Building PkgPulse: How I Compare npm Packages with Real Data

Originally published at pkgpulse.com The Problem Every Developer Ignores Until It's Too Late You're starting a new project. You need a date library. So you Google "best JavaScript date library" and get a blog post from 2022 recommending Moment.js — a package that's been deprecated since 2020 and adds 72kB to your bundle. Every developer faces "which package should I use?" decisions weekly. The existing tools each solve one piece of the puzzle. npmtrends shows download counts. Bundlephobia shows bundle size. Snyk shows vulnerabilities. But no single tool answers the real question: is this package actually healthy? Maintenance activity, popularity trends, bundle impact, and security status — you had to check four different sites to figure that out. I got tired of the tab-switching ritual. Check npm for the last publish date. Check downloads on npmtrends. Check bundle size on Bundlephobia. Check Snyk for CVEs. Four tabs, four UIs, and I still had to synthesize the answer in my head. So I