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As 2016 is coming to a close, we figured a recap of our absolute best articles of the year would be a fun way to wrap up.

There was a lot of ground to cover. There's always a need for good, general knowledge for Node.js developers to learn, like how to work with npm effectively, how to secure an app running express, and how to optimize deploys on new platforms.

On top of that, there were some engaging and important topics throughout 2016, like the finalization of Node.js 6 as an LTS release line, the solidification of Electron as a platform for Node.js on the Desktop, and the widespread discussion of the issues surrounding ES6 Modules in Node Core.

We had the pleasure to be able to share experiences and thoughts on those topics throughout 2016. Here's our list of the best articles from this year, covering everything from how to get started with ESLint in your project to the latest and greatest ES6 features in Node 6 to best practices for linting JavaScript projects with ESLint.

Article One: 11 npm Tricks to Knock Your Wombat Socks Off

In 11 npm Tricks, we run over a suite of quick tricks to streamline your experience with npm. Some tricks covered include quickly opening key links for any given package (like the GitHub repo, the link's website, and so on), checking to see if a package has outdated dependencies, and optimizing your packages for development and deployment.

Article Two: 6 of the Most Exciting ES6 Features in Node.js v6 LTS

In this article, we ran through some of the best features from ES6 that are now available in the latest LTS line, Node.js 6. There are some killer features from the JavaScript ES2015 spec in here that are available on a release line of Node that will continue to be a stable release line for over a year, so you should check it out to see what new tools you have access to.

Article Three: The 10 Key Features in Node.js v6 LTS Boron After You Upgrade

In a similar vein, this article gives some insight into new features in the latest LTS release line of Node.js - Node.js 6 LTS, also known as Boron. That said, this is a different type of feature set - these features are all features of Node core, and help streamline the experience as a Node.js developer. Some key features include --inspect, the new ways to create Buffers, and the Process Warnings API.

Article Four: 7 More npm Tricks to Knock Your Wombat Socks Off

The follow up to our initial 11 npm Tricks post, with 7 more npm tricks that we couldn't fit into the first post and still have it be a quick list. In 7 More npm Tricks, you'll find out how to check out all your globally installed modules, add npm autocompletion to your shell, configure your logging level for npm install, and a few more quick tricks to help you work better with npm.

Article Five: 15 Essential Packages to Get Started With Electron

The goal of this article on Electron was to give a foundation for building a successful Electron app, no matter what that app does. If you'd like to get up and running with Electron, or already have a Node.js project using Electron, this article will probably be able to give you at least one new tool to make your app more effective.

Article Six: 8 Protips to Start Killing It When Dockerizing Node.js

With this article, our guide on how to effectively build and deploy Node.js applications with Docker, we built a guide help allieviate some common gotchas and share a few easy and quick optimizations for building Docker images for Node.js applications. If you're working with Node.js and Docker together, definitely run through the article to see if there are any optimizations you can use to improve your builds and deploys.

Article Seven: 9 Security Tips to Keep Express from Getting Pwned

Security in Node.js applications is one of the most difficult things to get right. One of the easiest places for Node.js developers to get caught is when building Express apps - they're easy to build and easy to miss a key vulnerability in a specific application. In this post, we give a rundown of 9 ways you can harden an Express app's security fairly quickly. It covers some basic security improvements, in addition to explaining how to prevent some vulnerabilities that are more obscure and complex.

Article Eight: ES Modules and Node.js: Hard Choices

Originally a post in Japanese by Yosuke Furukawa, we worked with him on translating the article to English. This post is a mid-year analysis of the state of Node.js and the ES6 Modules spec. It gives an overview of the difficulty that Node.js was facing to implement ES6 modules.

Article Nine: Streamline JavaScript Development with ESLint

Wrapping up the list, we published our article on effective linting in JavaScript using ESLint. Linters are used in a wide variety of projects, for good reason - they help teams and projects communicate and work effectively. In our guide, we go into the benefits of implementing linting for projects, how to integrate ESLint into a given JavaScript project, and how to start building out a workflow that consistently encorporates linting.

One last thing...

Is there anything you'd like to see from us in 2017? Curious about how to approach a problem in Node most effectively? Feel free to reach out to @NodeSource on Twitter if there's anything specific you've got in mind!

We're looking forward to even more awesomeness in the Node.js ecosystem next year, and we'll be sure to share it with you when it happens.