~nodeweekly | Bookmarks (147)

Fastify + React – 7x Faster than Next.js? — Node’s Fastify framework has a mature plugin for Vite integration (explained in detail here), including @fastify/react which just hit version 1.0 and makes it easy to create fast, featureful (though obviously less so than Next.js) React apps atop Fastify. How fast? Very, it seems.

Chrono 2.8: A Natural Language Date Parser — Give it a string like “today”, “last Friday”, “2 weeks from now”, or even an entire date and time, and it’ll come up with a date object to suit.

Prisma ORM 6.6.0 Released — Introduces a new prisma-client generator that’s more flexible and comes with ESM support, plus a preview of an MCP server to let AI agents and tools manage Postgres.

Lexe: Package a Node App into a Single Executable — Node actually has a mechanism for creating single executable applications and there are numerous other tools to do it, but Lexe takes the approach of using Amazon’s lightweight LLRT engine to make binaries of under 10MB in size. Note, however, "Lexe is not a drop-in replacement for Node.js. It only supports a subset of Node.js APIs."

Some Features Every JavaScript Developer Should Know in 2025 — A quick list post breezing through a few more modern areas of JavaScript including iterator helpers, structuredClone(), and set operations.

Comparing Tauri and Electron for Building Desktop Apps — Electron is a natural choice for building JS and HTML-powered cross-platform desktop apps but numerous alternatives have appeared like Neutralinojs and the Rust-based Tauri. This post does a good job of quickly showing how Tauri differs and why you might choose it.

Bi-Weekly Demo: Find & Fix Errors in Your Application — In this fast-paced 25-min demo, see how Sentry (and Codecov) help you catch Node errors, spot slowdowns, and ship cleaner code—without getting buried in logs. Hosted biweekly by a real human who’s broken plenty of apps, too. 👉 Save your spot.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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..

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

Express 5.1: Express 5 Finally Becomes the 'Latest' Release — After a period of some dormancy, Express 5.0 was released last year, but remained a somewhat experimental ‘edge’ release as it went through a security audit and process of building up new governance. With 5.1, however, Express 5.x finally becomes the ‘latest’ tagged release on npm, so be careful with those upgrades (luckily there’s...

Nōdo: A Way to Call Node.js from Ruby — A mechanism for letting Ruby scripts make calls to Node.js-based functions via a Unix socket-based IPC approach. (We also learn that “ノード” means “node” in Japanese.)

Teable: Open Source Airtable Alternative atop Postgres — Airtable is a popular data table database SaaS, but here’s a NestJS-powered open-source alternative in a similar manner that sits atop Postgres. GitHub repo.

Land Ahoy: Leaving the Sea of Nodes — A deeply technical post from a core member of the V8 JavaScript engine team that explains the limitations of Turbofan, one of V8’s optimizing compilers. If you don’t care for the internals of how your JavaScript is compiled and run, just be assured the V8 team is working to make it run even faster!

Neutralinojs 6.0: Alternative Cross-Platform Desktop App Approach — Neutralinojs offers an interesting lightweight alternative to something like Electron, as it still lets you build apps that run on Linux, Windows and macOS, but Chromium isn’t bundled – instead the existing installed browser engine is used.

Playwright MCP: Connect LLMs to Browsers with Playwright — MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers enable certain LLM-based agents (such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and Cursor) to perform actions on systems outside of their usual sandbox. This new project from Microsoft enables such LLMs to interact with Web pages via Playwright.

New URLPattern API Brings Improved Pattern Matching to Node — The Cloudflare Workers team has implemented the URLPattern API in the Ada URL parser, used by both Node.js and Cloudflare Workers. The API lets you take patterns like /blog/:year/:month/:slug and test whether URLs match against them. If you’re using Node 23.8+, you can start using it today.

Node.js TSC Votes to Stop Distributing Corepack — Corepack was introduced as an (experimental) tool bundled with Node to help with managing versions of your package managers. Corepack will live on as a separately installable tool, but will be phased out from future Node releases following a recent TSC vote.

Errsole.js: Collect, Store, and Visualize Node App Logs — Rather than leaning on a third-party service for log monitoring, the idea of Errsole is you just drop its package into your app and you get logging and a basic UI for looking at those logs all ‘out of the box’. It supports numerous storage mechanisms, from SQLite in dev to MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB...