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**Mikeal Rogers:** I think at the time there wasn't a lot of negativity about the BDFL model yet. By the time that we did the fork there was, but at the time there really wasn't. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it needed more governance, that's the point I'm trying to drive home here. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I would argue that the entire time that Ryan ran it, it really didn't. By the time that Isaac took it over, you could see it growing beyond what Joyent was really focused on. I mean, they're a company, they're a business, they need the funds; they were focused on cloud services. By the time that Isaa... |
I mean, when you're growing a hundred percent a year, you can't double the engineering on that project every year; that's just not doable. I think when you look at something like the Go project inside of Google, they probably have added a lot of resource to that project as it's grown in terms of usage... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a lot of disconnect too, speaking of Go, between the community and the core team. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, and still they have that problem, right? But they're definitely putting a ton of resources into it. I don't think that any company could have doubled every year their investment in Node.js at the time. So eventually, Isaac also left the project and handed it over to another person at Joyent... ... |
\[28:04\] Rod blew out his voice so he couldn't join us today, but Rod Vagg, who's now elected to the TSC chair, he didn't write any core code before io.js, but he had the chops to do it; there wasn't that technical barrier. He wrote NAN, which is the native binding layer that everybody uses; it's all C++ code, it's re... |
Rod had pioneered a lot of governance models around liberal contribution agreements in the level down community and even around then... So he just didn't get involved. And when io.js happened and it had its open governance, he immediately got involved. Now he is elected to be the leader of the project. These are the pe... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So we got to this subject here because we were talking about VM neutrality and how that wouldn't have been possible had that not been for the Node Foundation being able to bring together the right kind of team, the right kind of VM developers to care enough, bring the right kind of people to the tab... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What else has got you excited? So VM neutrality is a big deal, but what else...? How does that play out into other things? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You'd mentioned IoT, you'd mentioned Node in other places that isn't just the web... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, VM neutrality also really helps us with IoT as well. There's work that isn't public that various people are doing on more JavaScript VMs, essentially, and even JavaScript VMs that are entirely on device, and stuff like that. And without a stable native layer for them to expose and for everybod... |
I also think that if you're currently a Nodebots or IoT developer, one of the biggest headaches that you have is that you're dependent on native APIs; you're dependent on serial port, like Chris Williams, actually, from JSConf. But that's sort of the base underlying library that everybody has to bind to, and every majo... |
In terms of other things to get excited about... Oh wow, let me back up a little bit and try to take my head out of just thinking about really specific -- oh, I'm excited about the security work that we're doing. Security has become more and more top of mind in end developers and enterprises and everywhere. Security is... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[32:02\] Right. Do you have any examples? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Examples of things that have happened recently...? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Change of focus on security. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So the giant outage that we had a couple months ago, that was basically driven by a botnet of compromised IoT devices... That was a big one. Bruce Schneider has a great quote about this, he's like "Big vendors have done a pretty good job of security for a long time now." So when you're relying on tha... |
These devices are incredibly weak in terms of security, get compromised really quickly, and now people are turning them into botnets that basically take down the internet. That's really problematic. We need to start thinking about security at every layer; it's not just an operating system problem, it's not just a packa... |
We've seen a ton of announcements... The new Node Source work that they've done is mostly around security. I think three of the five features that they released in their 2.0 release this weekend, are all security focused. |
We've worked with the Node Security Project, which was lead by Lift Security (a small consultancy), but they were doing a lot of ecosystem security work. They've done a really good job; we've been talking with them for a while. We have a really sophisticated, really good disclosure and security policy for Node Core, bu... |
But just taking more responsibility for the Node ecosystem - which is what everybody relies on; it's not just on Core - is really important for us, through the lens of security. I think we tend to try to not involve ourselves in the ecosystem when it means picking a winner. We really want a diverse ecosystem, we want d... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you've got VM neutrality, security... What else? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think we're also gonna save the world, I don't know... \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Do you think Node will continue to grow at a high percent rate each year? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We don't have any signs of it slowing down. In fact, it's gotten a little quicker, but we're cautious about making statements that it's growing quicker than it was, because... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... Is it healthy growth? And how do you measure that? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that we can measure the health of the projects and repositories that are inside of the Node Foundation. Those are very healthy, and growth there is really healthy. I think it's very hard to measure if growth is healthy or not in the ecosystem. I mean, how do you define the quality of a packag... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I'm not too worried about that kind of stuff. One of the reasons that we hired Tracy this year is that the focus on the Node Foundation needs to be on education; when half of your users every year are new, because you're doubling in size every year, you really need to worry about what the onboardi... |
\[36:04\] We've now entered a point in enterprise adoption where it's not a new team that gets spun up -- this still happens, but there's a team that gets spun up, they adopt Node.js, they have a lot of success, they're on microservices, they're doing all this kind of new technology stuff, they're trying to drive digit... |
We're now getting to the point where at a very high level - CIO/CTO level - they decide to make a decision to invest in Node, which means hiring sometimes hundreds of Node developers, or retraining hundreds of Node developers - that means people that used to write Java and .NET. When those kinds of developers come to N... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So is this documentation, is this video tutorials, is this [Pluralsight](https://www.pluralsight.com/) stuff, independence? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We have all that... We have documentation. We couldn't have more of an ecosystem around that kind of an education, which is why we continue to grow so quickly, but formal certification programs, formal training programs, that kind of stuff... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So is this a Node Foundation thing? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** The Linux Foundation administers the Linux Certified Admin program, and quite a few other programs for certification, and we're working with them to build out a baseline Node.js certification program, so that when developers who reach for a certification when they wanna prove that they learned someth... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's not all that we're doing in terms of education. When you look at Node School, which is an amazing community that I was really involved in when we were starting out - it's grown into hundreds of local trainings that are run by community volunteers; all of the materials are being created online.... |
We're starting to dedicate some of my time, some of Tracy's time to work with the Node School community and some of these other educational communities that have just grown so big that they're becoming kind of unwieldy, and are having some scaling problems that we can work with them to resolve -- and may even need some... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about sustainability, to a degree. One question I have is... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** We have a whole podcast to talk about that... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know we do. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Request For Commits plug. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, definitely. Rfc.Fm - if you don't listen, it's a shame. The latest episode, by the way... Phenomenal. I'm like, "Gosh, man... That was such a good show." |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** But on sustainability, one thing I was thinking about is for those developers -- actually I had a conversation just before you sat down with Athan Reines, and he was talking about how math has broken in V8; he was talking about how he's bringing this library called Standard Lib, and data science typ... |
Right now he is living on his own savings, focused on this open source project... For those out there who have ideas, what kind of support can they look for from Node Foundation? Is that important? Is that something you ever plan to do? Not so much to sustain, but to help the community find a sustainable way to bring n... |
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