Mongoose 5.3.0 was shipped on September 28. This minor release includes 17 new features and improvements that will help you clean up repetitive code. In particular, the orFail() query helper and the new toObject and toJSON global options will make life much easier for devs building Express APIs and backend services with Mongoose. In this article, I'll provide an overview of these two features and what makes them so useful.

This blog post originally appeared on LogRocket's Medium publication.

One of the major challenges when working with AWS Lambda is bundling all your node_modules into one zip file. Most simple examples rely on zipping up the entirety of ./node_modules, but that doesn't scale well if you're looking to built a suite of Lambda functions as opposed to a single "Hello, World" example. In this article, I'll demonstrate the problem with zipping up Lambda functions yourself and show you how to use Webpack to bundle a Lambda function that connects to MongoDB.

Keeping a changelog is an important practice that many developers don't value enough. Keeping a changelog makes it easy for humans to understand what the important changes in a new release are. Even if you squash commits, there's a key difference between git commit messages and changelogs: commit messages are for developers actively working on the project, changelogs are for consumers of the software. Plus, changelogs are more portable because they are typically written in markdown, so you can search a changelog using a text editor and ctrl+f.

Let's be frank: backwards-breaking API changes are painful. Especially when

Support for arbitrarily large integers (BigInts) is a stage 3 TC39 proposal. Stage 3 means the proposal is ready and for browsers to start implementing. Earlier this year, the V8 team added support for BigInts, which means Node.js 10.4.0 has BigInt support. You can use BigInts in Node.js 10.x without any flags, as long as you're on at least 10.4.

Arguably the biggest gap in Express' API is its

MongoDB Stitch is MongoDB's backend-as-a-service solution. Stitch supports a wide variety of high-level features, like Twilio integration and field-level access control, but it also supports custom functions similar to Amazon Web Services' Lambda. In this article, I'll walk you through setting up backend application in MongoDB Stitch on top of MongoDB Atlas. This backend application regularly ingests stock price data from the IEX API and exposes an REST API endpoint for loading a stock's latest price.