npm Convos: Lexio

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

AH: Hi! I’m Anthony Humphreys, Technical Lead at Lexio, I’m a full-stack developer and work on all the technical aspects of the business.

JT: Hey, I’m Jessica Tebay, Operations Director at Lexio, I run all the “human” aspects of the business, from networking with potential brand partners through to finances and project management!

How’s your day going?

Great, thank you! I just walked the dogs and I’m sitting down with a coffee to look over our demo for TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin and planning our trip to Google Cloud Next ’18! Things are a little crazy here getting ready to launch, so it’s nice to take a step back and chat to you today.

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

We are building a SaaS, Lexio, which will allow businesses to build a mobile app without writing a single line of code. We’re using React Native to power our front end and needed a robust solution to managing the React components which make up our UI library.

We are also planning to open up our UI library to our brand partners so they can contribute components to the library for use in future builds, with each use earning them a commission or credit.

We started by using a private, on premise solution, but we soon moved to npm as the user management and access control is far superior, as well as the obvious benefits of high availability, resilient infrastructure and of course one less piece of infrastructure for me to manage day to day!  This has helped us to streamline our service creating a faster and more reliable platform for our end user.

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

Our use case is actually a pretty common one, just applied in a novel way.

We want a secure, reliable way to distribute and install JavaScript packages for use in other projects. Through our npm organization we can allow our contributors to enjoy the same experience as we can, extending the npm community into our platform’s private distribution mechanism, helping us develop a thriving community for our brand partners.

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

Great! I think I probably take the ease of use for granted to be honest. The addition of ‘npm audit’ means it’s much easier to stay on top of the security of third party packages which, when you are providing software to clients, is very reassuring indeed.

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

Absolutely. If you are using JavaScript in any fashion, I can’t think of a good reason *not* to use npm.

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

Not yet, but in the near future. Lexio will be opening up some of our component library — keep an eye out for updates!