UsTaxes is an open source tax filing application that can be used to file the Federal 1040 form. It is different from paid tax preparation software in that it protects user privacy and is provided for free. It is available in both web and desktop formats.

The coolest thing about this (in addition to it being free-as-in-beer) is that it stores all data in the browser only, so your personal info never leaves your computer.

WIP Alert: You shouldn’t use it file your taxes for the 2020 / 2021 tax season, but it’s a great time to get involved and help this software become production-ready for the next go-around.

1log is a new logging library for the browser and Node. This library provides a log() function which is like console.log, but with superpowers:

1. It can be used in expressions - f(log(x))
2. It supports plugins

There are plugins for setting a severity level, for adding badges, and for logging functions, iterables, promises, and RxJS observables. You can even use it in your tests. Instead of writing log messages to the console, you can inspect them in unit tests with help of Jest’s snapshots feature.

Not all developers understand what are the risks of command injections in Node.js applications and I see it more often when I triage security vulnerabilities. In this article I’m featuring a practical walk-through of an actual CVE for a Node.js module which has a command injection vulnerability.

Angie Rojas shared some insights into what Deno brings to the TypeScript ecosystem and whether or not it will “render Node.js obsolete.”

During the last 10 years, Node.js has become a big player in the backend framework market, powering several large scale applications across the globe. Meanwhile, JavaScript has also evolved greatly, not only because of the efforts of its development team, but also based on community feedback. However, integrating some of these new language features into a 10-year-old framework is not really straightforward, and has a high level of complexity.

Therefore we could say that Node.js’ architecture hasn’t evolved as fast as the language. As a basic example, Node.js is still based on callbacks, while there are far better ways to deal with asynchronicity in modern JavaScript. This is something that its creator, Ryan Dahl, has acknowledged in the past few years, and it has moved him to work on a new framework that addresses some of these issues. It is called Deno, and in the following article, we would like to explore some of its concepts to determine if it will render Node.js obsolete.

Built on WebRTC and Node.js. No downloads, no signups, just share a URL and you’re good to go.

Group video call is achieved using WebRTC mesh. So the quality of the call is inversely proportional to the number of people on the call. The sweet number is somewhere around 6 to 8 people in an average high-speed connection.

After searching for a fast and lightweight universal date formatting library, I’ve decided to create my own! I managed to include the most common features in just 157 bytes. The thing is also more than 2 times faster than Moment’s format and 3,5 times faster than date-fns lightFormat. 😃

Formatting patterns are compliant with Unicode Technical Standard #35.

While only a basic set of features is included with the format function, I added an additional localeFormat for locale-based formatting (such as month names). I’m planning on extending the package in the future to potentially include string escape mechanism and time-zone formatting.

Node.js development began a bit like the Wild West, but over time idioms, anti-patterns, and best practices have emerged. Yoni Goldberg’s Node Best Practices repo on GitHub collects, documents, and explains the best practices for Node developers. On this episode, Yoni joins us to discuss.

Luckysheet’s list of features is quite impressive and there’s more coming soon.

Mikeal and Chris welcome (back) special guest Fred K. Schott, who you may recall from our episode on Pika. This time, we’re talking ESM: what it is, what’s new about it, why it’s the future, writing libraries with it, and much more.

I’m not sure what makes this lightweight (their word, not mine), but it does load pretty fast from where I’m accessing it. I definitely see what they mean by powerful, though, as wiki.js boasts many features: multiple editors, multiple auth schemes, search functions, comments, multiple locales, the list goes on…

The demo is worth a thousand words.

uvu has minimal dependencies and supports both async/await style tests and ES modules, but it’s not immediately clear to me why it benchmarks so well against the likes of Jest and Mocha.

~> "jest"  took  1,630ms  (861  ms)
~> "mocha" took    215ms  (  3  ms)
~> "tape"  took    132ms  (  ???  )
~> "uvu"   took     74ms  (  1.4ms)

The benchmark suites are pretty basic, so it’d be cool to see a “production” grade library or application port their test suite to uvu for comparison.

