npm Weekly, #10

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Angular’s improved Browserify support

If you missed it, Angular introduced better support for Browserify with a recent release, 1.3.14 instantaneous-browserification. This means your dependencies can take over some of the work of remembering the dependency tree for you. To make use of this new support, there are a few tweaks that need to be made, both to modules and to apps.

What’s going on in the CLI?

We’ve had a couple of weeks of patch releases (which, if you’re new to semantic versioning, means there haven’t been any feature additions). The main focus has been on fixing things in the test suite. If you want to help get npm’s Travis builds back to green, check out Forrest’s call for assistance.

From the community

The folks at nearForm discuss their strategy for evaluating packages in Tips for coding with #Nodejs: Making use of the extensive @npmjs ecosystem. There are lots of heuristics that they use… and of course, as they point out, you can also review the source code. Friend of npm Aria Stewart has a talk on how to read source code.

How do you choose packages?

The nearForm folks talked about their way of picking packages… what’s yours? One of the things we’ll be working on this year is making it easier to find the packages that are useful to you, so we’d love to hear what heuristics you use to make that decision.