Ooh, look! Node got async/await!
Ooh, look! I can lint shell scripts with shellcheck!
Ooh, look! Webpack 2 has been released!
Ooh, look! I can switch over from npm to yarn!

There is so much stuff I want to upgrade and optimize in our project, that I forget about the actual JIRA ticket.

Gulp 4 is on the way and because async/await is here, Koa 2 is the new, better HTTP framework :3

What is yarn? Why is it better? I would like to read a concise description and comparison here on DevRant.

🙃

The amount of times I have felt that "ohh look"...haha

@ArchieT it's a npm client. its not better, it's different. It caches packages locally, which makes subsequent installs of the same version of a package faster.

@ArchieT I think that yarn gives some real benefits. Aside from the caching that @nicholai mentioned, it downloads packages in parallel connections, and it records a known-good set of package versions in a yarn.lock file. Aside from giving extra insurance against breaking changes upstream, and from totally breaking things yourself when upgrading packages, this also saves time when calculating inter-package deps.

The really nice thing is that yarn still uses package.json.

@chaimleib npm does these things as well :) yarn came out when npm3 was fairly new, we're at v5 now :)