Tag: Productivity

Digging into explicit resource management

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#​663 — November 16, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

Prettier 3.1 Released — The popular opinionated code formatter has a new release including support for the new control flow syntax in Angular 17 plus a new, experimental formatting option for ternary expressions (as in x ? y : z) explained in more depth in “A curious case of the ternaries.”

Alex Rattray

🤔 With an aim to making code formatting even faster, Prettier’s co-creator has put up a $10k bounty for any Rust project that passes >95% of Prettier’s tests.

Exploring Explicit Resource Management in JS — A practical look at the idea of explicit resource management, an idea both currently at stage 3 in TC39 (and partly supported in TypeScript 5.2) that makes it easier to ‘clean up’ resources once they are no longer used or needed.

Ilia Pozdnyakov

Build Interactive, Live Video Applications with Amazon IVS — Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) allows developers to create dynamic video experiences, such as collaborative real-time livestreams. Check out the new ivs.rocks to find code samples, demos, and other resources. Click here to get started.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsor

On HTML Web Components — “With web components, you might even say React’s component model is being ported to the browser. But it’s being done in a way that works to enhance how the web already works, not replace it”.

Jim Nielsen

A Review of Lightweight JavaScript Frameworks — This overview is targeted at Django (i.e. Python) developers but if you, too, want to avoid larger frameworks like React or Angular, you might appreciate this look at numerous alternatives from Stimulus and htmx to more oblique options like Laravel Livewire.

Michael Yin

🥳 AWS is celebrating a huge release with v6 of the AWS Amplify JavaScript library which includes full support for Next.js App Router and Server Actions.

🌎 Node.js TSC member Yagiz Nizipli is suggesting using Biome for code formatting in Node, since ESLint has deprecated its core formatting rules.

👾 The winners of React Jam, a recent React-based game development contest, have been revealed. An entry I enjoyed was useChess, a set of chess-based puzzles.

▶️ If you’ve wondered what the big deal is about Astro, James Q Quick went on the Software Engineering Daily podcast and explained Astro pretty well.

🎵 Someone’s recorded ▶️ a rap music video about TypeScript..

RELEASES:

Node.js v21.2.0 (Current)

visx 3.5 – D3-based visualization primitives for React.

fx 31.0 – Powerful terminal JSON viewer.

Astro 3.5, Ember 5.4, and Prisma 5.6.

📄 Articles & Tutorials

67 Browser-Based Debugging Tricks — A list of useful, ‘not-obvious’ hacks to get the most out of the browser’s DevTools. Assumes a reasonable existing understanding of said tools.

Alan Norbauer

Exploring V8’s Strings: Implementation and Optimizations — Note: This is very technical and most JavaScript developers do not need to go this deep. That aside, this is a fantastic look under the covers of how the V8 engine handles strings, including the optimizations used that allow it to go toe to toe with languages like C++.

Ilia Pozdnyakov

JavaScript Scratchpad for VS Code — Quokka.js is the #1 tool for exploring/testing JavaScript with edit-continue experience to see realtime execution and runtime values.

Wallaby Team sponsor

▶  An Overview of Angular 17’s New Built-In Control Flow — Angular 17 was released last week and a significant enhancement was support for a new syntax in templates that looks and feels more JavaScript-y.

Dmytro Mezhenskyi

Moving Back to React (from Preact) — Preact felt like a logical, lightweight choice to this team at one time, but they’ve switched to React for better compatibility with Next.js, among other things. Their page weight is up slightly, but they feel the tradeoff is worth it.

Ante Barić (Daily․Dev)

My Journey to 3x Faster Builds: Trimming Barrel File Imports — “I maintain a small frontend application (4K LOC) which uses Vite as the compiler. The production build, using npm run build, was taking 26 secs on Github Actions. It seemed awfully slow for such a small application. I decided to investigate why.”

Ramana Venkata

Can Bun Eat Node’s ‘Lunch’? — An experiment in migrating a codebase (a restaurant voting app called Lunch) from Node over to Bun and seeing how it fares.

Jeffrey Carl Faden

Feel the Power of More Than 420,000 Teammates and Work #LikeABosch

Bosch sponsor

How to Use NPM Packages Outside of Node — Learn how to run NPM packages in ‘other places’ like serverless platforms, the browser, and beyond.

