Script'17

Evolution of a web application - Raquel Vélez

Stefan Baumgartner

May 22, 2017 • 2 min read

We first came in contact with Raquel as fans of the wonderful Reactive podcast. With her colleagues Kahlil and Henning already been to Linz for speaking gigs, we thought it is only fair to invite her over to meet the whole crew. And she came! On triple-duty! Two days before the conference she gave another talk for our friends at Angular Vienna, and after Script'17 she demonstrated her awesome skiing skills on the Austrian slopes. If you got a skiing Franz Joseph von Wombat, you only can win!

Franz Joseph von Wombat

Thank you so much for the time with us, and the NPM Sticker special edition! 🎉

Evolution of a web application

This is the story of npmjs.com: how it started as a special snowflake web application, got rewritten into an almost-modular-but-not-quite monolith, and began its next steps towards becoming a real, honest-to-goodness conglomeration of microservices.

From zero lines of front-end JavaScript to what looks like a React-based application, I will dive into how we have managed to keep up with our users, anticipated their needs, and tried (and sometimes failed!) to give them a good experience.

Video

(Or go to Youtube directly)

Slides

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About Raquel Vélez

Raquel Vélez is the engineering manager and tech lead of the web team at npm, Inc. in Oakland, CA. She has previously worked at institutions such as Caltech, NASA JPL, the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and various universities in Europe. She is a co-author of the book Make: JavaScript Robotics. In her off time, you can find her baking, teaching NodeBots not to fall off of tables, and speaking. Also, hanging out with her hilarious husband and two cats dressed in dog suits.