npm Convos: Hello Club

Q. Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and/or what your company does?

Hi there! My name is Adam Reis, and I am the co-founder and CTO of Hello Club.

We’ve created Hello Club to help reduce the workload and time spent on admin tasks for the volunteers and committee members who often run clubs.

It has been designed to be easy to use and fun to work with, and allows clubs to keep track of members, bookings, events, and finances effortlessly. It integrates with popular tools like Mailchimp and Xero and also has an integrated access control system for clubs that need it.

Best of all, it’s free for small clubs, so if you know anyone involved in a (sport) club, feel free to point them in our direction!

How’s your day going?

It’s been great so far, thanks! Super busy, but that’s a good thing :).

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

We needed a good way to package and distribute reusable components for our Javascript modules, and were looking for a tool that could help orchestrate our build processes, test scripts, and database migration scripts.

npm offered all of that along with a great eco system of already-existing packages that we use for both our front-end, back-end, and IoT devices.

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

I would say that npm allows you to bundle and distribute your code, so that you can reuse it in multiple different projects. What’s great is that you can use it for both public (open source) code, as well as proprietary code and modules.

It also allows you to lock in specific versions of modules you want to use — you don’t have to worry about breaking your application when packages are updated or that all your developers are using the exact same version.

In addition, npm can help you organize your scripts and build tools and commands, making it easy to manage the build, test, and maintenance processes of your software or application.

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

It’s been great! We’ve use it just about every single day for the past 4–5 years, and find that in general it’s been stable and effective, with minimal downtime of the service.

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

I definitely would. I think npm is the best package manager out there at the moment and would highly recommend it to anyone developing anything with JavaScript.

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

To support the basic functionality we needed for our application, we’ve developed an ecosystem of packages called Meanie that work together to provide a framework for anyone developing with the MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node).

Most of these modules are available as open source under the @meanie namespace and are updated regularly, so feel free to check them out and use them in your own projects.