George MacKerron (Neon)

What I Learned Building an Audio Plugins System for the Web

Ben Wiley

Rust for JavaScript Developers: An Overview of Testing

Joshua Mo

🛠 Code & Tools

gsplat.js: A Gaussian Splatting Library — Gaussian splatting is an increasingly popular graphics rendering techniques where rather than render millions of tiny, textured triangles in a scene, you get a more wild paintball-like splatter fest, where each paintball creates a smooth, colorful blob instead of a rigid shape. This demo is both simple and striking.

Dylan Ebert

Reveal.js 5.0: The HTML Presentation Framework — A way to build presentations using standard Web technologies. The project’s homepage is, itself, such a presentation. v5.0 adds support for ‘scroll mode’ which essentially turns presentations into more typically scrolling Web experiences – demo.

Hakim El Hattab

🖍️ Marker.io: Collect Bug Reports With Annotations & Session Replay — Collect feedback on live websites. Get dev-friendly bug reports with screenshots, URLs, console logs & session replay.

Marker.io sponsor

Datasheet Grid: An Airtable-like React Component — If you’ve got an array of objects and you want a way for users to manipulate them, this is for you. It’s not going to replace a spreadsheet or an extensive data grid framework, but it’s a mature solution featuring smooth animations, virtualized rows/columns, keyboard navigation, and more.

Nicolas Keller

Perfect Freehand: A Library for Creating Better ‘Freehand’ Lines — You can try it out here. Makes your e-signature not look like chicken scratch! Might be useful for drawing apps.

Steve Ruiz

Wild Wild Path v5: Object Property Paths with Wildcards and Regexps — A ‘wild’ way to access properties in objects (which can be deeply nested) by way of string based queries that support wildcards and regexes. The examples help communicate the idea.

ehmicky

@storybook-test: More Streamlined and Powerful Storybook Testing — @storybook/test consolidates the API of @storybook/jest and @storybook/testing-library into a new, single package, powered by Vitest.

Kasper Peulen

Marked 10.0 – Markdown parser and compiler. There’s also marked-terminal 6.1 which lets you render Marked-processed Markdown on the terminal.

HumanizeDuration.js 3.31.0 – Turn milliseconds into textual durations in numerous natural languages.

actions/github-script 7.0 – Script the GitHub API in GitHub Actions.

Plasmo v0.84.0 – “Like Next.js for browser extensions.”

PDFKit 0.14.0 – PDF generation for Node and browser.

React Joyride 2.7 – Create guided tours in your apps.

Job Listing

Full Stack TypeScript Software Engineer – [Remote Europe] — Marker.io is a visual bug-reporting tool for the web. Join our dev team and work remotely (Stack: Node.js, Vue.js & MongoDB).

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“When you choose a language, you’re choosing more than a set of technical trade-offs – you’re choosing a community.”

___
Joshua Bloch

Svelte 5 is going to be radical

Posted on by

#​651 — August 10, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

My Experience Modernizing Packages to ESM — What a post! Mark, well known for his work on React, Redux, and much more, details the painful experiences and hard-earned lessons he picked up while migrating the Redux packages to ES modules.

Mark ‘acemarke’ Erikson

Things You Forgot (or Never Knew) Because of React — “I’ve written before about how React is the new default frontend framework, and how I don’t think most people using React on a regular basis realize quite how much it’s fallen behind.” High level thoughts about the React ‘bubble’ and some reasons to look beyond it, including a round up of some of the alternative options.

Josh Collinsworth

Build Web Apps in 60 Seconds with Dynaboard AI — Dynaboard’s low-code IDE offers 40+ built-in UI components. Quickly connect to REST & GraphQL APIs, SQL databases, and spreadsheets. Write custom code or use AI to generate any SQL, JS, or CSS.

Dynaboard sponsor

⚡️ IN BRIEF:

“Svelte 5 is going to be radical,” 🐦 tweets Rich Harris.

Server side JS runtime Deno 1.36 has been released with extended security options, a polyfill for node:test, completion of the node:os polyfill, and many other minor Node.js compatibility improvements.

