#301 — April 24, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

'Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases' — A Google engineer (whose name may be familiar to those Go developers amongst you) shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself..

Jaana B. Dogan

Lambda Store: A New 'Serverless Redis' Service — This seems a neat idea. Claiming to not be just another Redis cloud service, Lambda Store applies a serverless-style pricing model which opens up a variety of neat use cases for the popular data structure server (serverless caching, for starters). The underlying system appears to be a custom clone of Redis rather than the real deal, however.

Sven Anderson

???? AWS, GCP, & Azure Punch Back at the 2020 Cloud Report — AWS, GCP, & Azure each responded to the Cockroach Labs 2020 Cloud Report with instructions on how to tune their respective clouds for optimal performance.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview from an engineer at ScyllaDB.

Glauber Costa

kvrocks: An Open Source, RocksDB-based, Redis-compatible Database — You know Redis’s API is good when so many projects continue to implement it for themselves. kvrocks brings the Redis API (with pretty good support) together with the RocksDB persistent key-value store. Written in C++.

Bit Leak

Mireo SpaceTime: An Absurdly Fast Spatiotemporal Database? — The SpaceTime database provides unprecedented analytical tools speed, sometimes outperforming other state-of-the-art solutions by three orders of magnitude.

Miljen Mikić

Cloud GPUs Aimed at Data Scientists — Core Scientific, an AI and cloud infrastructure vendor, is teaming with GPU-accelerated analytics specialist SQream Technologies to deliver a “GPU Cloud for Data Scientists.”

Datanami

An Easy Postgres 12 and pgAdmin 4 Setup with Docker — Docker provides an easy and loosely coupled way to get things set up in a development environment.

Jonathan S. Katz

Why We Index Everything — Tired of constantly managing indexes to speed up queries? Learn about how Rockset automatically indexes every field in a row-based store, column-based store, and search index.

Rockset sponsor

Redis Labs Moving RedisJSON to a New Codebase Written in Rust — RedisJSON provides a JSON data type to Redis and it’s been ported from C to Rust for better safety and developer experience.

Gavrie Philipson (Redis Labs)

Replicate Multiple Postgres Servers to a Single MongoDB Server using Logical Decoding Output Plugin

David Zhang

xsv: A Fast CSV Command Line Toolkit Written in Rust — Another ‘Swiss Army knife’ for your slightly structured data.

Andrew Gallant

???? Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Data Engineer (Remote - USA Only) — Help us architect and design “big data” systems which require queries returning within sub-second response times.

Social Chorus

#335 — April 23, 2020

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Node Weekly

Node.js 14 Released — Woo-hoo another major release of Node.js is here. v14 now becomes the current ‘release’ line with it becoming a LTS (Long Term Support) release in October.. so production apps would, ideally, remain on v12 for now. So what’s new..?

• Diagnostic reports are now a stable feature.
• It's based on V8 8.1.
• An experimental Async Local Storage API
• Improvements to streams.
• An experimental WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) to support future WebAssembly use cases.
• Bye bye to the ESM module ‘experimental’ warning (though it still is experimental).

Michael Dawson and Bethany Griggs

Learn Hardcore Functional Programming in JavaScript — Join Brian Lonsdorf and learn how to apply such concepts as pure functions, currying, composition, functors, monads and more.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Puppeteer 3.0: Say Hello to Firefox — Best known as a way to headlessly control Chrome from Node, Puppeteer has recently seen some competition in the form of the cross-browser Playwright recently. But competition can be good and Puppeteer now supports Firefox too.

Mathias Bynens

ZEIT Is Now Vercel — You probably best know ZEIT as the creators and maintainers of the popular Next.js React framework and their ‘Now’ deployment and hosting platform.

Vercel

New OpenSSL Security Release To Require Node Updates? Maybe Not.. — A key security update to OpenSSL raised the possibility of widespread Node releases to incorporate the fixes, but initial suggestions are that Node isn’t affected. Fingers crossed!

Sam Roberts

???? Jobs

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

OneTesselAway: Building a Real-Time Public Transit Status Device — A developer wanted to know when the next bus would arrive.. while using lots of cool tech, including Node, the OneBusAway API, and the Tessel 2 IoT platform.

Robert McGuire

What is the toJSON() Function? — If an object has a toJSON function, JSON.stringify() calls toJSON() and serializes the return value from toJSON() instead.

Valeri Karpov

Top GitHub Best Practices for Developers - Expanded Guide — Implementing these best practices could save you time, improve code maintainability, and prevent security risks.

