Node Congress Speaker Showcase: Interview with Feross Aboukhadijeh

Socket CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh was recently interviewed on Basarat Ali Syed’s YouTube channel for his Node Congress Speaker Showcase series. Syed is an engineering team leader and prolific open source contributor in the JavaScript / TypeScript ecosystem.

This 16-minute episode is a fun conversation that spans NodeJS, security, and the eye-opening experience of becoming an open source maintainer. They also discussed the humorous back story on how Feross’ StandardJS project emerged from a need to maintain consistent coding styles across multiple projects.

Through authoring 100+ packages on npm, Feross became intimately acquainted with the vulnerabilities inherent in downloading open source code from package registries and the risks developers face with dependency management. He founded Socket to tackle these issues.

The episode touches on the innovative use of Language Learning Models (LLMs) to detect malicious code in dependencies, showcasing the broader potential of LLMs beyond chat interfaces to real-world applications in code analysis and security. Feross hinted that this will be part of his session at Node Congress and he plans to include practical steps for improving dependency security, based on Socket’s work in securing open source software at scale.

Node Congress 2024 is happening on April 4 - 5 online. The event is packed full of exciting sessions on modern JavaScript backend runtimes and best practices. We hope to see you there!