Google has unveiled a sneak peek of a new IDE it’s developing called Project IDX. It has VS Code at its base but with strong JS framework support, simulators, and lot of ‘AI smarts’ on top, 🐦 says Addy Osmani.

A revived but early stage proposal for introducing observables to JavaScript. Your feedback is sought, so file an issue if you have any.

A fun walk through front-end history with a blog post containing every HTML element (well, almost – sorry applet).

Nim 2.0 has been released. Nim is a C++ and Python inspired, statically typed systems language, that supports being compiled to JavaScript.

🎉 RELEASES:

TypeScript 5.2 RC – TS 5.2 is nearly set for its final release. Explicit resource management with using is the headline feature, but there’s more, as usual.

esbuild 0.19.0 – The high-perf bundler can now import paths containing wildcards and supports advanced CSS @import rules. Note that this release contains backwards-incompatible changes.

Astro 2.10 – There’s also a first beta of Astro 3.

Node.js Security Releases – v20.5.1 (Current), v18.17.1 (LTS) and v16.20.2 (LTS) are all part of this set of releases including OpenSSL security updates and fixes, mostly, around permission policies.

📒 Articles & Tutorials

Bringing Sharp to WebAssembly and WebContainers — A look at how it’s possible to bring Sharp, a popular Node.js image manipulation module, into the browser. Welcome to the future.

Ingvar Stepanyan

A Compilation of Outstanding JS Testing Articles — An opinionated list of 10 outstanding testing articles, all with a JS slant to them. He also mentions his own list of JavaScript and Node.js Testing Best Practices which is worth revisiting too.

Yoni Goldberg

🚀 JavaScript Moves Fast—and So Should You. Let Us Help You Upgrade — React, Vue, Next, Node – our expert devs have it covered! Technical debt mounting? We’re your tech debt busters! 👊

Reduce Tech Debt. UpgradeJS now. sponsor

▶  A Look at HTMX: A ‘Game-Changing’ Alternative to React? — One of Jack’s typically well produced, short tours (just 14-minutes). He likes htmx and thinks it’s worth learning in order to have more options in your toolbox.

Jack Herrington

📝 Prefer a traditional writeup? James Hibbard has one here.

Node.js’s ‘Config Hell’ Problem — Andy ponders why a Next.js project has over 30 configuration files and what we can do to avoid it (unsurprisingly, it involves using Deno, but I enjoy the boldness).

Andy Jiang (Deno)

Creating a Screen + Camera Recorder with the Document Picture-in-Picture API — This is more powerful than I was expecting. You can basically record a screencast using browser APIs. In Chrome, at least.

Sébastien Jalliffier Verne

React Authentication — Without Complexity

Userfront sponsor

▶  Build and Deploy a Full Stack MERN Next.js 13 Threads Clone — An extensive, five hour screencast walking through the creation of a Threads/Twitter/X-style app using Next.js 13 and Clerk for user management.

Adrian Hajdin

▶  Turbopack vs Webpack — Being involved with the development of both bundlers, Tobias Koppers has some interesting things to say about the differences and explains why Turbopack is necessary.

Tobias Koppers and Jack Herrington

Autogenerating Rust-JS Bindings with UniFFI

Ben Dean-Kawamura (Mozilla)

Migrating My Blog from Gatsby to Astro

Artem Sapegin

🛠 Code & Tools

Fuite 3.0: A Tool for Finding Memory Leaks in Web Apps — A CLI tool that you can point at any URL to analyze for memory leaks. Introductory blog post here, and there’s also a video tutorial.

Nolan Lawson

Luxon 3.4: Date and Time Manipulation Library — If you’re familiar with Moment.js, it’s like that but with immutable objects, 1-indexed months, Intl-powered localization (so no locale or timezone files needed) and more.

Moment.js

JavaScript Frontend Error Monitoring 101 — Take a crash (pun intended) course on frontend error monitoring with Sentry. Read on.

Sentry sponsor

Filesize.js: Generate Human Readable Strings From File Sizes — For example, 123456 bytes could turn into “120.56 KB” – though different standards of conversion can also be used. GitHub repo.