Datree.io sponsor

Refactor Your Node and Express APIs to Serverless with Azure Functions — John Papa points out a Microsoft tutorial that walks through the process of taking a Node API serverless with Azure’s Functions service.

John Papa

Querying SQL Server from Node with async/await

Rob Tomlin

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

lazynpm: A Terminal UI for npm — One of those sort of things you don’t realize you need until you give it a go. There’s a four-minute screencast if you want to see how it works without downloading.

Jesse Duffield

node-sqlite3 4.2: Async, Non-blocking SQLite3 Bindings for Node — 4.2.0 just came out.

Mapbox

ts-gphoto2-driver: A Node Wrapper for libgphoto2 — libgphoto2 provides a way to control a variety of digital cameras/DSLRs.

Lenzotti Romain

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

Rosetta: A General Purpose Internationalization Library in 292 Bytes — Less than 300 bytes, but does have a few dependencies. Aims to be very simple and is targeted at basic string use cases.

Luke Edwards

nodejs-dns 2.0: The Google Cloud DNS Client for Node

Google

node-osc 5.0: Open Sound Control Protocol Library — OSC is a protocol used to communicate between media devices.

Myles Borins

ts-node: TypeScript Execution and REPL for Node

TypeStrong

???? And One for Fun..

npm trends: Compare NPM Package Downloads — A site to compare package download counts over time. For example, what about koa vs restify vs fastify?

John Potter

#336 — April 30, 2020

Read on the Web

Be sure to check out the Tools and Libraries section today as there have been quite a lot of (minor) releases.. from MIDI parsing and JPEG decoding to generating TypeScript types from a Postgres database.. maybe there's something for you ????

Node Weekly

Middy 1.0: A Node Middleware Framework for AWS Lambda — Middy’s aim is to make writing serverless functions (hosted on AWS Lambda) easier by providing a familiar middleware abstraction to Node developers. The example in this post shows off the main benefit.

Luciano Mammino

Rust and Node.js: A Match Made in Heaven? — This is technical stuff but using other languages, such as Rust, for building add-ons for Node is an interesting area.

Anshul Goyal

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Editly: Slick, Declarative Command Line Video Editing — I’ve long wondered why there isn’t a good way to “code” video editing at the command line other than wrangling with arcane ffmpeg options. Well.. this uses ffmpeg, but it handles a lot of the wrangling for you.

Mikael Finstad

Node v14.1.0 (Current) Released — Last week we featured the release of Node 14.0 and 14.1 is already with us. Principally bug fixes, plus an update to the OpenSSL dependency.

Bethany Nicolle Griggs

???? Jobs

Backend Developer (Skien, Norway) — We are looking for a full-stack dev with a solid track record to help us adapt to tomorrow's security requirements.

OKAY

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

Four Tools for Web Scraping in Node — A walk through of a few different libraries (for scraping and parsing data directly from websites) to see how they work and how they compare to each other.

Sam Agnew

Six Platforms for Hosting a Node App in 2020 — Of course, you can run a Node app pretty much anywhere there’s a server, but some platforms make it easier than others. These all have free tiers too. Glitch, Now.sh (now Vercel) and Heroku are particular favorites of ours at Cooperpress.

Amit Bendor

Getting Started with NuxtJS — Learn how to create Vue.js-powered server-side rendered apps with NuxtJS including configuring an app and deploying it on Heroku.

Timi Omoyeni

The Node.js Security Handbook — Improve the security of your Node.js app with the Node.js security handbook made for developers.

Sqreen sponsor

A Collection of Challenging TypeScript Exercises — “The goal: Let everyone play with many different TypeScript features and get an overview of TypeScript capabilities and principles.”

Marat Dulin

Exploring Node.js Internals — It’s reasonably elementary but Aleem Isiaka explains how the internals of Node.js interact with one another on a simple task such as creating a file.

Smashing Magazine

Creating CommonJS-Based npm Packages via TypeScript

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

Turning Vue Components Into Reusable npm Packages — Outlines how you can reuse Vue components across your projects by automating your process to bundle, test, document, and publish your components.

Sjoerd de voorhoede

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

Node v12.16.3 (LTS) Released — OpenSSL gets an update, and warnings are no longer printed for modules that use conditional exports or package name self resolution.

Node.js

pm2 4.4 Released: The Node Production Process Manager — A very mature and widely used process manager that includes a load balancer for keeping Node apps alive forever and to reload them without downtime. v4.4 improves the Node 14 compatibility.

Alexandre Strzelewicz

jpeg-js: A Pure JavaScript JPEG Encoder and Decoder — It admits it’s far slower than native alternatives but if you need a pure JavaScript JPEG encoder/decoder, this is where to go.

