Subverting Control with Weak References — Node supports WeakMap and WeakRef for working with weak references and James is a big fan of the extra abstractions they unlock. A weak reference differs from a normal reference in that it doesn’t prevent a referenced object from being garbage collected – this might sound like it has limited value, but is quite useful in certain scenarios.

James Long

Node v23.8.0 (Current) Released — You can now tell Node to use the system’s trusted CA certificate store with --use-system-ca and there’s an implementation of the URL Pattern API (URLPattern will become a global in Node 24). Other minor enhancements include an update to Node’s timezone data and initial support for the zstd compression algorithm (via node:zlib).

Michaël Zasso

Functional JavaScript First Steps, v2 — A friendly, practical introduction to functional programming fundamentals in JavaScript. Learn the power of the pure function while exploring functional programming paradigms.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Migrating 160K Lines of Production JS to TypeScript Without Downtime — A quick look at the motivation, strategy developed, and a few of the tools that made it a less painful process. But was it worth it? “Absolutely,” Ben says.

Ben Howdle

A Demo of Running TypeScript Directly in Node.js — “I have published the repository nodejs-type-stripping which demonstrates how to implement a package with a bin script that is written directly in TypeScript (no transpilation).”

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Why TypeScript 5.8's --erasableSyntaxOnly Matters — “It disables a bunch of features that I don’t think should ever have been part of TypeScript.”

Matt Pocock

Optimize Your BullMQ Workers — Queues backed up? Workers over-provisioned? Automatic scaling based on queues is the answer!

Judoscale sponsor

upfetch: An Advanced fetch Client Builder — A TypeScript library to enhance fetch with schema validation, automatic response parsing, and type-safety, while maintaining the familiar fetch API.

Laurent Blondy

Mastra: A TypeScript AI Framework from the Gatsby Team — From some of the folks behind the Gatsby React framework comes a new way to build LLM-powered agents that perform various tasks, use knowledge bases, and hold memory. Think a meta-framework like Next.js but for AI agents. GitHub repo.

Mastra

Opus 0.10: Native Opus Bindings for Node — Bindings for libopus, a library for working with the Opus lossy audio codec.

Discord.js Team

♟️ Chess.js 1.1: A Library to Manage a Chess Game — Move generation/validation, piece placement, check/checkmate/stalemate detection – “basically everything but the AI”!

Jeff Hlywa