Jason Mulligan

Typograms: A Way to Render ASCII Diagrams More Elegantly — An intriguing project where you ‘draw’ diagrams in plain ASCII text within special script tags and these get rendered into much nicer looking versions. An interesting approach if Mermaid is too full on for your needs.

Sam Goto / Google

💡 Talking of Mermaid, the latest release supports Sankey diagrams.

d3-graphviz 5.1: Graphviz DOT Rendering and Animated Transitions — Renders SVGs from DOT-defined graphs using a WebAssembly port of Graphviz, a popular graph visualization tool.

Magnus Jacobsson

🔊 Meyda: Audio Feature Extraction Library — Supports both offline feature extraction as well as real-time feature extraction using the Web Audio API. You can play with a demo right on the homepage.

Rawlinson, Segal, Fiala, Wray, et al.

💻 Jobs

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

Senior Software Engineer (Frontend Lead) — Lead Emerge’s web platform, used by teams like DoorDash, Square, & Airbnb (Our stack: Next.js, React, TS, Vercel).

🛸 Emerge Tools

🧑‍💻 Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

ggml.js: Run ggml-Ported ML Models Directly in Your Browser — We’re going to do a feature on ML/AI related stuff in JS next week, so watch this space..

Rahul D Shetty

React Virtuoso 4.5 – Powerful virtual list component.

Perspective 2.4 – Fast, streaming real-time data visualization.

express-rate-limit 6.9 – Basic rate limiting for Express apps.

PLV8 3.2 – Use JS as a procedural language in PostgreSQL.

Puppeteer 21.0 – Headless Chrome automation in Node.js.

📊 Well, that’s handy..

npmgraph: A Fun Way to Visualize Package Dependency Graphs — A Web tool that accepts one or more package names (or a package.json) and renders a visualization of their (possibly intersecting) dependency graphs. Packages can be colored by various criteria (such as number of maintainers, if you want to see how fragile the world is) and you can download SVGs of the output.

Kieffer, Brigante, et al.

Transformers: JavaScript in Disguise

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#​630 — March 17, 2023

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JavaScript Weekly

????  Transformers.js: Running ML Models in the Browser — Transformers are a type of machine learning model often used for natural language or visual processing and while running such models directly in the browser is in its infancy, Transformers.js opens up some ML models to you with some impressive demos here.

Xenova

????  Celebrating 10 Years of Electron — It feels like Electron pops up everywhere (Slack, Spotify, VS Code, and more) so it might feel surprising it’s only been with us for a decade. Slack and Electron developer Erick Zhao gives thanks to Electron’s developers, the community, gives us a bit of Electron related history, and reassures us Electron is still going strong.

Erick Zhao

Dynaboard: A Visual Web App IDE Made for Developers — Build high performance public and private web applications in a collaborative — full-stack — development environment.

Dynaboard sponsor

Announcing TypeScript 5.0 — Note that TypeScript doesn’t follow semantic versioning, so this is as much a ‘major’ release as 4.9 was.. but 5.0 looks cool anyway. This release of the typed JavaScript superset is packed with features like decorators, improved ESM project support for Node and bundlers, const type parameters, and more.

Daniel Rosenwasser (Microsoft)

Turbowatch: File Change Detector and Task Orchestrator — Not just that but it claims to be extremely fast and “if you ever wanted something like Nodemon but more capable, then you are at the right place.” This looks very promising and the README is full of examples.

Gajus Kuizinas

IN BRIEF:

BREAKING NEWS: The JS Party podcast has just dropped an episode called ▶️ The Future of React – so new, we haven’t listened to it, but it features Dan Abramov and Joe Savona so may make for good weekend listening..

“The most dangerous command you run every day: npm install” says Socket, who are introducing what they call ‘safe npm’, a transparent wrapper around npm designed to, well, make it less dangerous.

CORRECTION: In issue 627 we suggested the ECMAScript 2023 spec had entered a new draft stage. TC39 member Jordan Harband pointed out to us that it has been in such a state for some time. “There’s still a stage 4 PR not yet merged,” he noted, but there will be some progress in the next month.

Defer is a new ‘zero-infrastructure’ background jobs platform for Node.js apps.

