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**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, the metrics on downloads from npm are a little bit harder to contextualize than you would think. What you kind of have to do is that you've gotta look at how much these things are depended on, and basically try to filter out what you would expect the number of just things being pulled in as a d... |
Express is a very good indicator of "How many downloads are happening for this particular web thing?" I think Yarn is an edge dependency that is probably an accurate interpretation of people that are probably doing some frontend stuff, that are touching one of those. |
But Babel gets pulled in by other toolchains, Webpack gets pulled in by other toolchains, and when you look at their download metrics, they can be pretty astronomical because they're sitting below the stack in so many different applications. So yeah, it's a little bit harder to quantify what's going on there... Also, t... |
A good example of this is like -- Request is depended on quite a bit, and it's depended on directly quite a bit, but there are small dependencies of Request, because it's broken into a bunch of modules, and those modules are depended on by almost nobody but Request, and they have astronomical download numbers. |
**Alex Sexton:** If you look at the top 10 JavaScript libraries that are distributed across the Alexa top one million, Yepnope is like number 12 or 8 or something like that; it's extremely high up there, and virtually no one put on their page, but Modernizr put it into Modernizr, and now it's one of the top scripts eve... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Exactly. That's why I think that -- when you're trying to quantify people, download metrics are a really problematic metric to look at. |
**Alex Sexton:** Can you give like several years of talks about download metrics? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I'd give several years of talks about growth of package ecosystems and growth of users, and the users are quantified not by the download metrics. |
**Alex Sexton:** It's the spin... Every week, the spin... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, I actually -- so when the Foundation put out the eight million number of users, I was kind of on my way out of the Foundation, and people really went after it and were very skeptical of it... And I'm really confident in that number. There's a couple reasons for that. One is it's a very good numbe... |
\[11:53\] You can even use npm without using the website, but chances are in a three-month period you're going to engage with it if you're a user... Unless you're in China. And there's a bunch of reasons for that, but before we get into that, we also have metrics on the NodeJS.org website, and because it's localized in... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, just docs are on there. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, so we did not have metrics on the API documentation until about a month ago... \[laughter\] Yeah, so this is the website minus the API docs, because they're often in their own section. But anyway, because you have that 12% -- because you know that the market share is about 12% and you know that... |
So I'm much more confident in the number of users of Node.js metric that I've seen -- we have better data there than I think any other language has, I'll say that. Anyway, that's not really about this survey, but... \[laughs\] |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I guess the reason I brought all that up is I'm skeptical a little bit of the data about -- because of the massive amount, what I assume is in the area of 50% of people who only use Node as their build tool, but still use Node, like, how does that skew this stuff? |
There aren't a ton of people doing builds inside of containers compared to people running servers in containers, I imagine, but... I mean, not that it's not done; I do it, personally, but it's just more overhead for building a static asset. |
What does the containers number go up to if you take out the build tool only people? I don't know, I just feel like because the two communities are there, it would be really much more interesting to see this data split on those two points. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I did try to do this analysis once... Actually, there was a conference that you put together, I believe... |
**Alex Sexton:** Correct. Front End Ops Conf. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yes, exactly. And one of the things that I did in that talk was that I parsed through GitHub data that figured out how many people are interacting with packages, and then I came up with some fuzzy ways to figure out if it's a frontend or a backend package... |
**Alex Sexton:** This is what I was talking about whenever I made the joke, like 10 minutes ago. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. It's not the greatest, but it was kind of good enough, and what you saw was that front-end packages had far more people engaging with them than back-end packages, and that their growth was actually a lot higher. npm - I don't know if they're getting this from their download metrics or if they h... |
\[16:10\] They've said that they estimate that a little over half of Node users are doing front-end stuff. I don't think that they have a great way to figure out if they're only doing front-end stuff, which I think is what you want... |
**Alex Sexton:** Well, I mean, primarily it would be fine... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** ...but that's just really hard to determine. As Node.js becomes a build tool for anybody building a website, the web is definitely larger than people that write back-end, period. We know that. |
**Alex Sexton:** And there are a lot fewer options. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. One of the slides in this deck is just a bunch of logos, a ton of corporate logos for different companies, and at this point... Can we just put up an empty slide that says "People not using Node.js?" \[laughs\] Isn't that easier and more accurate? |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah... I'm always skeptical of those things, too. I'm old school, jQuery crew, but it was amazing how many logos were the same across Dojo, MooTools and jQuery's websites. It's like, "Oh yeah, IBM uses jQuery. IBM uses Dojo. IBM uses" -- well, IBM never used MooTools... \[laughter\] But I think I push... |
I'm interested does the skunkworks labs team, for people at X company use Node, or it's like the API that that company is known for built on Node? Because you could say Stripe uses Node for sure, but we don't have any production services - that I'm at least willing to mention here - that use Node. Does it make sense? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. This was something that when I was at the Foundation I had to talk with analysts a lot about. Analysts heard for years about how enterprises are adopting Ruby, and what it always was was like "Somebody is using a test framework somewhere written in Ruby", and it wasn't like they were actually m... |
But I think outside of enterprise and outside of tech analysts that care about enterprise, a much more interesting story to me is what's happening with front-end development. I think that this very huge shift in how we build front-end applications and how much basically software infrastructure we're able to build up an... |
I know that there's a lot of weird identity politics about "Node.js is back-end, and we're whatever framework is cool right now", but at the end of the day I think that one of the greatest successes for Node.js is going to be the change that happens in the front-end web, that is facilitated by the platform. |
**Paul Frazee:** \[20:04\] One of the interesting side effects to that is that it's also starting to really dominate my time in Bash... Because you have so many build tools that you're running from the command line that are just Node.js packages, but I'm starting to have a lot of commands showing up that people make, a... |
**Alex Sexton:** One benefit is that it's cross-platform. |
**Paul Frazee:** Cross-platform, exactly. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that's really the main benefit. One is that you have this dependency network that you can tap into. So you have all this software infrastructure, you don't have to build everything from scratch, but two is like -- |
**Alex Sexton:** You know how to write Bash. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, you know how to write Bash... There's a lot of great things about Python, but Python never had - and still does not - have a great cross platform story. They're still pretty \[unintelligible 00:20:54.06\] on Windows, and so is Ruby, and so is -- like, a lot of languages just never really did th... |
**Paul Frazee:** Of course, Windows is trying to change that with their UNIX stuff. I don't know, I haven't tried that - has anybody here tried that? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I have... It's not there yet. The problem is that like, as a subsystem, if you treat it like a better VM or something, it's quite good. But as soon as you wanna use it like a regular Windows thing and have it tap into that sub-file system, things go a little haywire. |
Anyway, I think one thing, Alex, to point out is that this survey definitely picked up a section of the community that is more back-end than what you would think of as the average. Look at the number of respondents that work with databases directly - that's really high. It's like 95%. I think it's the kind of people th... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah. I mean, I'd be in the 5%. I don't think I ever touch production databases, at least. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I try to write a database about every month from scratch, but... |
**Paul Frazee:** You know, what I'd be interested to see is which databases people are using with Node. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** There was data in the survey that was conducted the prior year on that... A lot of MongoDB still. |
**Alex Sexton:** They're a billion dollar company now, right? I think they just hit it. Just insane... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, full unicorn status. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, wooot!? I mean, for what it's worth, Stripe does not use Node, it does use MongoDB. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] Not to store financial transactions... \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** We store them there... We just store them a couple other places, too. \[laughter\] |
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