#303 — August 29, 2019

Read on the Web

Being the end of August, it was a really quiet week this week, but we've somehow built a full issue! 😄 However, always feel free to hit reply and send us links to things you've written, released, etc. and we'll be sure to take a look :-)

Node Weekly

▶  A Journey Into Node's Internals — A 45 minute talk covering some of the Node platform’s internals, including a deep dive into the event loop, how it works, what its different phases are, and how it enables non-blocking IO.

Tamar Twena-Stern

Node v12.9.1 (Current) Released — A patch level release fixing two regressions in the http module.

Node.js Foundation

New Course: 🔩 Digging into Node.js with Kyle Simpson — Learn Node.js piece-by-piece, from building command line scripts, to reading and writing files, to web servers and more...all while using very few libraries and abstractions.

Frontend Masters sponsor

A Practical Guide to Symbols in JavaScript — ES6 introduced symbols as a new primitive type to act as unique identifiers. Here’s a look at their uses.

Valeri Karpov

npm.community: The Official npm Forum — We first mentioned its launch a year ago but in case you’re not aware of it, npm.community is the place to go for npm-related support, discussion, or to even suggest new features and ideas for the tool.

npm forum

A Recap of the 'funding' Experiment Which Brought Ads to npm install — If you saw an ‘ad’ in your terminal when installing packages recently, it might have been the funding package at play. It was an experiment at raising funds for open source developers by showing a simple text ad during npm package installation. The experiment is now over, however.

Feross Aboukhadijeh

💻 Jobs

Have You Thought About Being a Web Developer in Robotics? — A unique opportunity to work on a high-powered engineering web application for a computer vision system combining 3D graphics and an intuitive user experience.

Veo Robotics

Node developers are in demand on Vettery — Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

📚 Articles and Tutorials

Understanding and Protecting Against Malicious npm Package Lifecycle Scripts — Explains the importance of understanding how npm lifecycle scripts such as preinstall and postinstall work, how they could, (and have been) used maliciously, and some advice on what you can do to avoid trouble.

Kyle Martin

Building a Node API with Stateless Authentication — A simple look at implementing stateless authentication with JWTs (JSON Web Tokens).

Henrik Molnes

Build Video for Your Node App in Just Two API Calls — Mux Video is an API-first platform, powered by data and designed by video experts to make beautiful video possible for every development team.

Mux sponsor

▶  Leveraging Angular in Node with NestJS — Bringing the Angular development experience to the back-end.

Kamil Mysliwiec

How the Node Event Loop Polls — If you’ve ever wondered what libuv is.. this will help you grasp the first few steps.

Alex Woods

Running Express on Cloud Functions for Firebase — The idea of running Express apps in serverless contexts always takes me a while to understand, but it’s an increasingly popular approach.

Michele Riva

Going Beyond npm with Yarn and pnpm — A quick look at two alternatives to npm if you haven’t ventured off that path yet.

Niccolo Borgioli

🛠 Code and Tools

ndb: An Improved Debugging Experience for Node — Run your Node code with ndb and get extra, powerful Node debugging features right in Chrome’s DevTools including editing files and setting breakpoints before modules are loaded.

Google Chrome Labs

Memento: A Developer Tool for Caching HTTP Requests — You’d use this for caching API responses while in development only to either avoid rate limits, guarantee responses, be able to work offline, etc.

Antoine Chalifour

MongoDB Atlas is a Powerful and Reliable Cloud Database. Try Now

MongoDB Atlas sponsor

Feathers 4: A Framework for Real-Time Apps and REST APIs — Feathers brings together Node, React Native and the browser in a reasonably novel (for Node) framework based around services and workflows rather than the more traditional routes and controllers.

David Luecke

Web Template Studio 2.0: Generate New Apps from VS Code Wizard-Style — Web Template Studio is an extension, from Microsoft, for Visual Studio Code that simplifies creating new full-stack apps in a ‘wizard’-esque style. It supports Node as a backend (as well as Python’s Flask).

Lea Akkari (Microsoft)