Recently we linked to ???? Dittytoy, a fun online JavaScript environment for audio coding/experiments. Someone has somehow implemented an entire Commodore 64 SID synthesizer in it!

????  Developer Day: A Front-Row Seat to What’s New with Retool

Retool sponsor

RELEASES:

Node.js v19.8.0/1 (Current)

Jasmine 4.6
↳ Testing framework for browsers and Node.

pm2 5.3
↳ Popular Node production process manager.

Mongoose 7.0
↳ Popular MongoDB ODM for Node.js.

ESLint 8.36

???? Articles & Tutorials

Chrome 111 Gains a ‘View Transition’ Feature for SPAs — The View Transition API is only supported by Chrome so far, but allows easy animated page transitions within single-page apps (demo here). Luckily it suits progressive enhancement so you can start using it right now without feeling too guilty 😉 Multi-page app support is forthcoming.

Jake Archibald (Chrome Developers)

Create and Download Text Files with JavaScript — If you want your code to be able to generate a text (such as JSON) file on the fly and have it downloaded by the user’s browser, it’s reasonably easy.

Amit Merchant

Five Mistakes I Made When Starting My First React Project — Richard shares his early React mistakes with the hope you can learn from his misfortunes. He tackles topics like using defaultProps, propTypes, and class components.

Richard Oliver Bray

Too Much Tech Debt in Your node_modules? Our Team of JS Devs Can Help — We are a team of senior software engineers who specialize in tech debt. Let us modernize your JavaScript stack ????

UpgradeJS.com | JavaScript Upgrade Services sponsor

Progressively Enhancing a Table with a Web Component — Building a web component wrapper to add table sorting.

Raymond Camden

Shell-Free Node.js Scripting with Execa 7.1 — Execa is a popular process execution library for Node and the latest version includes an interesting $ method feature for writing zx-style scripts with it, making it even more useful for shell scripting style usecases.

ehmicky

What is Vite and Why Use It Over Create React App?

Luke Twomey

Pointers on Upgrading from Cypress v9 to v12

Gleb Bahmutov

How to Use v-model with Form Inputs in Vue

Dmitri Pavlutin

How to Create and Use Path Aliases in TypeScript Imports with Vite

Hasibul Hasan

What Is Deno and How to Use Its Sandbox?

Roman Zaynetdinov

???? Code & Tools

Template: A Simple Framework for Webapps — The author built it for his own projects, but notes: “It’s a joy to work in, feels “frameworky” but it’s just web standards with <100 lines of convenience JS wrapped around it. There is no magic beyond what the browser provides – I like it that way.” We do too.

William Blankenship

React ProseMirror: Integrate the ProseMirror Editor with React — ProseMirror is a toolkit for building rich text editors for the Web.

The New York Times

Breakpoints and console.log Is the Past, Time Travel Is the Future — 15x faster JavaScript debugging than with breakpoints and console.log, now with support for Vitest.

Wallaby.js sponsor

Fable 4.0: F# to JavaScript Compiler — If you fancy F#’s flavor of almost-entirely-functional development, this could be for you. GitHub repo.

Fable

MiniSearch: Small In-Memory Fulltext Search Engine for Browser and Node — The strength is that the indexed data is stored locally, allowing it to work offline and giving good performance, as seen in this demo.

Luca Ongaro

css-variable: Tiny Treeshakable Library to Define CSS Custom Properties in JS — Compatible with popular CSS-in-JS libraries like Emotion, styled-components, Linaria, etc., and it boasts better CSS minification and smaller virtual DOM updates, among other features.

Jan Nicklas

Tremor 2.0: The React Library to Build Dashboards Fast — Provides an array of modular components to build data-driven dashboards. v2.0 is the “first step towards a production-ready version of Tremor” and sees a full switch to Tailwind CSS. Homepage.

Tremor Labs

Stable Diffusion Plugin for Photoshop — Writing code that worked with Adobe’s weird JS variant was ghastly, but this uses their new ‘UXP’ based approach, so is interesting enough for that alone. This plugin also opens up the Stable Diffusion generative art system to Photoshop users.

