NodeConf EU 2013 - Impressions

Nodeconf.eu this year took place from 9 to 11 September, in the town of Waterford, in the south of Ireland. This is one of the few conferences that takes place in Europe and is entirely dedicated to Node.JS. The presentations were held in the center of the city, and practical exercises fixing speeches were held on the island modestly named (at the time of the event) Nodeland. In total 140 people participated. In this post I collected materials from the conference, as well as my impressions.

Node.JS in the industry

An important role was given to speeches related to the use of Node.JS in the industry. Ben Acker (@nvcexploder) from Walmart, Jacek Korycki from Skype, Clifton Cunningham (@clifcunn) from Mail Online, and Bill Scott (@billwscott) from PayPal told that they began to implement Node.JS to replace the old software stack, which usually consists of huge backend systems usually written in java.
Dav Glass from Yahoo showed what team tools are using (and writing) during development ( presentation ). I got the impression that the main purpose of such presentations was to lure developers under their roof, which is commonplace at such events.
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The future of asynchronous programming in Node

Bert Belder (@piscisaureus), one of the Node.JS developers, presented the ambitious project Future of asynchronous programming in node , where he shared his opinion on how to solve the long stacktraces issue. For a programmer with a past from Enterprise Java, this is a sore point when you don’t know what method caused the callback in which the crash occurred.

Leveldb

Rod Vagg (@rvagg) spoke about the evolution of databases in the presentation of A Real Database Rethink
Max Ogden (@MaxOgden) presented his vision of working with binary data: Working with binary + multidimensional data in JavaScript . Some people call LevelDB an analogue of Node.JS for databases, due to minimalism, modularity and simplicity.

Communities

Isaac Schlueter (@izs) made a presentation on how to build an effective and non-conflicting Open Source community in the final presentation of the Compassionate Communities . The speech was greeted with a bang.

miscellanea

The following speakers also spoke at the conference:

Dominic Tarr (@dominictarr)
Paolo Fragomeni (@ hij1nx)
Jake Verbaten (@raynos)
Trevor Norris (@trevnorris)
Richard Rodger (@rjrodger)
Emily Rose (@nexxylove)
Elijah Insua (@tmpvar)
Matteo Collina (@matteocollina)
James Halliday (@SubStack)

Practical classes - LevelDB

Levelup tutorial

Just install the module from npm and run levelmeup

npm install levelmeup -g
levelmeup



Then follow the instructions - starting with the simplest operations with levelup, ending with writing complex queries to the database.
This approach is a bit like different Koans (for example Scalakoans , Rubykoans )

Practice - Debugging

Max Bruning (@mrbruning) from Joyent showed using Dtrace and mdb: Example Debugging Session Using DTrace and mdb .

Results

I will add the missing materials as soon as I find them. If you have questions - please ask in the comments.

EDIT: added slides about DTrace and mdb