npm Weekly, #2

Welcome to the second edition of the npm Weekly. You can also have it
delivered to you… weekly, of course.

io.js includes npm@latest

We’re very excited that io.js 1.0.3 includes npm@latest (currently npm@2.2.0). Making sure that folks who are just getting started have the latest version of npm is a big win for everyone involved.

From the community

This data visualization from the folks at Bocoup popped up on our radar last year, but we especially enjoyed the more recent post detailing the process behind the visualization.

Meet the humans

A bunch of us will be at Node Summit in San Francisco on February 10-11.

• CJ will talk about Node at Scale, sharing lessons learned from scaling and stabilizing the npm registry.
• Isaac will be on the Betting Big on Node.js panel.
• Lin will talk about the pain of team development workflows and pain mitigation tactics with npm.

And Raquel (aka rockbot) will be emceeing.

Packages that have caught our eye(s)

There are lots of packages on npm. Here are some that we like.

Zeke has been using cheerio lately. It’s a module for non-browser environments that converts HTML strings into DOM objects that can be queried and modified using a jQuery-inspired API. It’s a great tool for writing server-side tests that validate the structure and content of HTML.

If you’re moving back and forth between private and public registries like we do here at npm, Raquel recommends the power-user package npmrc,
which makes it easy to switch between different npmrc files.

And CJ is checking out blessed-contrib. There may be an ASCII art npm dashboard in our future.

You can keep an eye on the list of packages that we use a lot at npm to see when new ones get added.