Customer Convos: Rob Tirserio, Remedy Health Media

This piece is a part of our Customer Convos series. We’re sharing stories of how people use npm at work. Want to share your thoughts? Drop us a line.

Q. Hi! Can you state your name and what you do?

A. Hi! I’m Rob Tirserio. I’m a Tech Lead at Remedy Health Media.

How’s your day going?

Can’t complain. < — written before I had 2 meetings so now I’m sad :(

Tell me the story of npm at your company. What specific problem did you have that private packages and Orgs solved?

We started using private modules at the beginning of this year. We are using it for a few modules that really don’t make a lot of sense other than for internal use. For example, one is a client for an internal API. Using Orgs allowed this client to be shared with multiple projects that needed to interface with the API.

Can you tell us a story about a specific package you wanted to make that private packages really enabled you to do?

The API client. It was just an easier way to allow other projects/teams at the company to integrate with an API.

Does your company do open source? How do you negotiate what you keep private and public?

We do open source and have been trying to do more. We just discuss internally whether or not we feel it makes sense to release something open source. If so, we get some of the people who didn’t work on it to review and offer feedback.

To people who are unsure what they could use private packages for, how would you explain the use case?

I think it’s great for creating reusable modules that may need to be shared across projects/teams. It really can be anything from configurations to a project template specific to an organization.

How’s it going? How’s the day to day experience of using private packages and Orgs?

We don’t have a ton to manage so its pretty easy. It’s nice to only have to tell everyone a version number to change in their project when new changes go out.

How would you see the product improved or expanded in the future?

Being able to get more info from the org packages list page would be nice. I do appreciate the simplicity of the site and ease of releasing/updating modules.

Would you recommend that another org or company use private packages or Orgs and why?

I would recommend everyone use npm and modules in general. Keeping things small and focused makes things easier to manage and maintain. It also increases the chance that something is identified as a candidate to be released to the community. 

Any cool npm stuff your company has done publicly that you’d like to promote?

Our only significant open source module is ‘contentpull’ https://www.npmjs.com/package/contentpull which started as an internal module and we decided to release it. It’s just a wrapper for the Contentful CMS but we rely on it heavily.