Node 14, Vue’s Vite, and is-promise are in the news. We’ve got some working from home tips and unpopular opinions to share. And… shout outs! 👏

This is a nice, Smashing deep-dive by the author of React HereMaps:

Armed with basic knowledge, beginner and intermediate developers of Node.js struggle with many things: “It’s just a runtime!” “It has event loops!” “Node.js is single-threaded like JavaScript!”
While some of these claims are true, we will dig deeper into the Node.js runtime, understanding how it runs JavaScript, seeing whether it actually is single-threaded, and, finally, better understanding the interconnection between its core dependencies, V8 and libuv.

The New Stack with a nice rundown of what’s new/noteworthy in Node 14. The once-an-npm-package node-report is now mainlined, an experimental AsyncLocalStorage API has been added, and more.

This looks like an excellent read for anyone looking to level up their fullstack JS chops:

I do React consulting and this is a showcase product I’ve built in my spare time. It’s a very good example of modern, real-world React codebase.

There are many showcase/example React projects out there but most of them are way too simple. I like to think that this codebase contains enough complexity to offer valuable insights to React developers of all skill levels while still being relatively easy to understand.

Playwright is focused on enabling cross-browser web automation platform that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast. Our primary goal with Playwright is to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution and offering insights into the browser operation.

From the Microsoft Edge team.

At Node+JS Interactive… the talks are all quite attractive. From transpilation dread… to awesome worker threads. This conf is surely impactive!

ES Modules are unflagged in Node 13. What does this mean? Can we use them yet? We chat with Mikeal, our resident expert, and find out.

This week we chat with Matteo Collina, Technical Director at NearForm and member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee, about his upcoming Node+JS Interactive talk on Node Streams. We talk about their creation before any standards and how they are one of the bedrock APIs used throughout the Node ecosystem. We also talk about WHATWG streams and some of their key differences, and how streams have gotten easier to work with thanks to the addition of async iterators and generators to the language.

With 35k+ stars, I might be the last one to the party on this awesome repo.

It is the largest compilation, and it is growing every week - currently, more than 80 best practices, style guides, and architectural tips are presented. New issues and pull requests are created every day to keep this live book updated. We’d love to see you contributing here, whether that is fixing code mistakes, helping with translations, or suggesting brilliant new ideas.

This is a map of known process signals with some information about each signal. Unlike os.constants.signals this includes:

• human-friendly descriptions
• default actions, including whether they can be prevented
• whether the signal is supported by the current OS

Handy!

Fuzzing for safe languages like nodejs is a powerful strategy for finding bugs like unhandled exceptions, logic bugs, security bugs that arise from both logic bugs and Denial-of-Service caused by hangs and excessive memory usage.

As we recently learned on Go Time: pessimists write tests, fuzz functions, and sleep well at night. 💤

What if you could have an Electron-like app framework without the Chromium dependency and resulting performance woes? Well, now you can. NodeGui is a Qt5-powered, cross-platform, native app GUI framework for JavaScript with CSS-like styling. In this episode, Jerod and Nick sit down with Atul –author of NodeGUI and NodeGUI React– to learn about this exciting framework. We ask him a zillion and one questions about it.

In this episode we’re shining our maintainer spotlight on Valeri Karpov. Val has been the solo maintainer of Mongoose since 2014. This episode with Val continues our maintainer spotlight series where we dig deep into the life of an open source software maintainer. We’re producing this series in partnership with Tidelift. Huge thanks to Tidelift for making this series possible.

When talking about the Console API, newbies usually use only some functions like 👌console.log(), ⚠️ console.warn(), or ❌ console.error() to debug their application, while often there are many other methods which can perfectly implement our requirements and improve debugging efficiency.

Guilty! ✋

This article is made to expose some of the most interesting console methods with related examples that I use while teaching at Codeworks. So let’s see a list of the 8 best functions from the Console module!

I have used console.table a few times (totally rad), but there’s plenty of functions here that I haven’t been using (and definitely should be).