We value quality

For us, quality and love for details are core values. Hence we deeply care about our code and the surrounding build process.

The heart of our build process is tourism, a convenience wrapper around Grunt, that allows us to easily configure code analysis, unit tests and anything else we need for development. Using eslint-config-es, our code analysis rules are also available standalone.

For testing we primarily rely on Mocha with a number of custom extensions: assertthat provides a syntax for fluent assertions, isolated encapsulates file-system based tests, and nodeenv controls environment variables.

Privacy is important

Web applications are accessible by anyone, anywhere and anytime. That's why security is absolutely essential to us.

crypto2 is our base module that provides everything we need with respect to encryption, hashes and message digests. It enhances Node.js's integrated crypto module.

To identify users, we favor claims-based authentication over traditional approaches. Hence we have written limes, a middleware for Express and Socket.io.

Additionally, we use shaker to hash and verify passwords in a cryptographically secure way.

The web is real-time

Since the dawn of single-page applications, the web has ultimately become real-time.

We believe that, from time to time, using a technology that has worked for decades is better than catching the next hype. Hence instead of using web sockets we rely on pure HTTP.

json-lines is a module for Express to push data to a client, be it Node.js or a browser. As its name suggests we use the JSON Lines format. json-lines-client is a client for json-lines that works with Node.js and the browser.

As foundation we have written http-browserify-2, a drop-in replacement for http-browserify that makes use of the streams2 API.

Use a reliable core

Any application, from CLI to cloud, needs to get a few basic things done. We have written a few modules that help with these tasks.

We believe that even CLI applications can be beautiful, hence we have created buntstift. In addition, to make them more fault-tolerant, we use findsuggestions.

For cloud applications, we have written flaschenpost, an opinionated logger that respects the Twelve-Factor App principles. Finally, there's processenv that parses environment variables.

Act gracefully

Handling errors is a critical part for any application. Hence we have created a few modules to detect and work with errors.

First, since having custom error types is quite useful, we have created defekt. It reduces creation of custom error types to calling out their name.

To sensibly use custom error types you have to detect error cases. This means validating user data with formats as well as verifying function calls with ensurethat.

One more thing

In addition to all the aforementioned modules, there are a few more that we have created.

To remote control Docker there are crew and tutum. To connect to RabbitMQ there's hase. To store blobs there's datendepot. For P2P networking there's p2p.

We could also talk about draht, an application event bus, or our evented timer called timer2, or… - but then we would never get to an end.

So, to learn more, visit us on GitHub. And don't be shy: issues and pull requests are highly welcome.