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VALUES_AND_PRIORITIZATION.md

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Values and Priorities

Document Status: Proposal, Work In Progress

Context

Prioritize the Technical values shared by the project and use these to guide us when making tradeoffs.

Values and priority level

This is only a subset of the overall priorities, listing only those which are at the top of the priority list. Anything on this list is very important for the project despite the relative priorities shown.

  • Priority 1 - Developer experience
  • Priority 2 - Stability
  • Priority 3 - Operational qualities
  • Priority 4 - Node.js maintainer experience
  • Priority 5 - Technology and API currency

Value descriptions

Developer Experience

We value ensuring that developers are productive and enjoy developing with Node.js. Some key elements of this include:

  • Approachability (both technical and community)
  • Great Documentation
  • Bundling friction-reducing APIs and components, even though they could be provided externally
  • Enabling/supporting external packages to ensure overall developer experience

Stability

To avoid introducing churn into Node.js' ecosystem, we value stability and consistency across releases and avoid breaking changes. Some key elements of this include:

  • Backwards compatibility
  • Predictable and stable releases
  • A strong safety net, including explicitly testing how changes in Node.js affect userland packages.
  • Careful consideration of what goes into LTS releases

Operational Qualities

We value keeping Node.js safe, performant and lightweight as well as the ability to investigate and debug problems in development and production. Some key elements of this include:

  • Throughput (speed)
  • Startup time
  • Binary size
  • Memory footprint
  • Debug tooling (debugger)
  • Diagnostic tooling (profilers, heapdumps, coredumps, etc.)
  • Addressing security vulnerabilities in a responsible manner

Node.js Maintainer Experience

We value the productivity and happiness of Node.js' maintainers. Some key elements of this include:

  • Approachability of the codebase
  • Good internal documentation and guides
  • Low-friction policies and processes
  • Good CI and tooling to make maintainers productive

Providing modern APIs and Technologies

We value providing developers with modern APIs and technologies following existing standards whenever possible. Some key elements of this include:

  • Participating in standards work and organizations
  • Web API compatibility
  • Supporting and exposing new technologies and standards through early adoption

References

First pass at list of values Original priorities brainstorm document