Things I learned taking a team into NodeJS

NodeJS retrospective on building a product entirely in NodeJS, and getting it running into customer's hands

Transcript

1. Things I learned taking a
   team into NodeJS
   

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2. @heckj
   Joe Heck
   Cofounder and VP of Engineering at Renasar
   Technologies
   Prior worlds:
   • Python
   • Java
   • Objective-C
   

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3. Renasar
   Started Python, C#
   We knew it, was fast
   Web-service with different focus - started into Angular,
   hosting on Heroku
   Wow, we really get stuff done fast!
   Changed product direction in May, moved to NodeJS
   

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4. Dipping a toe
   Yeah, weekend project turned all out effort
   Full transfer for major code in June (mostly from C#)
   No deep team experience in NodeJS, just moved
   quickly
   What we are building is very asynchronous network
   oriented
   

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5. Learning in Anger
   Tools that teach us
   JSHint
   Webstorm IDE
   Load of VIM plugins
   Jenkins driving EVERYTHING, have it yell at us
   

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6. The Obvious Things
   Prototype inheritance
   Javascript, The Good Parts
   Where’s my damn list comprehensions!?!?
   Thank god for underscore, lodash
   Dynamic language vs. static compiled languages
   testing as a priority, assert-plus
   Functional scope vs. Object scope
   

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7. The Subtle Things
   All the calls are asynchronous.
   No, Really!
   Nested callback hell to guarantee sequencing
   Promises!
   there’s SO many to choose from - we use Q
   Hierarchical module imports in NodeJS
   

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8. rewrite lots of constructors to pass in more and more
   things
   configuration, logging, etc…
   Finally - di.js
   What’s the scope for that function?
   Rewriting to be able to test functions otherwise
   hidden via scoping
   

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9. NodeJS is young…
   Caveat Emptor on libraries!
   Greater variability than I expected from other
   languages
   Don’t like that way of doing it? That’s ok, probably have
   of JS developers don’t either and made another way of
   doing it
   Node.js, IO.js
   

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10. ES6
    NodeJS on the server, browser implementation
    pieces - all sorts of convoluted
    Transpilers and build tools galore
    Make, Grunt, and Gulp
    Yoeman
    

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11. WTFBBQ?!?!
    DHCP server - listens on raw socket for broadcasts
    NodeJS doesn’t appear to support the full raw
    socket API - can’t bind to a specific interface, end up
    having to bind to 0.0.0.0 to get it to work
    Corner case for most, but surprised the hell out of us!
    To-do on our list to patch or expose and submit
    upstream
    

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12. Libraries
    Machina, postal, Q, nconf, lru-cache
    And more commonly known ones:
    lodash
    express
    request
    mongoose
    commander
    

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13. Testing
    Started with Jasmine, switched to Mocha
    Chai, Sinon, chai-as-promised, sinon-as-promised
    Mockery, istanbul
    JSDoc, APIdoc
    memwatch, strongloop, statsd
    

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14. Refinement
    Mongoose -> Waterline
    Validation and CRUD lifecycle
    migrations, adapters to different backends
    API management
    Swagger: JSON-Schema ++ for APIs
    Multi-language library support
    

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15. Releasing
    NPM is great, but multi-repo can be a pain
    Debian and RPM packaging
    dependency management in packages is ugly
    Deploying updates
    Linux OS conventions for hosting NodeJS
    

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16. 6 months, code in the wild
    Damn, we get a lot of stuff done quickly!
    Asynchronous has been beautiful, if occasionally
    painful
    Reaping the scaling, multi-protocol benefits
    Q/Promises making a huge difference
    Peer review and tools to suggest critical issues
    

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17. Q&A
    HIRING!
    @heckj
    github.com/heckj
    joseph.heck@renasar.com
    

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