npm Convos: Tripetto

Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and what your company does?

Hello! My name is Mark van den Brink and I’m a co-founder and tech lead of Tripetto. Developers can integrate our full-fledged form kit straight into their projects to wield an entire solution for creating and deploying smart forms and surveys. Tripetto is not SaaS, but a set of JavaScript libraries delivered through npm. It’s also platform agnostic and extensible. Heck, it should spell the end of the rigid form and survey SaaS paradigm. There, we said it

How’s your day going?

Quite alright! We’ve recently shipped version 1.0.0 of the Tripetto form kit and developers are really starting to get the hang of it. They’re tweaking our demos, building custom blocks, and finding truly cool ways to integrate Tripetto tech into their own projects. We’re just trying to keep up with the invaluable feedback and get better as fast as we can. And we invite everyone to share any cool stuff built with Tripetto.

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

npm solves a lot for us. We continually work on multiple projects - most of them open source. But there’s always a part of the projects still under development and not meant to be shared yet. On top of that we work with remote teams in different locations. Private packages and Orgs help us share our projects with the right people the right way easily. We gladly piggyback on npm’s expertise, so we don’t need to worry about security, version management, availability, etc.

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

I have so many good examples. But the best one for us actually was the development of the Tripetto form kit itself. We kept the project mostly private in order to keep a competitive advantage – only sharing progress when we were ready. We developed the form kit using an npm Org with private packages. And when we were good to go last summer to share it with the world, we just simply made our packages public and off we went!

Does your company do open source? How do you negotiate what you keep private and public (feel free to be as vague as you need to be)?

Yes, we do! Moreover, our goal is to open source as much of what we do around Tripetto as possible, but only when we think the particular part or feature is ready to be shared. Besides that, we occasionally work for clients that use Tripetto technologies in closed source projects. We mostly do customizations then and use private packages for their distribution.

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

It’s all the good stuff you know from npm, but now for your private projects. Full control over who can access your packages. Put trust in the npm’s knowledge and expertise in package distribution, security, semantic versioning, quality of service, availability and more. And make stuff public with one click if you’re ready for that!

How’s it going? How’s the day to day experience of using private packages/orgs?

We like it a lot. We manage a considerable mix of open source and private packages and there is literally no difference in our workflow for these different projects within our organization. That keeps things simple and organized.

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

If you mean the npm product, I can definitely think of one thing: Download and usage statistics for private packages. But other than that, it is excellent. For our own product we have plenty of ideas. But the best thing that could happen for Tripetto is broad adoption of our technologies by developers in need of a complete form and survey solution.

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

Well, we aspire to be fully open source. So, try and suggest making as much open source as responsibly possible. We firmly believe even commercial software can be open source and npm is a beautiful platform to distribute it. But, if you also build stuff for organizations that don’t want or cannot expose stuff to the outside world, private packages are an easy and safe way for distributing your packages – without having to change a whole lot about your workflow.

If you are interested in the ways private packages can help your business, you can learn more here.