, Cap’n Web’s underlying serialization is human-readable, focused on integrating well with JS runtimes, and works over HTTP, WebSocket, and postMessage() out-of-the-box.

Varda and Faulkner (Cloudflare)

*.* Globby 15.0: User-Friendly Glob Matching — Give it an array of globs and it returns an array of matching paths. It even supports negations and .gitignore files.

Sindre Sorhus

Icebird: Read Apache Iceberg Tables in JavaScript — Iceberg is a high performance open-source format for large analytic tables.

Hyperparam

🖼️ Odiff 4.0: A Fast Pixel-by-Pixel Image Diffing Tool and Library — Claims to provide results in milliseconds. You can use it as a CLI tool or from Node (though it’s written in OCaml, primarily). It supports PNG, JPG, and BMP, including cross-file comparisons.

Dmitriy Kovalenko