Node.js 21 released

October 17, 2023 By Mark Otto 0

Node.js Weekly

πŸ˜… We’ve mentioned some community efforts to create a mascot for Node recently, but the Node project itself has 🐦 unveiled a Node.js mascot design contest on Twitter/X. You have until November 6 to submit your ideas.

Don’t Block the Event Loop (or the Worker Pool) β€” β€œIf you’re writing anything more complicated than a brief command-line script, reading this should help you write higher-performance, more-secure applications.”

Node.js Project

Speeding Up the JS Ecosystem: The Barrel File Debacle β€” Marvin continues his tour through the world of JavaScript performance fixes with a look at how some innocent looking code can make tools run slower than they should. Test runners and many import cycle detection tools are most affected.

Marvin Hagemeister

Building a ‘PDF Chat’ with Node, OpenAI and ModelFusion β€” In modern AI circles, the idea of being able to use large language models (LLMs) to β€œchat” with PDFs and similar reference docs is quite popular. This tutorial shows off the basics of creating such a system from reading PDFs with PDF.js, through to tokenization, and building a chat loop.

Lars Grammel

πŸ“° Classifieds

πŸ“† Debug Node.js Issues Fast – Join us today to learn how distributed tracing connects your frontend and backend to find issues and root causes.


🎟️ Join Astro core team member Elian Van Cutsem to see what is new in Astro 4 at CityJS Berlin, Nov 1-3 – use discount code COMMUNITY to save 25% off.


Full-Stack Engineer at Feather (Remote EU or Berlin) β€” Join our small team to build an insurance product that people love. We use React, TypeScript, Prisma, NestJS and more.

πŸ›  Code & Tools

PureImage: A Pure JS HTML Canvas 2D for Node.js β€” If you want a browser-like 2D canvas experience in Node but without any native dependencies, this is for you. You can then save the output to PNG or JPEG. (node-canvas is the long-standing popular choice in this same area but relies upon Cairo as a dependency.)

Josh Marinacci

Cronicle: Cron with a Web Front End β€” Describing itself as β€˜a fancy cron replacement’, Cronicle is a task scheduler and runner built in Node with a web-based UI.

Joseph Huckaby