~ $ cd open-source/packages && cat README.md

What strangers install

Thirty-four packages on npm are mine. Most were written for one project and are of interest only to it. None was ever promoted, and a few kept being installed anyway, years after I had stopped looking:

package	2015 to 2025, a bar a year	downloads
`string-cache-map`a WeakMap replacement for string keys, with a bounded cache behind it		100,982
`async-barrier`a helper that makes async/await tests say what they wait for		71,966
`spy-middleware`a Redux middleware for spying on actions in tests		27,885
`grunt-frontmatter`a Grunt task: many files with YAML front matter into one JSON		22,087
`object-canonical-keys`always the same array of keys for the same keys, so comparisons stay cheap		9,804
`async-deferrer`one function that returns a promise, or resolves it		6,231
the other 28mostly AngularJS and Redux helpers written for one project each		41,712
all of them		280,667

Source: npm, Inc. Download counts of the public registry. The dataset, at its source. This site keeps sums of the finished years 2015 to 2025, last added to on 21 September 2026.

Each row of bars is on its own scale: it shows the shape of a package's life, and the number beside it says how much.

What is in it

string-cache-map had its best year four years after it was written. It is from 2018 and was downloaded a few hundred times a year until 2021; in 2022 it was downloaded fifty thousand times.
async-barrier is still growing. Its best year so far is 2024, six years after it was published, and it is a helper for writing tests.
grunt-frontmatter is the other shape: it peaked in 2017 with Grunt itself, and has been going quietly ever since.

What it is not

A download is not a person. The registry counts every mirror, every robot and every build server that ever ran an install, and one company's continuous integration can be most of a package's year. What the numbers do say is that the code is in use somewhere, by someone who found it on their own and did not replace it.