This week brings a rather low amount of activity in the Node.js organization thanks to the holiday season and people coming out at the end of conference season exhausted as usual.

Nevertheless, there have been a few developments in Node.js and the broader ecosystem since the last Need to Node that you should definitely be keeping an eye on. Let’s dig in.

What’s New in the Node.js Project

• There will be a Security Release shipping sometime in the next 48 hours, addressing updates to OpenSSL and upgrading all release lines to either OpenSSL 1.0.2q or OpenSSL 1.1.0j.
• Work is being done by Joe Sepi in the Bootstrap committee to begin documenting what a possible iteration of the C3 (a top-level, community-focused committee)
• Node.js core has a backlog of orphan issues that are nice-to-have feature requests that don’t have owners. If you’re interested in helping out, check out the backlog.
• The package maintenance team was kicked off to help ensure that key modules in the Node.js and JavaScript ecosystem are maintained in perpetuity.
• It looks like today will be the day that the decision to move Node.js 8 maintenance mode will be pushed up to January 2019 from April 2019 is finalized.

Awesome Articles, Links, and Resources

• ncc: Node.js Compiler Collection by the ZEIT team
• dive – a tool to explore each layer in a Docker image by @wagoodman
• htm – JSX alternative using standard tagged templates by @_developit
• electron-comrade – a tool that allows you to run Electron apps with a different version of Electron by @felixrieseberg
• easygraphql-load-tester – a tool to build queries from your schemas to use with load testing tooling by @estrada9166

One Last Thing...

If you find any awesome Node.js or JavaScript things over the next week (or beyond!), never hesitate to reach out to us on Twitter at @NodeSource to share and get it included in Need to Node - our DMs are open if you don’t want to share publicly!