September 2017 - Built In Node

Node.js is a very popular platform for designing web applications, this list is meant to show just how important Node is to the developing world. Without further ado, here are 5 important websites built with Node.js, websites used by millions of people.

1 PayPal

If you ever paid online or received money online (which I’m hoping you have, it’s 2016) you probably used PayPal at one point or another. I could say that PayPal was co-founded by Elon Musk to draw you in, but actually PayPal was born as a merger between two companies, Confinity and X.com, the latter being owned by Musk. The important thing is that node.js is an integral part of PayPal since 2013. That’s when they slowly started to introduce node.js in their system and you know what they found out?

The node.js app was twice as fast
Had 33% fewer lines of code
It was constructed with 40% fewer files
It also had a 35% decrease in the average response time for the page

Jeff Harrell, Director of Engineering at Paypal:

“Node.js powers our web applications and has allowed our teams to move much faster in bringing their designs to life.”

2 Shutterstock

Shutterstock is a website that provides stock photographs, illustrations, videos and more. It has a library of over 50 million royalty free photos and 2 million videos and music pieces. It offers high quality photographs, licensed from photographers, designers, illustrators, videographers and musicians. It’s the perfect resource for high quality materials for websites or marketing campaigns.

Shutterstock uses node.js in various ways including in displaying images through the search queries.

3 Medium

Medium is an easy way to blog, an online publishing platform where you can contribute to your community, or express your opinion. The platform is a hybrid of professional and nonprofessional contributions with some paid contributions. It combines features from Twitter (it was co-founded by Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder) WordPress and Tumblr and is a great place for developers.

Medium uses node.js in its main app with Java, Redis and a few AWS services with Closure and LESS on the front-end side.

4 Trello

Trello is another very useful website, a management tools that helps you keep things organized for yourself or when working on a team. It has more than 10 millions users and an infrastructure built with Node.js for instant propagation of updates. Trello uses uses node-mongodb-native for its DB, structured data sharing in node_redis, and various other Node.js libraries to build their server.

It came a long way considering it started as an HTML mockup that was put together in a week.

5 Storify

Storify is a social network service that makes it possible for its users to create stories using various social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. As a user you can just find whatever elements or posts interest you from these social networks and drag them into stories. You can basically your own news items, which is pretty cool. The stories can gather up the most interesting things out there, avoiding the sift through on social media.

Node.js was still a teenager when Storify started using it so they had a few ups and downs at the beginning, but it was the perfect solution for its asynchronous nature and high scalability.

Philippe Modard is the Lead Engineer of Storify

“Our service is built on Node.js”

If you know of any other startups or companies using Node.js let us know, happy sharing!

Interviews are meant to be an analysis of your knowledge as a programmer and your personality. It’s not just about the technical aspects of the job, although they have a substantial say, but also how well would you fit in that organization and how well can you work with others. You’re not just a piece of data, the human side is very important.

When it comes to technical questions there is a lot of information out there, lists and examples from big corporations, not just related to Node.js, but related to programming as a whole. But programming is rarely a solitary venture so behaviour matters quite a bit.

In that context, companies choose various interesting questions to challenge people, questions to show them more about who you are, than what you know and how well do you know it. Character and behaviour are a big part of any job so it’s natural that questions will come up related to them. But some questions can be downright weird. Take note that they’re meant to gauge a response from you, so the weirdness in most cases is intentional.

Here are 10 behavioral questions, harvested from the great crop of the Internet.

1 Are you more of a hunter or a gatherer?

2 What songs best describe your work ethic?

3 Have you ever stolen a pen from work?

4 What do you think about when you are alone in your car?

5 What kind of animal would you be and why?

6 What do you think about when you are alone in your car?

7 What dinosaur would you like to be?

8 How would you rate your memory?

9 What’s the first thing you would do if you got the job?

10 On a scale from one to 10, rate me as an interviewer.

Remember than whenever you’re interviewing for a position, the person(s) sitting across from you want to know as much as possible about you, more than your CV offers, more than your technical abilities. They will test your creativity, the way you think, the way you act in various situations, your critical thinking, the way you would respond under pressure.

For questions like the ones above there is no right answer, it’s not about getting that, it’s about your personal response to them and the way the interviewer perceives you through your answers.

What oddball questions have you encountered in your interviewing experiences?