javascript

JavaScript

House conventions for modern JavaScript and Node. Apply them to code you are writing or changing — don't refactor untouched files to match unless asked.

Conventions

• ESM everywhere. New packages get "type": "module". Mixing CJS and ESM inside one package produces the dual-package hazard — two copies of a module with separate state, failing in ways that read like race conditions.
• Match the combinator to the intent. Sequential await in a loop serialises independent work; Promise.all drops the whole batch on one rejection; allSettled is for when partial success is acceptable. The wrong choice is a latency bug or a swallowed-error bug, and both look fine in review.
• Every catch handles or rethrows. A catch that logs and continues converts a failure into corrupt state further downstream, where the stack trace no longer points at the cause. If there is nothing useful to do, don't catch.
• AbortController for anything cancellable — fetches, timers, streams, listeners ({ signal }). Without it an abandoned request keeps its handler and its closure alive.
• Never block the event loop. No readFileSync, no long synchronous parse or crypto on a request path: Node serves every other request from that thread. CPU-bound work goes to a worker thread.
• Don't mutate arguments. A function that edits its input changes the caller's object with no assignment in sight. Return new values — and reach for the non-mutating array methods that exist for exactly this: toSorted, toReversed, toSpliced, with. arr.sort() sorting the caller's array in place is one of the most common accidental mutations in JS.
• node: prefix on builtins. Unambiguous, and immune to shadowing by a userland package of the same name.
• Reach for the platform before a dependency. structuredClone, Intl, URL/URLSearchParams, crypto.randomUUID, Array.prototype.at/findLast, Object.groupBy cover most of what utility libraries were installed for.

Publishing a package

The exports map is the public surface — anything not listed is unreachable, which is the point: it lets you refactor internals without breaking consumers. Declare sideEffects: false (or list the files that have them) so bundlers can drop unused exports; without it, tree shaking has to assume importing your module does something and keeps all of it.

{
  "type": "module",
  "exports": {
    ".": { "types": "./dist/index.d.ts", "default": "./dist/index.js" },
    "./package.json": "./package.json"
  },
  "sideEffects": false
}

Two ESM facts that cost the most time when they bite: relative imports need the file extension (./utils.js, not ./utils), and there is no __dirname — derive it with fileURLToPath(import.meta.url), or createRequire(import.meta.url) when you genuinely need to load a CJS-only package.