the Deno dino

In 2018, eight years after walking away from the project he started, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl gave a talk called 10 Things I Regret About Node.js and used it to announce Deno, a secure by default runtime meant to fix what Node got wrong. The name is an anagram of Node and the mascot follows the same logic: a dinosaur, the prehistoric version of the thing that came before, standing alone in the rain. That melancholy is unusual for a developer tool, which normally reaches for something upbeat. Deno 1.0 shipped in May 2020 and the dino has been redrawn constantly since, in pixel art, in a fedora and sunglasses, and as the zero in the Deno 2.0 launch art in October 2024. Dahl and Bert Belder turned the project into a company in 2021 with backing from Mozilla, and the dinosaur is the one thing that survived every rebrand.