I have learned a lot about tools and conventions in JavaScript since I started publishing node-modules. I wish I had known these things for my first module, because now I have to look through (my) 27 modules and apply those best-practices to all of them. I plan to write a series of posts, each about a specific topic, e.g. testing, CI, documentation to allow you to start off on the right foot... Why do you need a coding-style? JavaScript is a rather anarchic language. You can write the same thing in many different ways. There are no code-conventions like...

If you are like me, than you have a deep desire to write quality code. Sadly, writing unit-tests takes time that you cannot put into new features. Writing unit-tests does not give you the feeling that you are "making progress", especially if you are working on a software that needs a lot of them. Well, I have to solution to your problem: "Visible test coverage". Let's say, you have started an open-source project. It was little in the beginning and you were playing around a lot. You put it on GitHub and on npm, just in case anyone wants to...

I've decided to focus my private programming efforts back on the single project that received a little attention in the world: bootprint-swagger. Creating this project was actually an accident. I was working on other, really important things, but that's another story. What is a Rest-Service? When I last tried to explain somebody what my project is for, I realized that it is so specialized that you have to explain the basic terminology even to people that have a knack for technology: bootprint-swagger is a tool to create readable static documents (i.e. books) from a Swagger-definition. But what is a...

In my last post, I wrote that the search function of npmjs.com is not as good as I would wish for and that I had to click through with a large number of packages that are appearently unfinished and fallow. I said, it would be nice to have a better tool: Something that filters packages or has a better ranking, so that the high quality packages appear in my results first. It would greatly reduce the time, I spend for finding adequate packages and it would greatly reduce my frustration. This blog post is about how I tried to...

When I look for a module that fits my needs I always ask myself. Is this module mantained? Will I get bugfixes when I report them? Will the API be breaking soon? The node- and npm-folks take pride in the growth-rate of the node community. In this JS-Conf-Talk, Mikael Rogers shows graphs where npm outnumbers Maven and is still the fastest growing opensource ecosystem in the world. "240 new packages per day", "Make it supersimple". The npmjs website itself states: "When everyone else is adding force, we work to reduce friction.". I do agree up to a point. It's great...