"Be not afraid!"

In the era of async/await, the grass has never been greener over here in Node.js-land. But there are still a few major gotchas you need to watch out for, and some of them are less than obvious. Mike will review the most common practical risks and mistakes our team sees in real-world Node.js applications. And then he'll explain why it's actually fine... why, despite all that, Node.js is even more of an awesome choice for your application in 2019.

Mike McNeil (@mikermcneil) has been an avid business user and evangelist for Node.js for the last seven years. He's also the creator of Sails.js, a popular open-source MVC framework that's kind of like Rails for Node.js.

Transcript

1. Austin Node.js meetup
   November 2018
   @
   

   View Slide

2. Thank you!
   

   View Slide

3. The Company
   Mike McNeil
   @mikermcneil
   founder & CEO of sails co.
   digital studio
   (a.k.a. design/dev/product shop)
   open-source MVC framework for Node.js
   creator of
   

   View Slide

4. "Be not afraid!"
   @mikermcneil
   

   View Slide

5. What's wrong with
   Node.js?
   

   View Slide

6. What's wrong with
   some Node.js apps?
   

   View Slide

7. 1. Not using await
   

   View Slide

8. 1(A). Throwing in callbacks
   

   View Slide

9. 1(B). Ignoring errors in
   callbacks or in promise chains
   

   View Slide

10. 1(C). Not using await...
    on purpose
    (drinking performance kool-aid)
    

    View Slide

11. 1(D). Not using await...
    on accident
    

    View Slide

12. 2. Not handling 'error' events
    

    View Slide

13. 3. Lack of structure
    

    View Slide

14. 3(A). Named functions being
    declared all over the place
    

    View Slide

15. (in our server-side Node.js code, if
    we give a function a name, then we
    also give it its own file)
    

    View Slide

16. 3(B). Not having a way of
    figuring out all the places
    where a given function is
    being called from
    

    View Slide

17. (can you grep for it?)
    

    View Slide

18. 3(C). Insufficient abstraction
    

    View Slide

19. (express is a fantastic "build your
    own framework" framework)
    

    View Slide

20. 4. Fetching WAAAAYYY
    too many things
    at the same time
    

    View Slide

21. 5. Fetching a normal amount
    of things…but WAAAYYYY
    too many times
    

    View Slide

22. @mikermcneil
    Questions?
    

    View Slide