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npm 3 is out of beta

If you don’t watch npm on GitHub (you should!), you missed Rebecca T.’s understated mic-drop:

the week of this release, v3.3.3 will become latest and this version (v3.3.4) will become next !!

To understand what this means for you, now’s a good time to revisit our release notes from when 3 initially came out in beta. Much goodness awaits, including an improved multi-stage installer, flatter dependencies, and new shrinkwrap behavior. Run, don’t walk, to get the scoop.

what would you take to Cuba?

In Jason Koebler’s fantastic Vice series about the challenges of getting online in Cuba, (part 1, part 2) he calls our attention to los paquetes: weekly deliveries of media and online content from the U.S. and elsewhere distributed via thumbdrive.

Our own Nick C. is preparing for a trip to Cuba and will be delivering paquetes of his own, but…

Instead of filling these with Mr. Bean videos or the latest from the land of Westeros, I’m appealing to the Node community to help me support the young developer in Cuba. Let’s provide them the open-source tools, instructions, and offers of mentorship they might need to get started with their engineering careers.

He’s opened up a GitHub repo for collecting apps, tools, and docs to distribute to Cuban computer science students who don’t benefit from the fast, free Internet which the rest of us take for granted — and soliciting our help with the curation.

Read more about Nick’s project on our blog, and consider helping out.

how we fixed a memory leak in Atom

We use Marky-Markdown to parse Markdown content like readmes for display on npmjs.com. Over the course of chasing down a leak, we traced the problem to a leak in oniguruma, a regex module also used by the Atom editor.

Our pull request with a fix was quickly accepted, which took care of our leak and helps out all of its other dependents.

Quoth our Ryan D.: “another win for small modules, and one less persistent leak waking me up at night.” Amen.

welcome n00bs / a basic npm tutorial

You’re probably new here, and that’s okay. Here’s a neat InfoWorld writeup that provides a simple npm walk-through: Inside npm: Building and sharing JavaScript packages [free registration req’d].

Once that gets you hooked, we recommend these docs, which will get you the rest of the way to becoming a ninja rockstar unicorn npm power user.

And don’t forget: at any point, if you need help, we’re here.

ievms: one command, many VMs for testing

40% of npm registry users use Windows, but 100% of Node developers would benefit from making cross-platform development easier. Meet ievms: spin up virtual machines for testing IE6 – IE11 and MSEdge with a single command. Bringing more instances of IE6 into the world in 2015 runs the risk of summoning a helldemon apocalypse: for the sake of all humanity, please use your power responsibly.

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