Yesterday I talked to Up and Running with Node.js author and Jetpacks for Dinosaurs principal Tom Hughes-Croucher. I already shared his thoughts on the relationship between DevOps and Node.js.

Prior to starting Jetpacks for Dinosaurs, Hughes-Croucher was a developer advocate for Node.js sponsor company Joyent (one of our open source startups to watch in 2012). Since starting his own practice in November he has been helping companies make the best of Node.js, working with clients such as Wal-Mart with its Walmart Labs mobile applications.

Mostly Hughes-Croucher is focusing on helping companies with architecture – planning roadmaps and avoiding common pitfalls. “People definitely want to hire me to write code,” he says. “But they don’t really want to hire a lone coder. They have instances of Node in development and they need someone to fast track it.”

“Because it’s a new technology, there aren’t that many people who have significant experience using Node,” he says. But the people who are using Node.js will still run into many of the same problems and have to make similar architectural decisions. That’s where Jetpacks for Dinosaurs comes in.

Node.js Trends

Hughes-Croucher says he has seen Node.js grow significantly in the past year, with most of the applications falling broadly into two categories: 1) As a middleware layer between a user facing front-end and existing infrastructure (much of which may not be ready for the sort of performance Web services need). 2) Brand new apps, like Voxer, that can take advantage of Node.js’s architecture to build near real-time services.

LinkedIn is a sort of hybrid of the two approaches. The company is using Node.js as the server that powers its mobile apps, but hasn’t gotten rid of Ruby on Rails, which still powers its website.

I would also add another category: IT teams using Node.js to create small, non-customer facing internal applications like monitoring and deployment tools (see: Why So Many DevOps Tools Are Written in Node.js). These don’t quite fit into that first category of middleware, but aren’t the sort of cutting edge user facing apps that make up the second either.

Consulting Trends

Hughes-Croucher says he’s also noticed the trend of consulting companies building more of their own IP. He says this is happening because “You start to build tools for clients, then those become services.”

He thinks consultants have an advantage in creating new software and services because they have “panopticon vision” of the needs of many organizations that they wouldn’t get if they only worked for one company. Working in consulting is market research.

All this is great, but Hughes-Croucher predicts that in the near future we’ll see some IP lawsuits arise between consultants and their customers. This is definitely a concern of many consulting firms, and Accenture made it very clear that the company’s staff only builds its own tools when not on the clock for customers.

What’s Next?

We’ll continue to watch trends in software development, DevOps and consulting both here at ServicesAngle, on our show theCube and on our forthcoming site DevOpsAngle. For more on Node.js, tune in next week to theCube for our live coverage of NodeSummit.