React

Enterprise Node.JS Apps in 2018

What are you doing today?

My job now is helping various teams make sure they're doing things the best way possible. If they're using React and Webpack or another set of tools, making sure that it's set up and configured well, making sure that they aren't making any common mistakes that we can help them avoid. Then, on the Node side, making sure people are using the latest technologies. I've been instrumental in helping our teams get upgraded to Node 6 and then 8, and keeping current with those technologies, staying aware of changes in the ecosystem, like Babel or TypeScript, GraphQL and other tools that have allowed us to do more interesting things and trying to keep ahead of the curb. Then working on turning the big ship that is PayPal engineering in a better and smarter direction.

You said Node is part of your front-end. What does that mean?

There's been a talk in the community for a while that Node is the back-end for the front-end. We have our back-end services teams and then we have our front-end teams. The front-end teams are using Node to prepare the data that comes from our services down to the customers. Our Node layer is an orchestration layer, and we massage that data and make it easy to consume by our clients.