I’ve just returned from speaking from NodeJSDublin and what turned out to be a great event! First off I want to say thanks to Cian Ó Maidín for organising a great set of speakers for the evening, and EngineYard Dublin for hosting the event in their amazing work space.
The first talk was kicked off by Richard Rodger introducing NodeJS to the crowd and lots of practical advice on how it can fit into your organisation.
Next up was Charlie Von Metzradt with a fast paced and practical talk on how Metricfire are using NodeJS to create a utility called Dali to use within their application ecosystem to solve a unique problem with rendering large volumes of data with Highcharts. Best of all it’s been open sourced on Github and is available to download now so make sure you check it out.
Then there was little old me and I gave a overview of the NodeJS ecosystem - from mailing lists and documentation through to NPM and getting the most of out it. Finally I did some live code examples of the Express, Request and Underscore modules to show some of the power and simplicity available using NodeJS as your network and IO stack.
Finally we were joined by Mikeal Rodgers live from West Coast US via Skype - who told us why we should be using NodeJS, and then floor was opened up to a Q&A session on the question couch with some interesting insights into what we can expect to see coming up in Node, and some interesting usecases.
Overall I was highly impressed by both the quality of the event, and the turnout from the Irish tech community - it’s great to see such a buzz be generated around the first event and here’s to more great events like this in the future.
It was interesting getting too and from the event as well - I was flying from Edinburgh and on the way there, DISASTER! Somewhere in the airport I dropped my boarding pass and was bricking it that I wouldn’t get on the plane - luckly I did a web checkin the night before and it saved my life because I had a PDF copy. On the way back it was even more of a lark with an engine failure on the plane - forcing us to turn back to Dublin and be put on a later flight.
The community itself was awesome, and I met some great people who’s hospitality was second to none - and 3.30am Vindaloos are interesting, if not good for my stomach (although the discovery of garlic chips more than makes up for that!). I can’t wait to go back and catch up with everyone I met, and meet some more new people. I hope many of them can make it over to Scotland too so I can return the hospitality.
You can follow all the chat from the night by checking out the #nodejsdub hashtag








