First NPM Package

Yesterday I developed and published my first NPM package, the armenian-names package. This package provides the following useful functions:

getMaleNames()
getFemaleNames()
getAllNames()
getRandomMaleName()
getRandomFemaleName()
getRandomName()

Who Would Benefit from armenian-names?

People developing applications that need to incorporate Armenian given names, whether boy or girl names, as part of their data can benefit from importing this package into their project.

Why I Built It

1. I wanted to build something fun that I'm interested in. I'm ethnically Armenian and preserving my ethnic identity is something I value. I also find picking names for babies to be a fun thing to do.
2. I wanted to learn a new technology. Learning how to build and publish an NPM package was always something I had in the back burner and finally got to do.
3. I wanted to add something to the incredibly vast universe of resources available for developers that is the Internet. This is one contribution I made, giving back to this mind-blowing ecosystem.
4. This is a project I could showcase in a future job interview or technical talk.

What I Learned

1. Building an NPM package is a very easy process. The steps are:
   1. mkdir <your-npm-package-name>.
   2. cd <your-npm-package-name>.
   3. git init.
   4. npm init.
   5. Create an index.js.
   6. In index.js, you provide data and export function(s) to make that data available to the end user in someway(s).
   7. npm link to make it globally available on your machine for testing.
   8. Create another project to test it.
   9. npm link <your-npm-package-name> to add it as a dependency and use it in that test project.
   10. When ready, npm login and then npm publish.
2. There are currently 2,459,633 packages on npm. My armenian-names package is one of those 2,459,633 packages.