I wonder if the author could have replicated the couchdb database locally to make their life easier.

> I was recently working on a project that uses the AWS SDK for JavaScript. When updating the dependencies in said project, I noticed that the version of that dependency was v3.888.0. Eight hundred eighty eight. That’s a big number as far as versions go.

It also isn’t the first AWS SDK. A few of us in… 2012 IIRC… wrote the first one because AWS didn’t think node was worth an SDK.

The "winner" just had its 3000th release on GitHub, already a few patch versions past the version referenced in this article (which was published today): https://github.com/wppconnect-team/wa-version

Incidentally I once ran into a mature package that had lived in the 0.0.x lane forever and treated every release as a patch, racking up a huge version number, and I had to remind the maintainer that users depending with caret ranges won't get those updates automatically. (In semver caret ranges never change the leftmost non-zero digit; in 0.0.x that digit is the patch version, so ^0.0.123 is just a hard pin to 0.0.123). There may occasionally be valid reasons to stay on 0.0.x though (e.g. @types/web).

> Time to fetch version data for each one of those packages: ~12 hours (yikes)

The author could improve the batching in fetchAllPackageData by not waiting for all 50 (BATCH_SIZE) promises to resolve at once. I just published a package for proper promise batching last week: https://www.npmjs.com/package/promises-batched