James and Peteris are two of the most amazing devs I've seen in a long time. They ship and ship and ship and ship.
The first version of StackVM (Browserling's underlying technology) was written in Haskell. They switched to Node close to two years ago if I'm not mistaken. I've gotten an early look at Testling, their cross browser testing web testing tools, and they're easily a year or two ahead of anyone else on the market. I'm looking forward to seeing it launch.
They are amazing and Browserling is very handy, but they really need to hire a designer. A lot of their customers are going to be designers, there is no reason to have such a dated look.
I also agree. First time I came across their product it wasn't via HN and at first I just assumed they were one of the old-timers who were trying to be quirky with "cool" icons. Otherwise, good job on the product!
Most of these are small utilities (e.g. node-mkdirp), but a few are really significant contributions to the Node community. node-bigint, for instance, is a very robust, efficient library for doing infinite-precision arithmetic (a fairly common necessity, since every number in JavaScript is a 64-bit float and there's no way of knowing when you lose precision).
I like how everyone was drawn for NPM top. Got their likeness on point ha-ha. I wonder how many of these can be grouped in to a general utility package?
I know I'm getting to be a broken record, but two different attempts at an SSH server, neither of which work? Every other thing on this list is a reimplementation of something in Python's standard library or Twisted.
I mean, yes, that's a lot of code to write, and I'm impressed, but this just feels like yet more reinvention of the wheel.
I think that's the point. Nodejs is a new technology and people are re-inventing all the Twisted (and other technologies like it) wheels so that you can use them from nodejs.
1. You win. This contribution make me think there needs to be an open source awards show. Your "best contribution to a web platform in 2011" nomination is in the bag.
2. PG should be calling you with an invitation to the next YC class, not for this, but for everything you guys have accomplished in the last year.
Agree with both points, especially the second. Their product and work feels like a great fit for YC.
BTW, nirvana: at the risk of down-votes here I wanted to draw your attention to this comment I made on an older thread which you might not have noticed: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2958684
Thanks for pointing that out. I completely missed that wonderful thread.
EDIT: I agree with amirhhz. Nirvana, if you have a blog or newsletter, please let me know. The only info I found from HN & googling you is twitter @NirvanaCore, which I am looking forward it, but I don't want to just know about NirvanaCore from you. I want to read and know about you and your thoughts.
There are debugging, profiling and coverage tools though they're maybe not as well-developed as you'd like.
If you have any node questions, you should drop by the #node.js channel on freenode! It's a good place to get help and chat about asynchronous IO with (generally) friendly people.
The first version of StackVM (Browserling's underlying technology) was written in Haskell. They switched to Node close to two years ago if I'm not mistaken. I've gotten an early look at Testling, their cross browser testing web testing tools, and they're easily a year or two ahead of anyone else on the market. I'm looking forward to seeing it launch.
Hook James and Peteris up by purchasing a paid plan: http://browserling.com/pricing
Better yet, ping them about buying a corporate plan for your company: http://browserling.com/contact