Using Node to get ChatGPT on the phone
#556 — November 19, 2024
AWS Lambda Turns Ten: Looking Back and Looking Ahead — AWS Lambda, Amazon’s cloud function service, essentially launched the term ‘serverless’ and had a big impact on the use of Node.js in the cloud with Node v0.10 being the first and only runtime supported (till Java was added a year later).
Jeff Barr (AWS)
Val Town: A Social Way to Write and Deploy TypeScript — Staying on a serverless-ish theme, “If GitHub Gists Could Run, and AWS Lambda Were Fun” is a fitting description for this online platform where you write short functions (the so-called ‘val’s) and they get run in V8 isolates. You can connect them together, schedule them, serve them up over HTTP, and more.
Steve Krouse
Memetria K/V: High-Performance Key-Value Hosting — Boost your Node.js apps with Memetria K/V, providing portable, easy-to-use hosting for Redis OSS and Valkey. Scale your applications with ease and achieve high performance. Includes detailed analytics and large key memory tracking.
Memetria sponsor
Node v18.20.5 (LTS) Released — Node v18 remains in its ‘Maintenance LTS’ phase (until May 2025) and while you can’t expect anything big, this release updates a lot of key dependencies and marks import attributes and JSON module support as stable.
Antoine du Hamel
Talk to ChatGPT via a Phone Call — It requires some third party services like Twilio, AssemblyAI and, of course, OpenAI’s GPT 4, but you can tie all of these together with Node for a pretty neat demo.
Artem Oppermann
npmpackage.info: Detailed Package Info on a Single Page — Give this online tool the name of an npm package and you get a quick ‘dashboard’ style view of the project’s main statistics, covering areas like quality scores, commits, open issues, releases, bundle size, and more.
Shrinath Nayak
Explore Sentry Launch Week: New Products and Community Highlights — Join us for daily video drops on YouTube at 9am PT, and on Discord to chat live with the engineers building Sentry.
Sentry sponsor
📄 The Tragedy of Running an Old Node Project – When you haven’t deployed an app for several years, problems can rapidly rack up. Abdisalan Mohamud
📄 Precise Decimal Math in JavaScript with Fraction.js Trevor I. Lasn
📄 How to Read Files Quickly in Node (and vs Bun) Daniel Lemire
📄 How to Avoid Flaky Tests in Playwright Zanini and Ackerson
📄 How to Strongly Type process.env Matt Pocock
🛠 Code & Tools
💬 Discordeno v19: A Powerful Discord API Library — A long standing way to work with, and build bots for, the popular Discord chat system. v19 is a big update with breaking changes. GitHub repo.
Discordeno Team
SVG To Font 6.1: Read SVG Icons and Output a Font File — Both a CLI tool and Node library that can read in a set of SVG documents and output WOFF2, WOFF, EOT, TTF and SVG fonts. Useful for generating a Web font from a set of icons, perhaps, as in this demo.
Kenny Something
wacat 1.2: Tests Your Webapp Against ‘Cat Chaos’ — Uses a virtual ‘cat walking across your keyboard’ approach to tormenting apps with random clicks and form submissions. v1.2 adds LLM integration to detect and handle error states along the way.
Mika Tapanainen
Node-OracleDB 6.7: Oracle’s Official Database Driver for Node — I’m not an Oracle Database user myself, but I like the amount of effort Oracle puts into maintaining their Node.js driver. v6.7 adds OpenTelemetry support and settable V$ session attributes.
Sharad Chandran (Oracle)
📰 Classifieds
🛠️ There are 3 major considerations when building a reliable Node.js app: stability, efficiency & adaptability. We’ve been exploring each of these.
🚀 pgai Vectorizer automates embedding creation and syncing in Postgres with one SQL command—keeps embeddings updated, no tools needed.
🔓 Unlock the power of state management! Discover how Temporal simplifies complex workflows in our comprehensive guide. Download now.
☕ Javet 4.1 – Java + V8. Embed Node.js and V8 into Java. Updates to Node v22.11.0 and adds Float16 support.
node-pg-migrate 7.8 – Database migration management from Node. Now with support for table partitioning.
🐂 BullMQ 5.27 – Reliable, Redis-based distributed queue.
Verdaccio 6.0.2 – Lightweight local private npm registry.
airtap 5.0 – Run TAP unit tests in 1789+ browsers.
🎁 And a little bonus..
⚙️ DBngin: Simple Postgres, MySQL and Redis on Mac and Windows — It’s not Node-specific, but if you’d like to spin up different versions of various common databases using a simple UI, this could fit the bill.
DBngin
