npm weekly #101: how many npm users are there? Why use SemVer? Want to work with us?

Answering the question: how many npm users are there?

A year ago, npm COO Laurie Voss took it upon himself to answer the question “How many npm users are there?”, telling a story with 6 graphs. Although npm has grown quite a bit since then, the post is still instructive, showing how difficult it can be to track total users in a community of this size.

Here’s one of the graphs, which illustrates the increase in npm package downloads since 2013. But how does that answer the question of how many users npm has? The answer lies somewhere between the truth and those five other graphs you can see over on the blog.

npm 5.0.4, no, not that kind of 504

Earlier this week, the npm cli team released version 5.0.4, a smallish but special release full of all kinds of bugfixes. Tired of invalid format errors when setting cache-related headers? Tada, that’s fixed. But don’t get too attached to version 5.0.4, because another release is on the way soon! In the meantime, see all the fixes for yourself over at the blog.

npx 8 takes the guesswork out of bin names

Here’s a short update on something we mentioned last week: npx. npx 8 was released late last week, with some cool additions, most notably its ability to auto-guess binaries for packages that don’t use the package name as a bin name. Now you have more time to do other stuff!

What we’re reading: Hyperproductive development

In Hyperproductive development, writer and developer Jessica Kerr lays out the different types of situations where 10x development is useful, and others where it is not. An interesting take offering ideas for finding a productive medium between 10x development and team development.

Huh? What is, and why should you use SemVer?

It’s come to our attention that although we highly recommend using semantic versioning, or SemVer (or semver), we haven’t really explained why that’s a smart practice. Luckily, Laurie Voss wrote a blog post on why using semver is going to help you and everyone who downloads your packages get the most out of npm. Pssst, it has something to do with tiny modules (we love those).

Come work on our services team

We’re hiring again, this time for a full-time software developer to join our services team and work on npm Enterprise. If you value analysis, communication, action, sustainability, and reflection, then this role might be a great fit for you! Check out the full details on the position and get in touch.

Presenting “Solving Imaginary Scaling Issues, at Scale”

Hailed as one of Jenn Schiffer’s “myspace top 8 of favorite tech talks” this recent Dinosaur.js talk by Laurie Voss is a must see. Conceived as a fake book cover by Ben Halpern, Laurie wrote 30 fake chapters which he describes in just over 30 short minutes. Take a look!

npm puts WebAssembly binary tools into your command line

Ever wanted the full line of WebAssembly Binary Toolkit tools at your fingertips, ready to access from the command line? Enter webassembly-binary-toolkit, a module from Mathias Buus that allows you to do just that. All you need after download is git, make and cmake to be installed. Enjoy!

Our Pride shirts have raised over $1900 so far for The Trevor Project

There’s still time left to get yours and help us push that number over the two thousand mark. The proceeds of your purchase go to The Trevor Project, a leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) young people ages 13–24.

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