Abdullah Alfaraj

Flexboard: A React Component Library for Resizable Sidebars — Try the live example. The code allows you to set min/max sizes for the resizable parts of the layout.

Dorbus

???? Jobs

Full Stack JavaScript Engineer @ Emerging Cybersecurity Startup — Small team/big results. Fun + flexible + always interesting. Come build our award-winning, all-in-one cybersecurity platform.

Defendify

Software Engineer (Frontend) — Join our “kick ass” team. Our software team operates from 17 countries and we’re always looking for more exceptional engineers.

Sticker Mule

Find JavaScript Jobs with Hired — Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. Create a free profile now.

Hired

????‍???? Got a job listing to share? Here’s how.

Fuite 2.0
↳ Tool for finding memory leaks in web apps.

???? wavesurfer.js 6.6
↳ Navigable waveform built on Web Audio & canvas.

Svelte-Inview 4.0
↳ Svelte action that monitors when an element enters/leaves the viewport.

Discord.js 14.8
↳ Library for using the Discord chat API.

Plotly.js 2.20
↳ Powerful charting library. (Examples.)

Recharts 2.5
↳ React + D3 charting library. (Examples.)

deepmerge 4.3.1
↳ Merges the enumerable properties of objects.

Vue Testing Library 7.0

React Table Library 4.1

N|Solid v4.8.4 is now available

Posted on by Simon Helberg

IMPORTANT: This release of N|Solid v4.8.4 contains a Node.js security release!

NodeSource is excited to announce N|Solid v4.8.4 which contains the following changes:

Node.js v14.21.1 (LTS): Includes a Node.js security release captured in Node.js v14.21.1 (LTS).
Node.js v16.18.1 (LTS): Includes a Node.js security release captured in – Node.js v16.18.1 (LTS).
Node.js v18.12.1 (LTS): Includes a Node.js security release captured in Node.js v18.12.1 (LTS).

For detailed information on installing and using N|Solid, please refer to the N|Solid User Guide..

Changes

NodeSource is excited to announce N|Solid v4.8.4 which contains the following changes:

This release includes patches for these vulnerabilities:

CVE-2022-3602: X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow (High)
CVE-2022-3786: X.509 Email Address Variable Length Buffer Overflow (High)
CVE-2022-43548: DNS rebinding in –inspect via invalid octal IP address (Medium)

There are three available LTS Node.js versions for you to use with N|Solid, Node.js 16 Gallium, Node.js 14 Fermium and Node.js 18 Hydrogen.

N|Solid v4.8.4 Fermium ships with Node.js v14.21.1.

N|Solid v4.8.4 Gallium ships with Node.js v16.18.1.

N|Solid v4.8.4 Hydrogen ships with Node.js v18.12.1.

The Node.js 14 Fermium LTS release line will continue to be supported until April 30, 2023.

The Node.js 16 Gallium LTS release line will continue to be supported until September 11, 2023.

The Node.js 18 Hydrogen LTS release line will continue to be supported until April 30, 2025.

Supported Operating Systems for N|Solid Runtime and N|Solid Console

Please note that The N|Solid Runtime is supported on the following operating systems:

Windows:

Windows 10
Microsoft Windows Server 1909 Core
Microsoft Windows Server 2012
Microsoft Windows Server 2008

macOS:
macOS 10.11 and newer

RPM based 64-bit Linux distributions (x86_64):

Amazon Linux AMI release 2015.09 and newer
RHEL7 / CentOS 7 and newer
Fedora 32 and newer

DEB based 64-bit Linux distributions (x86_64, arm64 and armhf):

Ubuntu 16.04 and newer
Debian 9 (stretch) and newer

Alpine
Alpine 3.3 and newer

Download the latest version of N|Solid

You can download the latest version of N|Solid via http://accounts.nodesource.com or visit https://downloads.nodesource.com/directly.

New to N|Solid?

If you’ve never tried N|Solid, this is a great time to do so. N|Solid is a fully compatible Node.js runtime that has been enhanced to address the needs of the Enterprise. N|Solid provides meaningful insights into the runtime process and the underlying systems. Click here to start!

As always, we’re happy to hear your thoughts – feel free to get in touch with our team or reach out to us on Twitter at @nodesource.