Eugene Ware

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks

AppSignal sponsor

node-stream-zip: For Fast Reading of ZIP Archives — Reads chunk by chunk rather than all in one go so it’s memory friendly.

Dimitri Witkowski

JZZ: A MIDI Library for Node and Web Browsers — Send, receive and play MIDI messages from both Node and the browser on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Sema

Vegemite: A Pub/Sub State Manager — Inspired by Immer and Redux, full TypeScript support, and sized at only 623 bytes, which includes one dependency.

Luke Edwards

Kanel: Generate TypeScript Types from Postgres

Kristian Dupont

web-worker: Consistent Web Workers for the Browser and Node — In Node it works as a web-compatible Worker implementation atop worker_threads. In the browser it’s an alias for Worker.

Jason Miller

node-csv-parse: A CSV Parser Implementing the stream.Transform API

Adaltas

#337 — May 7, 2020

Read on the Web

✍️ With a few of the links today, this is a good time to note we sometimes link to things we disagree with or that are controversial if they are newsworthy or of relevance to our community. Inclusion is not always endorsement but you can read any summaries we write alongside items to get our take on things ????

Node Weekly

Node v14.2.0 (Current) Released — The latest version of Node gains a new experimental way — assert.CallTracker — to track and verify function calls and the amount of times they occur. Also, require('console').Console now supports different group indentations

Node.js

Deno 1.0: What You Need to Know — Two years ago Ryan Dahl, the original creator of Node, gave a popular talk called 10 Things I Regret About Node.js where he revealed Deno, his prototype of how he'd build a better V8-based JavaScript runtime. With 1.0 due next week, Deno is poised to be a particularly exciting release and this article does a good job of cruising through the reasons why.

David Else

Enhance Node.js Performance with Datadog APM — Debug errors and bottlenecks in your code by tracing requests across web servers and services in your environment. Then correlate between distributed request traces, metrics, and logs to troubleshoot issues without switching tools or contexts. Try Datadog APM free.

Datadog APM sponsor

Deno Weekly: Our Newest Newsletter — We really like what we see from Deno (above) so far, so we're launching a new newsletter all about it! ???? Rather than keep mentioning Deno in Node Weekly, we'll be giving it its own space. Even if you're not planning to use Deno, feel free to subscribe for a while, see what happens, then unsubscribe if it doesn't suit you — the next issue will drop on 1.0's release (due next Wednesday).

Cooperpress

Controlling GUIs Automatically with Nut.js — Write Node code that clicks on things, opens apps, types, clicks buttons, etc. Works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Hit the GitHub repo to learn more or check out some examples.

Simon Hofmann

A Practical Guide to Node Buffers — You’ll often encounter Buffer objects for holding binary data in the form of a sequence of bytes during interactions with the operating system, working with files, network transfers, etc.

DigitalOcean

???? Jobs

Node.js Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Opinions

How to Build a REST Service with Fastify — How to build a basic RESTful service using Fastify, a popular Node Web framework focused on performance/low overheads.

Wisdom Ekpot

▶  How to Use Node.js for Load Testing — A straightforward tour of an approach for hitting a Web site over and over from multiple child processes.

Tom Baranowicz

How to Fix ESLint Errors Upon Save in VS Code — A quick fire tip.

David Walsh

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Avoiding Memory Leaks in Node: Best Practices for Performance — Covers very similar ground to another memory leak article we linked recently.

Deepu K Sasidharan

'Some thoughts on the npm acquisition..' — The creator of Hapi and an investor in npm Inc. shared his thoughts on GitHub’s acquisition of npm. I disagree with his conclusion (and his views have also caused concern on Twitter) but it’s nonetheless interesting to get views from behind the curtain.

Eran Hammer

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

npm 6.14.5 Released — Just a couple of minor bug fixes.

The npm Blog

actions-cli: Monitor Your GitHub Actions in Real Time from the Command Line

Tommaso De Rossi

SQL Template Tag: Tagged Template Strings for Preparing SQL Statements — For use with pg and mysql, for example.

Blake Embrey

webpack-blocks: Configure webpack using Functional Feature Blocks

Andy Wermke

JavaScript Error Tracking with AppSignal v1.3.0 is Here

AppSignal sponsor

FarmHash 3.1: A Node Implementation of Google's High Performance Hash Functions — FarmHash is a family of non-cryptographic hash functions built by Google mostly for quickly hashing strings.

Lovell Fuller

do-wrapper 4.0: A Node Wrapper for the DigitalOcean v2 API

Matthew Major