Don't be in a hurry!

There's good and bad to the internet. The Good - there's plenty of copy-paste code snippets, ready to use libraries. Within no time you will be up and running. The Bad - Its overwhelming! You can cook something real quick, but you miss understanding the recipes. You could spend hours debugging a piece of asynchronous code, if you don't understand promises.

Follow DRY, but get to know before using!

npm is a great place to look for what you need. But spend time to understand the concepts that the author had used before using the code in your project. I did not start here. I wrote some helper tool kits only to realize that there are better, comprehensive, ready to use kits.

Don't start with "Let me write a framework that would encapsulate...". Your common infrastructure and utility needs are covered. The libraries are concise. One wouldn't need an extra abstraction layer on the top to expose them to the application layer.

There are chances that you would find more than one library for the same functionality that you may want. Instead of saying "let me write a wrapper, so I can switch between them", spend the time to understand what each library provides, write some code and pick one.