What You Missed at #NodeInteractive!
More than 700 developers, DevOps professionals, IoT engineers, engineering managers and open source enthusiasts descended on Austin for Node.js Interactive last week. We packed tons of workshops, keynotes, training sessions and knowledge sharing into four days. Thank you to everyone who came, spoke and sponsored the conference.
In case you missed the event, here’s a quick recap of Node.js Project’s code and community growth in the past year, news we announced, and a heads up on the Node.js user survey we launched.
You can view all of the presentations on the Node.js Foundation YouTube page here.
GROWTH OF NODE.JS ECOSYSTEM
With more than 15 million downloads per month and more than a billion package downloads per week, Node.js is considered the biggest open source platform powering everything from web, IoT and desktop applications to microservice architectures.
In 2016, the Node.js Project issued 63 new releases with seven different release managers. Node.js version 4 was the most popular release with release downloads increasing 220% year over year. Rod Vagg, Technical Steering Committee director for the Node.js Foundation and chief Node officer for NodeSource, discussed this during his presentation, “The State of the Union: Node.js.” Read his slides here and view his keynote here.
From a community growth standpoint, there were more than twice the number of new contributors and 1.5 times the number of unique contributors to the codebase per month compared to 2015.
Code and Learn, held last week in Austin, pushed Node.js contributors to Core to more than 1,100! Code & Learn events allow folks to get started (or go further) with Node.js Core contributions.
Ashley Williams, individual membership director of the Node.js Foundation and the developer community and content manager of npm, talked about how npm works, growth of the package manager (from downloads per week to new contributors), the potential for more developers to use JavaScript and how to contribute back to the npm community. Fun data from her presentation below:
You can see her full slide deck here and presentation here.
NEWS COMING OUT OF THE CONFERENCE
It’s election time! If you want to get more involved and became part of the Node.js Foundation leadership team, you can nominate yourself or another individual to become a membership director.
Nominations for the individual membership director seat will be solicited until January 15. If you are interested in becoming a board member, please submit and ask questions here.
In other news, major progress is being made around Node.js VM-neutrality:
- The first proof of concept for Node.js API (ABI Stable Module API or NAPI for short) was on display during Arunesh Chandra’s presentation — Arunesh is a senior program manager for ChakraCore at Microsoft. This effort is focused on defining a stable module API that is independent from changes in V8 allowing modules to run against newer version of Node.js without recompilation.
- The Node.js build system will start producing nightly node-chakracore builds, enabling Node.js to be used with the ChakraCore JavaScript engine. Node-ChakraCore also is continuing to improve debugging in Node.js with Time-Travel debugging, which allows developers to easily capture traces for post mortem debugging and step back in time using a supported debugger.
You can check out more details on this here and Microsoft’s Edge Developer blog.
The Node.js Foundation also announced it will oversee the Node.js Security Project. We are excited to continue to work with ^Lift on this project and begin organizing a working group to help with these efforts. More information on this here.
NodeSource announced NodeSource Certified Modules™ to bring security and trust to untrusted, third-party JavaScript. With NodeSource Certified Modules, consumers of the npm ecosystem can now rely on NodeSource as a secure, trusted and verifiable source. Learn more here.
TELL US YOUR NODE.JS STORY
We also launched a second user survey that builds on the questions that we asked in our first Node.js Foundation survey last year. We added a number of questions designed to shed even more light on who uses Node.js, where users are located, how developers learn Node.js, what they use it for and what technologies they use alongside it.
One of our major efforts this year and heading into 2017 is trying to create more diversity in the Node.js ecosystem. We are looking to get a good benchmark of where we are so we can discover and understand how to make improvements. Tracy Hinds, education manager of the Node.js Foundation, provided more details around this topic in her keynote.
Please fill out and pass it along to your colleagues/friends: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Node16
A FINAL NOTE
This year, we were thrilled to award 30 diversity scholarships with the help of IBM and Intel. We hope to continue to increase this in years to come. The Node.js Foundation along with IBM and Intel also hosted an awesome diversity coffee talk during the conference. There were a ton of great ideas, conversations and perspectives — it also ended up being so popular that we extended it to two diversity coffee talks. Thank you to all that contributed to the conversation.
Another thank you for those who attended, spoke and sponsored Node.js Interactive North America! If you are interested in joining us next year, please follow our event page to receive updates for 2017.
