#customer convos

Q. Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and/or what your company does?

A: `open-wc` (Open Web Components) is an open collective of volunteer developers interested in web components and the web platform in general. Late last year we got together with the idea to publish some community-sourced recommendations and tools for building apps with web components. So far we have published generators, a testing framework, and lots of documentation.

How’s your day going?

@bennyp: Pretty good, thanks! Had some really nice hummus for lunch. You?

@dakmor: Busy but the open source drive and the community keeps me motivated :)

@lars: With the LitElement 2.0 release I don’t think my day could get any better :)

@passle: Excellent, thank you, very productive day!

Tell me the story of npm at your company. What specific problem did you have that npm solved?

We needed a way to make all our tools, configs, and recommendations available to the frontend community, and because basically everyone in that circle already has npm it was a perfect fit. Using npm also gives us access to a huge amount of community-produced material, which we can curate and absorb as needed, and tools like like Lerna, which helped us easily achieve full continuous integration.

To people who are unsure what they could use npm for — how would you explain the use case?

For us, we use npm for two things:

1. Acquiring community packages for use in our own internal processes as well as for redistribution within our packages

2. Publishing our tools, libraries, configs, and generators so that the community can benefit.

We love #1 but we’re especially grateful for #2.

How’s the day to day experience of using npm?

We mentioned above some of the great things that npm brings to the table; however, with npm we also face challenges specific to front end code. For example, there is currently no reliable way to make sure a certain package is unique within your dependency graph, which is a hard requirement for any module which relies on the global state — a common pattern in front-end. This is a common occurrence in our day-to-day workflow, and we’re excited to have solutions like the singleton RFC in our hands soon.

So for the moment, it still can be a lot of manual work or extra plugins for our build tools. Still, even with these troubles, using npm is worth it for us. Just the amount of useful tools (like `lerna`, `eslint`, `prettier`, …) we use ourself is worth it, even before talking about publishing our own packages.

On a very direct level, we also use the `npm` command *constantly* when working on our packages — it’s a great task runner for tests, CI/CD, linting, commit-validation, and all sorts of other day-to-day tasks. We highly recommend that more developers start using npm that way.

Would you recommend that another org or company use npm and why?

Especially for startups, where runway is really important, it’s super helpful to have access to all this great community code. We’re confident that in 2019, there will be a lot of growth in the number of packages on npm which support browser-centred workflows for front-end, and we’re really excited to be a part of that.

At `open-wc`, we are pragmatic enough to offer advice and recommendations built upon Node-only tooling, but we still look forward to the day when the browser itself is more widely adopted as the development runtime. We think that day is coming really soon and we’re excited to see the npm registry developing in that direction.

Any cool npm stuff your company has done publicly that you’d like to promote?

Check out our packages!

`generator-open-wc` — Web Component project generator `yo:open-wc`

`@open-wc/testing` — Test helpers for your web component project

`owc-dev-server` — A simple web server for simple web developers. It does the minimal amount of work required for web development on modern web browsers.

…. and there is more :)

Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and what your company does?

Hello! My name is Mark van den Brink and I’m a co-founder and tech lead of Tripetto. Developers can integrate our full-fledged form kit straight into their projects to wield an entire solution for creating and deploying smart forms and surveys. Tripetto is not SaaS, but a set of JavaScript libraries delivered through npm. It’s also platform agnostic and extensible. Heck, it should spell the end of the rigid form and survey SaaS paradigm. There, we said it

How’s your day going?

Quite alright! We’ve recently shipped version 1.0.0 of the Tripetto form kit and developers are really starting to get the hang of it. They’re tweaking our demos, building custom blocks, and finding truly cool ways to integrate Tripetto tech into their own projects. We’re just trying to keep up with the invaluable feedback and get better as fast as we can. And we invite everyone to share any cool stuff built with Tripetto.

Tell me the story of npm at your company. What specific problem did you have that private packages and orgs solved?

npm solves a lot for us. We continually work on multiple projects - most of them open source. But there’s always a part of the projects still under development and not meant to be shared yet. On top of that we work with remote teams in different locations. Private packages and Orgs help us share our projects with the right people the right way easily. We gladly piggyback on npm’s expertise, so we don’t need to worry about security, version management, availability, etc.

Can you tell us a story about a specific package you wanted to make that private packages really enabled you to do?

I have so many good examples. But the best one for us actually was the development of the Tripetto form kit itself. We kept the project mostly private in order to keep a competitive advantage – only sharing progress when we were ready. We developed the form kit using an npm Org with private packages. And when we were good to go last summer to share it with the world, we just simply made our packages public and off we went!

Does your company do open source? How do you negotiate what you keep private and public (feel free to be as vague as you need to be)?

