npm Blog (Archive)

The npm blog has been discontinued.

Updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog.

Getting Started with npm

npm was started as a product by software developers for software developers. It has millions of active users, with tens of thousands of new users pouring in. These new users are bringing a diverse range of skills and experiences. They’re bringing front end expertise and robotics know-how, and lots of other exciting perspectives. But this broader user base means that some knowledge that was assumed before can’t be assumed anymore.

We need to find ways to make it easier for people with this broad and diverse set of skills to join the community and get productive faster. New initiatives like NodeSchool are making good progress on this.

As one more span in that bridge, I’m happy to introduce the Getting Started with npm series of videos. In the series, we cover how to install and manage packages, explain semantic versioning, and walk you through how to fix npm’s permissions so you can avoid that confusing EACCES error… and you don’t even have to have command line experience to follow along.

This is just the first step in making it easier to work with npm. In the next few months, we’ll be adding more documentation to help you level up your npm skills and also help you implement team development workflows with npm. And if you have any ideas for things you want to learn more about, please do let us know.

Speaking of getting started with npm, this is also my start with the company. Like most of the team here at npm, I came for the community, but I’m a much more recent addition to this community than the rest of the npm team. I’ve spent the last 8 years working in different open source and web standards communities, from being a core module maintainer on a large Open Source CMS to contributing to standardization efforts around HTML data.

One thing I’ve always felt compelled to do when I’ve learned something new in any of these communities is to smooth out the road behind me so that the people following that road after me have an easier time. The efficiencies gained by this kind of work are often unseen, but they are impactful. Fortunately, at npm I’ll have the chance to continue doing this.