November SFNode at Mixmax

Mixmax hosts SFNode for November. Now that Node 9 is hot off the presses Rich Trott stops by to let us know what's new and what's changed. After that Garret Meier show us some effective Promise patterns in Node 6 and beyond.

Schedule
6:30pm - Doors Open
7:00pm - What's New In Node.js 9.0.0? - Rich Trott
7:30pm - Effective Promise patterns in node 6 and beyond - Garret Meier
8:00pm - Open Mic and Social Time
9:00pm - Doors close

What's New In Node.js 9.0.0?
A dramatic reading of the CHANGELOG.md for Node 9.

About Rich Trott
Rich is a member of the Node.js Core Technical Committee. He is a prolific contributor to Node.js focusing particularly on tests. Rich also runs NodeTodo (http://nodetodo.org/) to assist others who wish to get started contributing to Node.js. Rich works in the UCSF Library and lives in San Francisco with his spouse, his daughter, two cats, a piano, a tiki bar, and a pizza stone.

Effective Promise patterns in node 6 and beyond.
Promises can be an effective way of avoiding a tangled mess of nested callbacks, especially with the introduction of async/await. However, it's not always easy to integrate existing, callback-based modules with newer Promise-based ones and it's an even larger task to migrate existing code to use Promises.

We faced this exact problem at Mixmax (https://mixmax.com/blog/) where we were torn between existing infrastructure using callbacks and the strong appeal of switching to Promises for future development. As a result we developed a few libraries (promise-callbacks (https://github.com/mixmaxhq/promise-callbacks), promise-pool (https://github.com/mixmaxhq/promise-pool), promise-iterate (https://github.com/mixmaxhq/promise-iterate)) and techniques (using transpilation (https://github.com/babel/babel/tree/master/packages/babel-plugin-transform-async-to-generator)) that allowed us to immediately integrate Promises and async/await into existing code without drastic, bottom-up changes.

I'll be sharing these techniques with examples as well as some tips, so you don't have to write another callback.

About Garret Meier

Garret Meier (@headin_thecloud (https://github.com/sfnode/sfnode/issues/twitter.com/@headin_thecloud)) is a full-stack engineer at Mixmax, a platform that's the future of outbound communication, using Javascript at each level of the stack. He's a recent graduate from Iowa State, avid climber, amateur philosopher (https://medium.com/@headin_thecloud/the-illusion-of-analyticity-part-1-introduction-31719f4eb559), and hackathoner.

Open mic
Open mic time give attendees 2-3 minutes of time to talk to the entire group. This is the time to debut a new project, announce upcoming events or let people know they're hiring.

Upcoming Events
• WaffleJs (http://wafflejs.com/)- First Wednesday of the month
• NodeSchool SF (http://nodeschool.io/sanfrancisco) - Last Saturday of the month
• NodeSchool Oakland (http://nodeschool.io/oakland) - Middle Saturday of the month