Node Starter Projects

Over the last few days, I’ve decided to brush up my node a bit. To begin that effort, I’ve started to create some Node starter projects. I’ve called the repository Node Tutorials in honor of the Java Tutorials that I had put together a few years ago. There really isn’t an accompanying Node Tutorials series as there was for Java at this point, but it’s still early days. From here this project can take several different directions.

• I can zero in more on testing in an article series. This is always my starting point for new projects, and it is what I’ve set up so far. From my experience to date, and as one would mocha plus chai combination has proven to be much more node-friendly than the Jest approach. This stands to reason, as the killer app for Jest was originally in testing React projects.

• I can leave the Node stuff in its early-days state, and spin-off a more in-depth tutorial series on TypeScript. It turned out the Typescript and Mocha using Webstorm example were quite easy to set up, and I’m curious to see where I can go from there in the debugger.

• Rather than setting this up as a single repository, I was thinking of doing a tool similar to Mike McClaren’s Node Stater Kit Project, but my tutorial series seemed to have better traction for some reason.

• In any case, tutorial series or starter-kit style arrangement, it might be better to break this out into separate repositories. I would like for example to support using GitPod for each tutorial/starter, and a separate repository might work better for that. I’d have to see if the load time for simple projects is less than that for one I’m trying out now (Typescript Theia). This is fairly slow – but by comparison to my starters is much less trivial, so there’s that.