All Things Open 2014 - Day 2 Thursday, October 23rd, 2014 Mike McNeil Founder & CTO at Balderdash and creator of Sails.js Front Dev 2 Sails.js: Rags to...Open Source Find more by Mike here: http://www.slideshare.net/michaelrmcneil

1. from rags to open-source
Raleigh, North Carolina
2014

2. Mike McNeil
@mikermcneil
github.com/mikermcneil

3. bdfl of
the leading open-source
MVC framework for Node.js

4. the leading open-source
MVC framework for Node.js

5. at least pageviews since 2013830,000
GitHub stars8,030
over downloads / day1,500

6. in funding$0

8. est. feb 2012

10. (us)
(customer)
(Javascript app)

11. love at first sight
circa 2011
Node.js...

12. “We’re doing I/O
completely wrong.”

13. <— “just look at the
Unterschied!”
“Not acceptable!”

14. “Threads should
be used by
experts only.”
“Concurrency
should be easy.”

15. How is that possible?
(copy the browser)

16. // synchronous!
console.log(‘hi’)
// asynchronous!
setTimeout(function (){!
console.log(‘hi’);!
}, 240000000);
vs.
incredible

17. could we use
…for everything?
I wondered…

18. so…

20. You don't want to be writing all
these system calls.
You need something that gives
you… an ORM abstraction, or
something.

21. so Sails.js was born

24. Sails is an MVC framework.

25. Sails is an MVC framework.

26. Sails is an MVC framework.

27. Sails is an MVC framework.

28. Sails is an MVC framework.

29. Sails is an MVC framework.

30. Sails is an MVC framework.

31. Sails is an MVC framework.

32. first version (late 2011)

33. December 2012

35. >=20 other community adapters custom app-specific adapters

36. January 2013
first halfway-decent docs
http://web.archive.org/web/20130514080123/http://balderdashy.github.io/sails/

37. posted screencast in early 2013

38. …woke up to 1000 views

39. reddit — Feb 2013
hacker news — Mar 2013
and again two months later

41. managed to get sailsjs.org online
mid-spring 2013

42. issues
pull requests
questions

46. ????

47. ???????????

48. v0.9 introduced
a new streamlined asset pipeline

49. asset pipeline????
“what about gulp?!”
“so thirsty…”
asset pipeline????????!!!!
asset pipeline????????!!!!
asset pipeline????????!!!!
asset pipeline????????!!!!
asset pipeline????????!!!!

50. so v0.10 introduced generators.

51. feature requests
are the hydra

52. they will never stop.

53. they will never stop.
ever.

54. moral of the story

55. only write code you actually need
if someone else actually needs something,
they’ll write a pull request
only merge new code if someone actually needs
you to merge it (i.e. there’s no other way, via a
plugin or something)

58. Supporting the Community

59. Tools
Metrics
Advice

60. #sails on freenode (IRC)
issues
groups

61. Tools
Metrics
Advice

62. • Github stars
• NPM downloads / day
• Google group membership
• IRC channel activity
• Number of tagged StackOverflow questions
(and your answer ratio)

63. Tools
Metrics
Advice

64. inline jsdoc comments
are not enough
write docs in markdown
compile to HTML

65. don’t repeat yourself
DRY

66. don’t repeat ourselves
DRO
the goal of open source

67. make an IRC channel
start a Google group
post a YouTube video
so

68. support !== marketing
but remember

69. support !== marketing
( )
but remember

70. far more front-end developers
∃
than back-end developers

71. far more front-end developers
∃
than back-end developers
eventually
everyday backend development
will be commoditized

72. Questions?

73. from rags to open-source
@mikermcneil