We took things easy over the holidays, changing things less frequently than normal. We hope you all had a happy and relaxing end of year. Still, we finished a few things:

Unless you were hiding under a rock, you probably heard about the “event-stream situation” on NPM this week. TLDR: the original maintainer of the event-stream package was tired of maintaining it. He handed over the reins to a different developer, who promptly injected malware and released a new version.

Much of the ink spilled on this subject focused around open source expectations and who. was. responsible. for. this. happening. I don’t want to spend much time on this part of the discussion, so I’ll keep it short by saying the entitlement on display in that Github issue was remarkable. Imagine a scenario where someone gave $20 to everyone who wanted it. Some folks in that thread would be angry because it wasn’t $50.

What I do want to spend time talking about is why this happened. And why does it keep happening to Node/NPM?

The TrackJS team is hard at work streamlining the system and giving you even better tools to capture, understand, and fix the errors on the web. Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:

Empty String. An infuriatingly vague error message that leaves few clues about what’s going wrong. A customer recently experienced a lot of these, and asked for our help debugging it. This is that story.

We recently released a new version of the TrackJS agent as a JavaScript module. This change was often-requested and long-overdue. It will make it way easier for you to include TrackJS in your applications and bundle it with your assets.

These days it’s common to release new versions of a web application daily, or even multiple times a day. At any given time there could be multiple versions of a code base running live in production. A new version might be getting soak tested on a pilot server, while the previous stable version is being served to most customers. When it comes to JavaScript error monitoring, it’s important to know if a new application release is having issues that old releases were not. (Or whether a new release resolved a previous bug.)