Starting out as a developer can be daunting, learning a new technology either as a student or a already established programmer usually takes the road of blood, sweat and tears. But learning Node.js can be a lot easier with the help of the amazing community that was built around it.
Here are a few tips from node.js developers and active community members. We hope their tips will help and if you have other useful tricks to share just think about how they helped you and how much they can help others.
A 100% growth rate means that every day new people start to learn Node.js and the great thing about this technology is the support that exists within the community. So if you have other tips for people starting out on Node share them in the comment section.
Here are some tips for Node beginners:
Start simple, do Vanilla, learn to use Node.js itself before moving to modules. Become active in the community, connect and try to contribute, to give back as much and as little as you can.
Wyatt Preul
Product Engineer, Joyent
Take some time and look at what goes on “behind the scenes”, how do the modules work, who writes them and get to know these members of the community and see what you you can learn from them and what are their opinions.
Steven Faulkner
Director of Engineering, Bustle
Use a private npm registry, don’t check in your Node.js modules to Git, be careful of using Git URLs in your package JSON, they can lead to a lot of issues in time, but at the beginning are a nice shortcut.
Charlie Robbins,
Director of Engineering, GoDaddy
Lock your dependencies. He’s really putting his foot down here – just lock them. If you’re going to upgrade Node make sure you let your team know.
If you upgrade Node on your machine and something goes wrong, just remove rm-rf/node_modules and npm install it again. This one is hand on a very practical advice.
James Hush
Software Engineer, NFL
Make sure you handle errors when they occur and make sure you handle them accurately., crash the application when it’s in an unknown state and restart it. Create tests and test them, make sure you have automated tests. Node being a dynamically typed language, he urges you to have some strict data validation.
Paul Milham
Lead Developer, WildWorks
If you’re an experienced developer think about all the stuff you wished you knew, that could have saved you a lot of headaches and frustration. There’s a lot of them, right?
Well, write a few of them up, a lot of people will thank you for them.
The tips mentioned in this articles were recorded in the following video.
Tweet