The trusted publishing setting that would have blocked the npm snapshot-branch attacks

In June 2026, a self-propagating npm worm compromised maintainer accounts and republished their packages with malware inside. Maintainers woke to hundreds of malicious versions across dozens of packages, often published in a few minutes overnight.

Many of those versions went out through npm's trusted publishing, the tokenless way to publish from CI, and they carried valid provenance. The green badge, the Sigstore attestation, the "built from this repo by this workflow" proof: all real.

The worm never needed an npm password for those publishes. It used the release pipeline itself.

Trusted publishing remains the right approach. Many configurations leave one field blank, and that blank field is the gap. Closing it takes about five minutes per package. This post shows the attack and the settings that would have stopped the snapshot-branch half of it.

The GitHub and npm settings open source maintainers should turn on before they need them

In the middle of a supply-chain incident, the maintainer is not just fixing packages. They are locked out of their account, answering reports, trying to contact registries, trying to warn users, and trying to prove what happened.

That is the part we do not talk about enough.

Most open source maintainers are not companies. They do not have incident response teams. They do not have a security department. They have a GitHub account, an npm account, a laptop, and a lot of people depending on them.

Security advice often assumes the maintainer is the weak link. That is backwards. The maintainer is the last line of defence, usually unpaid, usually alone, and often locked out of the systems they need during the incident.

This is the checklist I wish every maintainer had before something goes wrong. No single setting saves you, so it works in layers: the account, the branch, the release path, the workflow, the tokens, the files, the tripwires, and the recovery plan.

Managed laptops do not make secure maintainers

After a supply-chain incident, companies reach for the control they own: the device. They lock laptops down, ban personal accounts, restrict tools, and tighten policy.

That response can reduce risk. It does not secure the part that failed.

Open-source incidents do not usually begin with someone using the wrong brand of laptop. They begin with compromised accounts, weak release paths, bad credential hygiene, missing recovery plans, and maintainers who never got taught how GitHub, npm, OIDC, and publishing controls fit together.

If you secure the device and ignore the maintainer, you leave the real problem in place.

Secure AI Apps Start With Functions, Not SQL

If you're building AI features into your product, the temptation is to hand the model a database connection and let it write SQL.

It feels powerful. It feels like the modern way.

It's the wrong place to start.

The same reasoning applies whether you're building a CLI, a Slack bot, an MCP server, or an agent.

node-env-resolver Makes Safe, Typed Node Config the Default

Liran Tal is spot on in his Environment variables and configuration anti-patterns in Node.js applications post

You may inadvertently expose sensitive information like database credentials and API keys as part of error messages, stack traces, and other forms of data returned to consuming clients.

He explains why process.env feels safe right up until it isn't.

You add dotenv.config() on line one, scatter process.env.DB_PASSWORD across twelve files, then someone's error reporter serialises a request object and your Stripe key ends up in a third-party log.

If you've shipped a Node app, you've probably seen some version of this happen.

His anti-pattern example nails it:

const port = process.env.PORT || 3000;
const dbUsername = process.env.DB_USERNAME;
const dbPassword = process.env.DB_PASSWORD;
const dbHost = process.env.DB_HOST;
const apiBaseUrl = process.env.API_BASE_URL;
const apiToken = process.env.API_TOKEN;

Untyped. Unvalidated. Globally readable. One step away from leaking through logs, traces, or error reporters.

But there's still a gap...

Your .env File Is Not a Secret Store

Most teams make one of two mistakes with secrets.

The first is obvious.

The second is more common in teams that have already fixed the first one.

Both come from the same misunderstanding about what a .env file is supposed to do.

Log the Fingerprint, Not the Secret

When something goes wrong with your application's configuration, you need to know what was loaded and where it came from.

Most tools for answering that question either tell you too much or nothing at all.

There's a third option most people haven't considered.

Algebraic Thinking Without the Ceremony

Christian Ekrem's post, Effect Without Effect-TS: Algebraic Thinking in Plain TypeScript, shows something useful: typed errors, explicit dependencies, and composition do not require a framework.

This post takes the same principles and shows where awaitly helps once the manual approach starts to repeat. The point is not "no ceremony."

The point is where ceremony lives.

The package manager settings that would have blocked the Axios attack

On the 31st of March 2026, attackers hijacked an npm maintainer account and published malicious versions of axios with a remote access trojan baked in. npm pulled the bad releases after about two or three hours, but that was enough. Anyone who ran npm install axios during that window could have installed the trojan. The article Post Mortem: axios npm supply chain compromise has all the details.

This kind of attack keeps happening and the playbook barely changes: compromise an account, push a malicious update, hope people install it before anyone notices, get removed a few hours later.

Every major package manager now lets you defend against this. In this post I'll show you the setup for npm, pnpm, Bun and Yarn.

Engineering decisions are bets, not proofs

Most engineering decisions are not proofs.

They are bets.

You choose a direction with incomplete information, under time pressure, and with trade-offs you cannot fully test in advance.

That does not make the decision weak.

It makes it real.

In a previous post, I wrote about how design by committee leaves engineering change unfinished. The deeper reason is simple: many organisations treat technical decisions as though they should be certain before the work begins. But most meaningful engineering decisions are not certainties. They are bets.