Yes, we do! Moreover, our goal is to open source as much of what we do around Tripetto as possible, but only when we think the particular part or feature is ready to be shared. Besides that, we occasionally work for clients that use Tripetto technologies in closed source projects. We mostly do customizations then and use private packages for their distribution.

To people who are unsure what they could use private packages for — how would you explain the use case?

It’s all the good stuff you know from npm, but now for your private projects. Full control over who can access your packages. Put trust in the npm’s knowledge and expertise in package distribution, security, semantic versioning, quality of service, availability and more. And make stuff public with one click if you’re ready for that!

How’s it going? How’s the day to day experience of using private packages/orgs?

We like it a lot. We manage a considerable mix of open source and private packages and there is literally no difference in our workflow for these different projects within our organization. That keeps things simple and organized.

How would you see the product improved or expanded in the future?

If you mean the npm product, I can definitely think of one thing: Download and usage statistics for private packages. But other than that, it is excellent. For our own product we have plenty of ideas. But the best thing that could happen for Tripetto is broad adoption of our technologies by developers in need of a complete form and survey solution.

Would you recommend that another org or company use private packages or orgs and why?

Well, we aspire to be fully open source. So, try and suggest making as much open source as responsibly possible. We firmly believe even commercial software can be open source and npm is a beautiful platform to distribute it. But, if you also build stuff for organizations that don’t want or cannot expose stuff to the outside world, private packages are an easy and safe way for distributing your packages – without having to change a whole lot about your workflow.

This piece is a part of our Customer Convos series. We’re sharing stories of how people use npm at work. Want to share your thoughts? Drop us a line.

Q: Hi! Can you state your name, what you do, and/or what your company does?

A: Hey there! My name is Feross Aboukhadijeh. I'm an entrepreneur and programmer who spends a lot of time writing open source code. A few examples of projects I started are WebTorrent and Standard, which are open source. You can learn more about my newest projects by checking out my blog or GitHub profile.

How’s your day going?

Pretty great! I'm happy that it's finally the weekend. I'm doing some reading, open source maintenance, and tonight I'm hosting a party with my awesome housemates.

Tell me the story of npm at your company. What specific problem did you have that npm solved?

I first encountered npm while starting my first company, PeerCDN, in 2013. PeerCDN was a peer-to-peer content delivery network (CDN) which aimed to make the web faster, and help reduce website bandwidth costs. npm allowed us to build something useful super quickly. We installed `express`, `ws`, wrote some custom WebRTC magic and we had prototype off the ground in a few weeks. (We were eventually acquired by Yahoo).

The vast majority of the software I've written has been open source. I have over 100 packages on npm! I am able to create lots of value in the world when I don’t restrict how people can use my work. Publishing things under an open source license lets anyone use my code however they like, which is super powerful.

To people who are unsure what they could use npm for — how would you explain the use case?

If you want to use any modern JavaScript library, you're going to get it from npm. Period.

How’s the day to day experience of using npm?

npm install; npm test

These two magic commands are the not-so-secret incantations that bring any npm package to life. As an npm user, you'll type these commands dozens of times every day.

Would you recommend that another org or company use npm and why?

Definitely! npm is the best way to publish JavaScript code. It's super fast, it's optimized for a friendly developer experience (no dependency hell!), and it has all the packages that you need to make your vision come to life. If there's a package that's missing, you can be the one who writes it and publishes it to npm.

Any cool npm stuff your company has done publicly that you’d like to promote?

I'd just like to shout out open source maintainers. They do all the thankless work that makes this whole thing possible. Their tireless effort makes our awesome apps, websites, and projects possible! Many authors devote countless hours to open source. I think we all have a duty to help out authors and make the software we rely on healthier by giving back.

I built a tool called thanks that helps you financially support the open source maintainers you depend on in your project. Just run `npx thanks` in your project to see which of your dependencies are seeking donations. Share the love!

Me: *brings out drink* Here you go!

Customer: *frowns critically at drink*

Customer: Is this...is this a whole shot?

Me: ...

Me: ...Yes?

Customer: Um...okay, could you, like, add another shot to something? This isn't what I was expecting.

Me: You asked for a shot of espresso, right?

Customer: Right, but...it's...there's just not very much in there.

Me: ...

Guest checking in:My last name is _______ and I'm checking in"

Me: "Oh hello, yes we just spoke on the phone a little while ago"

Guest: *blank stare* "I thought I was talking to a young lady on the phone, your voice is very feminine"

Guest's daughter-in-law: "I'm so sorry! He says things like that, I think you sound very manly."

Me: "The most incredible people in my life are women, so I take being called feminine as the highest of compliments, so thank you!"