Customer Convos: StandardJS

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, what you do, and/or what your company does?

A: Hey there! My name is Feross Aboukhadijeh. I’m an entrepreneur and programmer who spends a lot of time writing open source code. A few examples of projects I started are WebTorrent and Standard, which are open source. You can learn more about my newest projects by checking out my blog or GitHub profile.

How’s your day going?

Pretty great! I’m happy that it’s finally the weekend. I’m doing some reading, open source maintenance, and tonight I’m hosting a party with my awesome housemates.

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

I first encountered npm while starting my first company, PeerCDN, in 2013. PeerCDN was a peer-to-peer content delivery network (CDN) which aimed to make the web faster, and help reduce website bandwidth costs. npm allowed us to build something useful super quickly. We installed `express`, `ws`, wrote some custom WebRTC magic and we had prototype off the ground in a few weeks. (We were eventually acquired by Yahoo).

The vast majority of the software I’ve written has been open source. I have over 100 packages on npm! I am able to create lots of value in the world when I don’t restrict how people can use my work. Publishing things under an open source license lets anyone use my code however they like, which is super powerful.

To people who are unsure what they could use npm for — how would you explain the use case?

If you want to use any modern JavaScript library, you’re going to get it from npm. Period.

How’s the day to day experience of using npm?

npm install; npm test

These two magic commands are the not-so-secret incantations that bring any npm package to life. As an npm user, you’ll type these commands dozens of times every day.

Would you recommend that another org or company use npm and why?

Definitely! npm is the best way to publish JavaScript code. It’s super fast, it’s optimized for a friendly developer experience (no dependency hell!), and it has all the packages that you need to make your vision come to life. If there’s a package that’s missing, you can be the one who writes it and publishes it to npm.

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

I’d just like to shout out open source maintainers. They do all the thankless work that makes this whole thing possible. Their tireless effort makes our awesome apps, websites, and projects possible! Many authors devote countless hours to open source. I think we all have a duty to help out authors and make the software we rely on healthier by giving back.

I built a tool called thanks that helps you financially support the open source maintainers you depend on in your project. Just run `npx thanks` in your project to see which of your dependencies are seeking donations. Share the love!

Follow me on Twitter at @feross.