Month: May 2016

Learning a new skill, learning something new, be it a programming language or something else,  is a challenge, but it also depends a lot on the resources you use. Our life is, or should be, a constant journey of development and learning; there is always not just room for more, but opportunity and benefits of practising your mind and gaining insights into all sorts of things. Of course this doesn’t apply just to programming languages, it’s not about learning them all. But as a general rule of thumb, knowing and learning is very much living.

Many of us have big dreams and plans when it comes to self development, we want to learn German (it’s not impossible), node.js, how to use a bow, how to fix a car, how to build a fort (forts are cool) and more. We want, we try and every so often, more often that most of us would like to admit, we give up. And we swipe our failure under the rug of “At least I tried”.

The resources we use to learn something new are equally responsible, together with our own desire to succeed,  for our success or failure. Some people resonate better with a certain learning environment, some likes books, others like videos and so on and so forth. When it comes to programming languages you have a lot of different types of resources available out there, there is a lot of material explained in all sorts of way so you can definitely find something that clicks with your process.

We’ll show you a few resources that can help you learn or better understand node.js, resources that take you from your level, be it beginner, master node expert or anything in between.

1 The Node beginner book

Of course we’ll start with the beginner level. This is a short book, simple and easy to comprehend, great for starting up. Break it layer by layer and you’ll be have an easier time climbing the learning ladder. You can find the book here.

2 Practical Node.js

This book is a great guide after you’re more familiar with node, it has a nice guide for building all sorts of real life apps. It goes through the whole toolkit, taking you step by step through the whole process. It’s available here.

3 Node: up and running

This one is great if you have a bit of a know how in JavaScript. It’s really useful to get in depth knowledge when it comes to Node.js. It covers several interesting topics like loop architecture. It’s worth a read. Available here!

4 Smashing Node

Smashing Node is a very complex book, ideal for developers with vast previous experience in JavaScript, a great resource that encompasses all the tools and features you need to know to build a great Node.js application. You can get it here.

These are just a few recommendations, there are a lot of great books out there about Node.js, books and other type of resources that can help you understand and master it. Each one of the books that we shown here take you from a different stage of knowledge, some take you as a blank slate other take into account a substantial amount of already accumulated knowledge.

Other useful resources that you might want to try out are: mastering Node.js, available in different formats (for free), the node.js documentation or YLD’s video tutorials,

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In 2013 a few big names starting using Node, for various reasons. PayPal replaced a stack of mixed technologies with Node.js in order to transform the company, The Mail Online –  dailymail.co.uk, one of the highest ranking website in the world when it comes to traffic, replaced Java with Node.js for rapid delivery. Netflix took the same route relying on Node in order to enable rapid delivery and innovation. The number of companies that currently use Node has increased dramatically over the years and so has the demand for Node.js. NearForm, a Node.js consultancy company has grown by 600% from 2013 to 2015, a clear indication on how popular Node has become.

Choosing a programming platform is a major decision that has implications in more ways that we can imagine. It impacts everything about the company or the product, from A to Z. Here are 3 reasons why Node.js is a good choice for a startup.

1 Scalability

Scalability is crucial for a startup, it’s a major point to check out before going deeper.  Node is an ideal solution to create a lightweight and large scale system that has a good real time response. The ability to scale up at any later date makes Node a very valuable framework for startups. You never know how high will you go, so you better get ready better you take of. It’s a good argument not just for startups, for example, Groupon changed their front end system from Ruby to Node in order to upscale their system. Linkedin choose Node for the same reasons, they needed to handle multiple services and live connections.

“On the server side, our entire mobile software stack is completely built in Node. One reason was scale. The second is Node showed us huge performance gains.”

~ (Kiran Prasad, Mobile Director of Engineering for LinkedIn)

2 The community

Node has got a very good buzz going for it, a buzz that has a lot of benefits. An active community means a lot of support, feedback and frameworks that help you with development. A crucial and valuable helping hand for a startup (and not just). Our own BuiltinNode website is a part of that movement – to bring awareness of Node startups and companies, to promote and connect people in the community.  This also entails a lot of talent coming on the Node side, and a surge in node jobs. Check this graph out from indeed, feel free to add any Node.js jobs you might have on our site.

In just a few short years demand for Node devs has skyrocketed, just like Node itself, there are hundreds of meetup groups and dedicated support communities that make Node an active and living entity that’s much easier to use.

3 Speed and reduced response time

We mentioned The Mail Online at the beginning of this article, this online newspaper is also a good example of how efficient Node is in the speed department. Frankly this is rather an important one, when was the last time you waited for more than 5 second for a site to process your connection?

The Mail Online has over 150 million visitors and a hugely complex website, with more than 100 billion images and about 200 articles in the sidebar. Their readers might be happy for this apparent luxury, but this complexity increases significantly the risk for their servers to crash. They switched from 155.000 lines of Java, 30.000 lines of JSP and 50.000 lines of JavaScript to all out Node in several apps. Node solved for them several problems that seemed unsolvable. Walmart turned to Node as well, and manages to double the number of requests per second and reduced response time by 35%. This was way back in 2013, so add 2 years of development on this and think about what you got now in Node.js.

Node.js was and is an excellent choice for several large companies and it has the characteristics and features that every startup needs. An ideal choice for succes.

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Your brand is so much more than the public facet of your business. A brand is not only defined by it’s visual representation, but it implies an entire spectrum of associations that people assign to it within every single interaction. Therefore, the process of rebranding not only has a rejuvenating effect over the public expression of your company, but it also reflects your brands’ positioning in the market dynamics and your business performances.

Nonetheless, rebranding seems prerequisite when the previous formula od your brand no longer makes justice to the technological innovations arising throughout your development efforts.

Rebranding occurs on a much deeper level than the simple visual existence of your business. Changing you logo, coming up with a catchy tagline and calling it a day just doesn’t cut it anymore, especially in the technological sector. Keeping pace with the innovative trends involves constantly reinventing and readapting your brand, in order to stay afloat.

In a nutshell, a well-executed rebranding could be exactly what the doctor ordered for your company to confidently reinforce its’ values and honor the commitment of a more relevant brand promise. This is the case of an early BuiltinNode community adherent, that has recently gone through the metamorphosis of the promising naming that “Now It’s Simple”, to the comprehensive status of Nodejs Enterprise, which encapsulates a full-featured and robust nodejs CMS.

Nodejs Enterprise incorporates the must-have trio manager for content, docker and ecommerce, sustaining setup content editors, controller, data bindings and parser in just a few clicks for any enterprise apps in Nodejs.

We salute the courageous movement of the up and running Nodejs Enterprise and we hope it receives and enthusiastic response within the Nodejs community!

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