I’m a maintainer of several small open-source libraries. It’s a fun activity. If the scope of the library is small enough, the maintenance burden is typically fairly low. They’re usually mostly ‘done’, and I occasionally just need to answer a few questions per year, and do the occasional release to bring it back up to the current ‘meta’ of the ecosystem.

Also even though it’s ‘done’, in use by a bunch of people and well tested, it’s also good to do a release from time to time to not give the impression of abandonment.

This weekend I released a 2.0 version of my bigint-money library, which is a fast library for currency math.

I originally wrote this in 2018, so the big BC break was switching everything over to ESM. For a while I tried to support both CommonJS and ESM builds for my packages, but only a year after all that effort it frankly no longer feels needed. I was worried the ecosystem was going to split, but people stuck on (unsupported) versions of Node that don’t support ESM aren’t going to proactively keep their other dependencies updated, so CommonJS is for (and many others) in the past now. (yay!)

Probably the single best way to keep maintenance burden for packages low is to have few dependencies. Many of my packages have 0 dependencies.

Reducing devDependencies also helps. If you didn’t know, node now has a built-in testrunner. I’ve been using Mocha + Chai for many many years. They were awesome and want to thank the maintainers, but node --test is pretty good now and has pretty output.

It also:

• Is much faster (about twice as fast with Typescript and code coverage reporting, but I suspect the difference will grow with larger code bases).
• Easier to configure (especially when you’re also using Typescript. Just use tsx --test).
• It can output test coverage with (--experimental-test-coverage).

Furthermore, while node:assert doesn’t have all features of Chai, it has the important ones (deep compare) and adds better Promise support.

All in all this reduced my node_modules directory from a surprising 159M to 97M, most of which is now Typescript and ESLint, and my total dependency count from 335 to 141 (almost all of which is ESLint).

Make sure that Node’s test library, coverage and assertion library is right for you. It may not have all the features you expect, but I keep my testing setup relatively simple, so the switch was easy.