The ten top Node Weekly links of 2023

1: The Node.js Best Practices List: 2023 Edition — This long standing resource is valuable enough that it was in 2022’s ‘best of’ too 😉 Delightfully it was “modernized to 2023 standards” with much work by creator Yoni and a growing team of contributors. The topics remained the same, though, covering areas like code style, project architecture, and taking apps to production.

Yoni Goldberg et al.

3: Nut.js: Use Node.js for Desktop Automation — Take control of your desktop environment (Windows, macOS or Linux) from code with control over keyboard and pointer, plus you get some image matching functionality too. (Note: It became a commercial product, but still has an open source core.)

Simon Hofmann

4: The State of Node.js Performance in 2023 — Node 20 was put through its paces against 18.16 and 16.20 with a few different benchmark suites running on EC2. It went into a lot of depth, but ultimately Node 20 is the champion.

Rafael Gonzaga

5: An Introduction to Debugging in Node — An informative primer on debugging, covering approaches like logging, IDE extensions that highlight potential problems, using the V8 inspector, and debugging via Chrome.

Craig Buckler

6: Fixing a Memory Leak in a Production Node App — Kent encountered some odd memory and CPU usage spikes in his app and had to figure out what was going on. This post walks through his journey, with plenty of side quests along the way, before discovering the root cause was where he least expected it..

Kent C Dodds

8: Testing the Dark Scenarios of Your Node App — Examples of less obvious, easy to forget, but nonetheless important, tests to have in your app or package. What happens when a service times out, code is mutating things it shouldn’t, or you have zombie processes milling around? These are some of the ‘dark scenarios’ you can be prepared for.

Yoni Goldberg and Raz Luvaton

9: qnm: A CLI Tool to Look Into node_modules — If you’ve ever gone into node_modules and been overwhelmed, this tool, supporting both npm and Yarn, lets you dig around with some guidance as to what is what. You can use fuzzy search to find specific things and also see which modules are using the most space.

Ran Yitzhaki