It is almost 1am, it’s Saturday night and I have not been clubbing or partying with my friends tonight. I have worked on my latest freelance project writing a Policy about Cookies.
What a bore you would think. Instead I went to bed feeling contented with myself, no, that’s not enough, I felt bloody good.
All of this just because today I wrote my first Node.js app. I lied in bed thinking “WOW, I did that”. I actually understood every bit of code me and my friend Davide wrote (following his guidance).
“So, we all wrote Node.js apps at least once in our life, what’s the big deal?” You would say. Well I thought I never would. Not at this stage in my “JS career”.
So while I tried to fall asleep and looked back at the day that has just been what seemed like a small epiphany this afternoon is now a full sober realisation: writing code is easy.
Why have I been so scared of learning in a new/different language? What kept me stuck in PHP world and only made me feel worse about myself as a coder for writing such horrible, cheap and unsafe code? What made so difficult for me to think of being able to write a RESTful-similar application? What convinced me that I would never be able to learn anything new?
I don’t know but whatever that voice was, it was wrong. Because it only took us 4 hours to write a simple app in Node.js. and it already included a Foursquare integration.
So what happened to my 14 year old self, that feared nothing and tried to mess about with any possible software she could install ?
That hopeful and playful girl got overwhelmed by how fast our industry changes every day, by the big boys demoing very fancy Node.js projects and thought “no way I can get there before I truly understand and master JavaScript”. So I told myself, like you tell yourself about many dreams “One day. One day”.
When Davide suggested we got together and hacked something, that he would rather do it in JS than in PHP, I simply sat there and nodded thinking “I will never understand and really own the code we’ll write together”.
But after a few very clean explanations I was already understanding how everything holds together and how very little JS has to do with writing an app in Node.js.
I did it. I wrote an app in Node.js . But what really matters to me is that I can now be that dreamy fearless girl again and I can go and hack things. Next on my hit list should probably be Backbone.js and I am not scared!
Keep on dreaming.
Snodada, our app in on github for now https://github.com/morena/snodata It’s a foundation app to handle logins with services such as Foursquare and Facebook. We aim to use this app as a starting point for Node.js apps where we will be using multiple APIs and will allow user registration/login using social media services APIs such as Facebook and Foursquare
In Italian snodata means “dexterous”, “flexible”, It’s a pure coincidence that our app is also built with Node.js 🙂
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