Noisy Program Maker: Forrest L Norvell

I first started playing with Node in the summer of 2010, when I was trying to figure out how to test some browser code on the server for my startup. I was tired of arguing with the existing, slow server-side JavaScript frameworks, and even in its raw state, Node was both fun and fast. Neither the testing nor the startup panned out (to, uh, put it mildly), but a few months later, I joined another startup that had bet on Node and have been working with it full-time pretty much ever since. I’ve done fun, crazy, and sometimes regrettable things with Node, and have used it to tackle problems as hard as any I’ve faced in the course of my career.

Node is a great tool and all, but what I find most compelling is Node’s community. I’ve spent the last two years building tools for Node developers at New Relic, and that’s led me to get to know many of you (y'all are great). It’s been phenomenally educational and heartening to watch Node grow, and somewhere along the line I realized that I was committed to doing what I could to support its growth.

When Laurie and Isaac approached me about joining npm, Inc., it seemed like the natural next thing for me to do. Without npm, and the care and thought that Isaac has put into its design, Node would be a very different and far poorer thing. Without disparaging the very hard work the Node core team has done and continues to do (they work so hard), Node is defined by the vast profusion of modules that all of you have written and published and downloaded and used via npm. I have used many programming languages and packaging tools, and I have never seen a tool be as important to a community as npm is to Node’s.

I’m therefore delighted, excited, and honored to be joining npm, Inc! The team, small though it may be, is filled with people I’ve wanted to work with for years, and I’m confident that I’ll have no shortage of things to do and skills to contribute (and I’m sure I will continue to share my many opinions about things). This feels like the most significant way I can help the rest of you succeed, which eases the pain of leaving the best job I’ve ever had at New Relic (with thanks especially to my manager, Belinda Runkle, and my talented teammate and lead NodeOS developer Jacob Goldwater).

That said, I start at npm on April 21st, and I look forward to helping npm and all of you!