As maintainers of the open source framework Electron, we try to be diligent about the work we take on. Apps like Visual Studio Code, Slack, Notion, or 1Password are built on top of Electron and make use of our unique mix of native code and web technologies to make their users happy. That requires focus: There’s always more work to be done than we have time and resources for. In practice, that means that we don’t want to spend time thinking about the server infrastructure for the project — and we’re grateful for the support we receive from Heroku, where we can host load-intensive apps without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at...

Yarn is a JavaScript package manager that also gives developers a project management toolset and a zero-install deployment solution. Heroku supports Yarn 2, 3, and 4, so developers are able to take advantage of zero-installs during their Node.js builds. We’ll go over a popular use case for Yarn that was enhanced by Yarn 2 and later releases: using workspaces to manage dependencies for a monolithic repository, also known as a multi-package repository or a monorepo.

Our Yarn Workspaces tutorial will cover Yarn monorepo setup and how to take advantage of Yarn’s cache to manage monorepo dependencies. Prerequisites for this include a development environment with Node installed. To follow...

JavaScript turns 25 years old today. While it’s made an impact on my career as a developer, it has also impacted many developers like me and users around the world. To commemorate our favorite language, we’ve collected 25 landmark events that have shaped the path of what the JavaScript ecosystem looks like today.

1995

1) JavaScript is created

In 1995, Brendan Eich, a developer at Netscape, known for their Netscape browser, was tasked with building a client-side scripting language that paired well with Java. While it may not be the language that you know and love today, JavaScript was written in 10 days with features we still use today, such as first-class functions.

1997

2)...

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js' asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps.

Over the last few years, GraphQL has emerged as a very popular API specification that focuses on making data fetching easier for clients, whether the clients are a front-end or a third-party.

In a traditional REST-based API approach, the client makes a request, and the server dictates the response:

$ curl https://api.heroku.space/users/1 { "id": 1, "name": "Luke", "email": "luke@heroku.space", "addresses": [ { "street": "1234 Rodeo Drive", "city": "Los Angeles", "country": "USA" } ] } 

But, in GraphQL, the client determines precisely the data it wants from the server....