Last week I had the pleasure of attending Node Summit 2016 in San Francisco. I am eager to share some of the new cool technologies and concepts I learned about while I was there.
NodeSchool is a tool for learning node and javascript concepts. If you have node and npm installed, starting a lesson is as easy as installing a new node package; these lessons range from utilizing node tools, to the nuts and bolts of creating and publishing a node package.
The one hardware workshop at the conference proved to be perfect office hackathon fodder. Particle.io is a platform for interacting with internet of things devices, and using node and their Photon microcontroller we were able to program a row of lights to act as a scoreboard for a game of tic-tac-toe. As someone who deals strictly with software, it was a welcome diversion to play around with breadboards and resistors for a few hours.
One of the most insightful and fun presentations I attended during my time at Node Summit was on security. This talk featured a lot of great examples of trying to hack into or disrupt a locally hosted web application. Of course, the main thrust wasn’t to teach people how to hack–though I can’t say I didn’t learn a thing or two–but to show how out-of-date node modules can bring security vulnerabilities to your codebase. The presentation concluded with a stern warning that actual hacking was illegal and an insight into a current company for those in need of a fix:”bugcrowd” a platform that lets companies pay bounties to hackers to break into their systems so that they can close any security gaps.
The main buzzword at the conference was micro-services. Every sponsor from NASA to Netflix gave talks on how they have transformed their entire systems over to use this architecture concept.
Micro-services are not specific to node, but node’s flexibility means that it lends itself well to the concept. The micro-service pattern refers to breaking out all of the functionality of your product into independent pieces, instead of housing them within a single unit–known as a “monolith”. This way, when you make changes to your app, you don’t have to redeploy your entire codebase. Instead you’re deploying just the parts of the app that were affected by changes. This works especially well in node because you to pull in only the modules you need for each individual micro-service, and there are tons of node modules out there designed with communication between micro-services in mind.
Looking back at the conference as a whole, I was inundated with the vastness of node itself. Every year for the past four years the numbers of new node users has doubled, and there are 300+ new modules published every day. This has inspired me to try them all out and bring cool new technologies back to Shockoe.
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