NodeDay Amsterdam 2016
The NodeDay Amsterdam event, held last week on February 11th, was a one-day conference, as the name implies, dedicated to Node.js. The conference took place in an old and beautiful hall, the Machinegebouw of the Westergasfabriek in the West of Amsterdam.
As a front-end developer I always try to be aware of what happens in the JavaScript world, so NodeDay Amsterdam was a logical move to check current status of Node.js and to hear the opinion of community experts. Some of the speakers were from really big companies like Netflix, PayPal and Red hat.
The keynote speaker, Richard Rodger spoke about microservices: what they are, how to use and manage them and what the different ways of communication are between them. At the end of talk he did a small demo with Seneca, the microservices toolkit for Node.js
The second talk was again about microservices, but this time Ahmad Nassri told us how to use Kong for orchestration, management and solving trivial tasks just by using a simple RESTful API.
Maciej Małecki from npmjs.com talked about how they built npm-registry, the package manager for Node.js. The key moment of his talk was him emphasizing the importance of implementing monitoring and how today they have 100% uptime (previously 98%). Maciej also said that in the beginning npm-registry started with only a single instance of CouchDB.
Jean-Charles Sisk, a developer from PayPal gave us an introduction to KrakenJS and how open source helps for better documentation at PayPal. Actually, he said that Node.js was a trojan horse for PayPal which changed company culture.
Nathan Zadoks spoke about deploying Node.js apps with NixOS and how we must not only rely on npm for package dependencies.
Ben Fleis spoke about Uber Ringpop, a tool which provides routing and forwarding of requests. It is built with easy scalabilty in mind and to handle highly interactive real time data.
Next on the stage was Michael Paulson from Netflix. His talk was named “Run Falcor, Run” about Falcor, a JavaScript library for efficient data fetching. Recently I have played with Falcor, so I was anticipating to a talk that would dive deep into Falcor. Unfortunately for me, in his talk Michael told us about different performance strategies and decisions that they made creating Falcor. He also shared his experience with benchmarks and performance optimization tools like Flame Graphs and Benchmark.js.
The closing keynote talk was delivered by Luca Maraschi, platform architect at IceMobile. He shared a few stories about Node.js and the most interesting one was about a memory leak in a Walmart project and how they handled that problem.
In conclusion, I really enjoyed the event, even for me (as a front-end guy) it was very interesting. Maybe I had expected different talks instead of deploying microservices and load balancing, but that only confirms my opinion how far Node.js is nowadays. It is not the hot new tool anymore that is only used by crazy startups. We can see corporations such as PayPal, AirBnB, Walmart, Netflix, etc. successfully making use from it.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on February 16, 2016.
