// the find
feross/awesome-mad-science
Delightful npm packages that make you say "wow, didn't know that was possible!"
A curated awesome-list of npm packages that do surprising things — P2P filesystems, WebGL shaders compiled from npm modules, Linux running in a browser, JVMs in Node. It's a snapshot of what the Node.js ecosystem was capable of around 2015-2018, assembled by Feross and friends who were pushing those boundaries.
The geometry section (Mikola Lysenko's packages) is genuinely excellent — robust n-dimensional computational geometry in JavaScript is not something most developers know exists. The P2P section predates most developers' awareness of WebRTC and torrent-in-browser tricks, and several entries (webtorrent, simple-peer) became real production tools. The 'mad scientists' section is a useful pointer to a cluster of prolific npm authors whose other work is worth following.
Last updated 2022, but most entries effectively stopped being maintained years earlier — several npm links 404 or point to deprecated packages. No health indicators: no stars, no last-commit dates, no 'abandoned' flags, so you have no idea which entries are alive. The list is too short and too shallow to be a real reference; it reads more like a personal bookmark dump than a maintained resource. The browserify section is a historical artifact at this point — that ecosystem is dead.