Advancements over time in Node.js are improving the out of the box experience. New versions are released all the time across Active LTS and Current development lines. It's easy to miss something between the release notes and our busy work schedules. Through the efforts of contributors over several recent majors, great new features are landing. Each is useful in isolation, but put together they form a more and more comprehensive standard library.

We’ll walk through 6 recent improvements to the standard library. Each feature may replace a dependency in the stack, simplifying your footprint and reducing support burden. We’ll walk through complete before and after diffs, get real about production readiness, and use live examples.

This iterative evolution of the project is part of a larger system of learning - continual innovation and stable foundations in balance and conflict. We'll contextualize how this is a marker of a vibrant, competitive ecosystem. and what we can do to keep it that way in our careers and on our teams. Lastly, I’ll inspire attendees to see themselves within these pace layers and find the open source engagement that meets their constraints, skillsets, and time constraints.

The march of tech is forever forward, and it’s easy to miss mature software updates amidst social media darlings. But often these foundational projects plod along with the certainty of inertia and iteration. I want to highlight how one mature project, Node.js, is doing just this, and how it’s part of a larger narrative of coalescence of userland into core functionality. I’ll show other instances of this at work too, and inspire attendees to see themselves in this landscape.