New beginnings and farewells

Firstly, I apologise that there wasn't a new article last week. I spent a couple of days in a beautiful town in Ireland called Tramore, in and around attending the first ever WebRTC meetup in Dublin as well as speaking at the Node.js Dublin meetup the following day.

I loved being in Dublin for Node.js Dublin where I spoke about a little known module called continuation-local-storage, written by Forrest Norvell - I say little known, it has thousands of downloads every week but when I talk to Node.js developers they've never heard of it.

If you're interested, check out the slides on slideshare.

I also attended the first ever WebRTC meetup in Dublin organised by Miguel Ponce de Leon. It was a huge success; probably close to 30 people attended and heard about starting out with WebRTC, as well as an established application which takes advantage of WebRTC's features - this is in addition to hearing about TadHack, which is happening in just over a weeks time!

Back to this week's article. I was stuck for ideas this week on what to write about so I asked Twitter.

Tim wanted to hear what I was up to last week that wasn't secret... well I'm afraid GCHQ hasn't asked us to team up with them on any secret projects yet Tim. We couldn't tell you even if they had, but they haven't. We do however have some news.

It's hugely exciting to be able to announce that, last week, Nimble Ape signed a new contract with the Node.js consulting team based in Ireland, nearForm. nearForm are doing great things in the Node.js community so we see them as a perfect match for Nimble Ape.

If you haven't heard of nearForm and are interested in Node.js development, where have you been? You must have been under a rock! nearForm are the team behind both the nodeconfeu conference and the recent nodeday in New York, as well as open source tools such as nscale and the seneca microservices framework. They are also building great solutions with some of the most innovative companies in the world. Their team is growing rapidly, going from 26 last August to 53 today. If you're interested in Node.js you should definitely come to nodeconfeu - more tickets are being released today.

I got to spend some time with some of the nearForm team last week when I wasn't travelling between Tramore and Dublin for meetups; I'm excited for our new partnership for many reasons. But, of course, with new beginnings and only a limited number of hours in the day there are farewells to be had.

For the past 18 months Nimble Ape has been working with the Respoke team; we were part of that team during early development and have loved every minute of it. I wouldn't be a Google Developer Expert today if it weren't for the time I spent with Respoke, and Nimble Ape wouldn't be in the position that it is today without Respoke's help. It's been a great 18 months but it's now time to move onto a new challenge that will hopefully allow Nimble Ape to expand even further.

Nimble Ape and Respoke will continue a close relationship but we won't be working with the Respoke team as we have. For example, I'll still be at Astricon in October, where I'll be talking about building contact centre applications for the 21^st century. This, of course, means the inclusion of WebRTC and Respoke.

Will this move from working on WebRTC day in day out have any affect on what Nimble Ape do for advocating WebRTC? Not at all. I hope it will actually help improve what we can do for WebRTC. Granted, working on a WebRTC platform every day has it's benefits in keeping up with the WebRTC draft and nuances between browsers, but it can also have a negative impact on your view on WebRTC. You get a degree of tunnel vision when it comes to issues within WebRTC, which takes away from the fact that it's always good to have a fresh insight and fresh view on things. We'll still be working with WebRTC, as well as working with the Respoke platform and possibly many of the other platforms out there.

This is a new chapter in Nimble Ape's life and we're hugely excited about it.