This message is from Mark Hinkle, the Executive Director of the Node.js Foundation; you can follow him @mrhinkle on Twitter. Every month, Mark will provide major updates from the team who makes up the Node.js Foundation and the Node.js Foundation board.
Hello,
Every month we, at the Node.js Foundation, are amazed at the more than 9 million instances of Node.js that are online. We continue to see amazing growth in the way organizations are using Node.js. We recently launched the Node.js Application Showcase where anyone with a Node.js success story can share their experience. We have more than 90 applications published (so far) and are growing quickly since launching in January 2018. We’d love to have more organizations showcase their Node.js success story, so share what you’re building today.
Update from the Node.js Foundation March Board Meeting
Every month the Node.js Board of Directors meets to discuss the business matters of the Node.js Foundation. The board of directors is made up of delegates from the Foundation’s Platinum, Gold, and Silver members, two independently elected directors (elected from the Node.js Individual Membership), and the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) director. If your organization is interested in joining the Node.js Foundation, you can find more information on the Foundation’s website.
The March meeting of the Node.js Foundation’s Board of Directors took place on March 26 via telephone and the public session was also streamed to YouTube.
Community Updates
There are thousands of people who help develop, promote, and contribute in a variety of ways to Node.js. The Foundation is working with Tracy Lee (@ladyleet) and the folks at This.dot to help provide support to the Node.js community and make sure we are providing everything the community needs to develop Node.js. Tracy and her team will start to become active in the Node.js community over the next month.
Last year we started putting together the Node.js Certified Developer Exam. You can follow progress on Node Certification on the Node Certified Developer repo on Github. We are currently getting ready to alpha test the Node.js Certification Exam.
Currently, there is a mentorship initiative in the Node.js project. The most recent meeting was held and streamed to YouTube. Myles Borins gave an update during the board meeting on why this is important, and how it can be supported.
Event Updates
JS Interactive is moving along and we have sign ups from both sponsors and attendees. The event will take place on October 10–12 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The marketing team is planning a cross-channel approach for promotion, with an additional focus on targeting local meetups in Vancouver to both submit call for papers and attend the event.
The Node.js Foundation has a booth at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon happening May 2–4 in Copenhagen Denmark. The team has several giveaways, including RFID passport wallets and luggage tags.
Marketing Updates
The Node.js Foundation marketing committee, which consists of the Node.js Foundation marketing team and personnel from the member companies of the Node.js Foundation, meets once a month.The marketing committee builds marketing and communication programs that help accelerate the growth of Node.js; these plans and objectives are based on feedback from members who are involved in the Node.js Foundation and the Node.js community.
Shawn Preissner and Zibby Keaton gave updates on marketing and communication initiatives coming out in the next couple of months:
- The marketing team is working on a messaging refresh based on analyst conversations and calls with members. The team will share a messaging framework for feedback during our next marketing meeting in April. Updating the website and creating media storylines are among the top reasons for the messaging refresh.
- So far this year, we have scheduled and completed calls with industry analysts Gartner, Forrester, IDC and RedMonk. The topics covered during these conversations include 2017 growth of Node.js, Node.js Foundation initiatives, and popular Node.js use cases. As Node.js becomes more pervasive in the enterprise, it is important to have these conversations to discuss where Node.js works and where it doesn’t, and what industry trends it is commonly linked to. Industry analysts requested the team find more traditional (manufacturing, etc) companies to complement the great internet companies already captured in our rockstar case studies.
- Node.js Collection, a Medium publication that is a collaboration between the Node.js community and the Node.js Foundation, published 17 articles from January — March 2018; the content heavily focused on Node.js working group initiatives for 2018. The publication has 10,792 followers with an average of 2,400 visitors per day (it averaged about 2,000 visitor per day last year).
- The group is building vendor-agnostic technical use case papers on common ways enterprises use Node.js. The first paper delivered will be an API Field Guide. Other guides under consideration include single page apps, mobile backends, and front-end optimization.
Where We Are Going
I am very excited about where the Node.js project is going. In the very near future we’ll have the Node.js 10 release, a huge milestone for our development community. This is the first year for our bigger JavaScript conference, JS Interactive, and we’ll soon launch the first Node Certified Developer program from the Foundation. We also are on track to see more than 10 million instances of Node.js online every month and are at the cusp of having our 2,000th contributor to Node.js Core. The Node.js Collection is one of the best resources of Node.js success and news; we highly suggest you follow us on Medium and the Node.js Collection publication. Take care until next month.
