With Node.js, it’s easy to get things done

Luciano Mammino is the author (alongside Mario Casciaro) of the second edition of Node.js Design Patterns, released in July 2016. He was kind enough to speak to us about his life as a web developer and working with Node.js – as well as assessing Node’s position within an exciting ecosystem of JavaScript libraries and frameworks. Follow Luciano on Twitter – he tweets from @loige. 

1.     Tell us about yourself – who are you and what do you do?

I’m an Italian software developer living in Dublin and working at Smartbox as Senior Engineer in the Integration team. I’m a lover of JavaScript and Node.js and I have a number of upcoming side projects that I am building with these amazing technologies. 

2.     Tell us what you do with Node.js. How does it fit into your wider development stack?

The Node.js platform is becoming ubiquitous; the range of problems that you can address with it is growing bigger and bigger. I’ve used Node.js on a Raspberry Pi, in desktop and laptop computers and on the cloud quite successfully to build a variety of applications: command line scripts, automation tools, APIs and websites. With Node.js it’s really easy to get things done. Most of the time I don't need to switch to other development environments or languages. This is probably the main reason why Node.js fits very well in my development stack. 

3.     What other tools and frameworks are you working with? Do they complement Node.js?

Some of the tools I love to use are RabbitMq, MongoDB, Redis and Elastic Search. Thanks to the Npm repository, Node.js has an amazing variety of libraries which makes integration with these technologies seamless. I was recently experimenting with ZeroMQ, and again I was surprised to see how easy it is to get started with a Node.js application. 

4.     Imagine life before you started using Node.js. What has its impact been on the way you work?

I started programming when I was very young so I really lived "a life" as a programmer before having Node.js. Before Node.js came out I was using JavaScript a lot to program the frontend of web applications but I had to use other languages for the backend. The context-switching between two environments is something that ends up eating up a lot of time and energy. Luckily today with Node.js we have the opportunity to use the same language and even to share code across the whole web stack. I believe that this is something that makes my daily work much easier and enjoyable. 

5.     How important are design patterns when you use Node.js? Do they change how you use the tool?

I would say that design patterns are important in every language and in this case Node.js makes no difference. Furthermore due to the intrinsically asynchronous nature of the language having a good knowledge of design patterns becomes even more important in Node.js to avoid some of the most common pitfalls. 

6.     What does the future hold for Node.js? How can it remain a really relevant and valuable tool for developers?

I am sure Node.js has a pretty bright future ahead. Its popularity is growing dramatically and it is starting to gain a lot of traction in enterprise environments that have typically bound to other famous and well-known languages like Java. At the same time Node.js is trying to keep pace with the main innovations in the JavaScript world. For instance, in the latest releases Node.js added support for almost all the new language features defined in the ECMAScript 2015 standard. This is something that makes programming with Node.js even more enjoyable and I believe it’s a strategy to follow to keep developers interested and the whole environment future-proof. 

Thanks Luciano! Good luck for the future – we’re looking forward to seeing how dramatically Node.js grows over the next 12 months.

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