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OpenJS In Action: Betting Your Product’s Developer Experience on Node.js and Open Source
OpenJS recently spoke with Yavor Georgiev, Co-Founder, and Head of Product at Fusebit, to learn more about how his product leverages Node.js and other benefits of the open source ecosystem.
OpenJS In Action: Betting Your Product’s Developer Experience on Node.js and Open Source
OpenJS recently spoke with Yavor Georgiev, Co-Founder, and Head of Product at Fusebit, to learn more about how his product leverages Node.js and other benefits of the open source ecosystem. Fusebit prides itself on being a “developer-first” focused product that takes the pain out of implementing SaaS integrations. Yavor and one of his co-founders at Fusebit previously had worked at Microsoft specifically on bringing support for Node.js to the Azure Cloud.
We learned that the Fusebit product team strongly believes in and supports the Node.js ecosystem. The entire Fusebit service is based on a “JavaScript developer experience with Node.js and npm”, which delivers a best-in-class experience for their customers.
Programming Model Based on Node.js
The Fusebit service exposes a programming model based on Node.js, allowing any developer to create an integration. That’s key for a couple of reasons. First, since there’s already a massive community of developers familiar with Node.js and JavaScript, developers don’t have to learn anything new and can use their existing processes and DevOps techniques. Another key benefit to having their model based on Node.js is that due to the size of the npm ecosystem, there’s a module for virtually everything. One of the benefits of open source is that developers don’t have to write and implement everything from scratch. In this case, they can grab a module from npm and speed up their productivity.
Security
We touched on the issue of security. Two of the co-founders of Fusebit were previously employees at Microsoft and later at Auth0, an identity and access management platform on which Fusebit’s security is based. Were it not for Node.js and companies like Auth0 being invested in securing the open source ecosystem, the Fusebit product itself wouldn’t be where it is today. They also leverage modules from npm where developers constantly update code and patch vulnerabilities.
Stripe for SaaS Integrations
The Fusebit service is like “Stripe for SaaS integrations.” So if you’re a developer working on a SaaS application and you need integrations to third-party SaaS products like Slack or JIRA, Fusebit provides the integrations in a turnkey way. Based on Node.js, there’s an infinite ability to customize solutions. As a result, Fusebit achieves great problem-solution-fits for their customers, unlike some low-code and no-code solutions. Another reason their product is focused on a developer audience is data fidelity is essential when connecting business software to something like Salesforce or other SaaS products. Someone has to have the right technical mindset to create that type of integration.
Open Source Contributions
The Fusebit team is also a proud contributor to open source development. Most of their source code is available on GitHub, so customers can go in and fork features, SaaS connectors, etc., and make them their own.
We talked about everynode, a new project that Fusebit recently contributed to the open source ecosystem that lets developers run any version of Node.js, including the most recent builds on AWS Lambda. Lambda sometimes doesn’t have the latest versions available. The Fusebit team initially built it internally for integrations that required newer versions of Node.js and needed to run on AWS.
“You know, selfishly, it’s actually better for more developers to be familiar with it instead of keeping it secret. The more people are familiar with aspects of Fusebit that we’ve made open source, the better for us.”
The Fusebit team routinely takes pieces of the Fusebit service and makes them available to the public, whether it’s npm packages, repositories, or other content. The team also contributes by filing issues and contributing fixes to OSS projects and Node.js itself when needed. On making parts of their code public, Yavor commented, “You know, selfishly, it’s actually better for more developers to be familiar with it instead of keeping it secret. The more people are familiar with aspects of Fusebit that we’ve made open source, the better for us.”
JavaScript FTW!
With so many other programming languages out there, Yavor believes JavaScript is still in the lead for many reasons. It’s amazingly versatile, giving devs the ability to build end-to-end solutions. The language itself continues to evolve, and there are some remarkable initiatives around the standardization of the module spec, for example. Now you can write a module and use it pretty much anywhere JavaScript runs, whether it’s Node.js or in a browser. This continuous innovation supports the JavaScript language and the community and encourages people to continue learning JavaScript.
Fusebit thanks the Node.js community and everybody who’s contributing unpaid hours to make Node.js and the package ecosystem great. According to Yavor, the Node.js community has been a tremendous help to their product. They also give back to our community by hiring folks with Node.js in their skillset.
We at the OpenJS Foundation appreciate Yavor sharing his thoughts and experience.