Package management sits at the foundation of modern software development, quietly powering nearly every software project in the world.

Tools like NPM and Yarn have long been the core of the JavaScript ecosystem, enabling developers to install, update, and share code with ease.

But as projects grow larger and the ecosystem more complex, this older infrastructure is beginning

to show its limits with performance bottlenecks, dependency conflicts, and growing concerns around

supply chain security. Darcy Clark and Rui Adorno are veterans of this ecosystem. Both spent

years maintaining the NPM CLI and helping guide the Node.js project, where they saw

firsthand the technical debt and design tradeoffs that define modern JavaScript tooling.

Now they're building Volt, a new package manager and registry that rethings performance, security,

and developer experience from the ground up. In this episode,

Darcy and Rui joined Josh Goldberg to discuss how Volt works, why they believe package management

needs a server-side reboot, what lessons they've drawn from NPM's evolution, and how features

like declarative querying, self-hosted registries, and real-time security scanning

could reshape how developers build and share JavaScript in the years ahead.

This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg, an independent full-time open-source developer.

Josh works on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem, most notably TypeScript

ESLint, a powerful static analysis tool set for JavaScript and TypeScript. He is also the author

of the O'Reilly Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and a co-founder of

SquiggleConf, a conference for excellent web developer tooling.

Find Josh on Blue Sky, Fostodon, and dot com as Joshua K. Goldberg.

Darcy Clark and Voya Dornan, the Volt Company, welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

How's it going?

Good. Thanks for having us, Josh.

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