// the find
creationix/howtonode.org
This repo contains the actual articles for HowToNode.org
A community blog from circa 2010-2013 where Node.js contributors wrote tutorials covering callbacks, control flow, Express, MongoDB, Redis, and socket.io. It's a historical artifact — the wheat static site engine that powered it is itself a Node.js experiment. Last meaningful activity was over a decade ago.
The articles cover foundational Node.js patterns (callbacks, event emitters, prototypal inheritance) that are still worth understanding even if the APIs have moved on. Several pieces were written by people who actually built the ecosystem — Isaac Schlueter (npm), Guillermo Rauch (socket.io) — so the explanations come from primary sources. The article format embeds runnable code files alongside the markdown, which was ahead of its time for tutorial repos. The object-graphs series in particular is a genuinely good explanation of JavaScript's prototype chain that hasn't aged badly.
Everything targets Node v0.1-v0.6, which predates npm having a lock file, streams2, Promises, async/await, and ES6 modules — entire articles are about problems that no longer exist or solutions that are now antipatterns. The wheat engine dependency is dead and the setup instructions reference spark, a process manager that's been gone for ten years, so you can't actually run this locally without archaeology. Half the packages mentioned (geddy, grasshopper, bogart) are abandoned or gone from npm entirely. There's no indication of which articles are still relevant versus which will actively mislead a reader new to Node.