Preact is a simplified alternative to React that focuses on bundle size. A minified bundle with Preact and a minimal Webpack config ends up being around 10KB. A minimal unbundled React bundle ends up being around 100KB because of react-dom. Because Preact bundles are comparatively tiny, Preact is a great choice for making sure your app feels snappy.

A QR Code is a 2-dimensional bar code. They're generally used to encode a URL so someone can just scan the code and visit a site. QR codes can encode all sorts of data beyond just URLs, I used a QR code to pay for my lunch today. In this article, I'll walk you generating and reading QR codes in Node.js using 2 separate libraries.

Mongoose 5.3.0 was shipped on September 28. This minor release includes 17 new features and improvements, including support for JavaScript's new async iterator feature. Async iterators were introduced in ECMAScript 2018 and are natively supported in Node.js 10.x.

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