If you’re an API developer working with Node.js, then you’re probably familiar with Express. But have you tried out the Fastify framework to build with power, speed, and convenience? In this walkthrough, we build a full-featured, easy-to-consume API with Fastify. And we deploy it to the cloud with ease. We show you how to:

• Get started working with Fastify to build an API
• Implement API authentication by using a JSON web token (JWT)
• Use Fastify’s Swagger plugins to generate an OpenAPI specification
• Consume the OpenAPI specification with Postman, giving you an API client that can send requests seamlessly to your back-end API
• Deploy your application to Heroku

How to connect your GPT on OpenAI to a backend Node.js app

Late in 2023, OpenAI introduced GPTs, a way for developers to build customized versions of ChatGPT that can bundle in specialized knowledge, follow preset instructions, or perform actions like reaching out to external APIs. As more and more businesses and individuals use ChatGPT, developers are racing to build powerful GPTs to ride the wave of ChatGPT adoption.

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)...

The following is the story of how Randall Degges created a simple API to solve the common problem of external IP address lookup and how he scaled it from zero to over 10 thousand requests per second (30B/month!) using Node.js and Go on Heroku.

Several years ago I created a free web service, ipify. It is a highly scalable IP address lookup service. When you make a GET request against it, it returns your public-facing IP address. Try it out yourself!

I created ipify because, at the time, I was building complex infrastructure...

So you want to build an app with React? "Getting started" is easy… and then what?

React is a library for building user interfaces, which comprise only one part of an app. Deciding on all the other parts — styles, routers, npm modules, ES6 code, bundling and more — and then figuring out how to use them is a drain on developers. This has become known as javascript fatigue. Despite this complexity, usage of React continues to grow.

The community answers this challenge by sharing boilerplates. These boilerplates reveal the profusion of architectural choices developers must make. That official "Getting Started" seems so far away from the reality of an operational app.