10 Best Ways to Fasten Your Node.js Development Process

Each programming language has its benefits, but Node.js is highly favored in Silicon Valley and all around the world. It lets you develop a real-time data-intensive application, has a low learning curve, and is useful for building microservices.

This JavaScript runtime environment is perfect for dynamic web pages, web applications, and command-line programs. It knows how to communicate with external libraries, requests commands from code, and acts as a web server. Whether you want to develop a chatbot, online game, or social network, use this framework to achieve your goals.

However, it is not that simple. Working on a Node.js project, you should be ready to meet some challenges. Sometimes the development process is just slow, and it seems there’s nothing that can help it. Sounds familiar?

Fortunately, the TechMagic team is ready to share our experience and provide you with powerful insights on how to advance the Node.js development workflow.

How to Accelerate Node.js Development: Challenges to Overcome

Code debt

One of the reasons why TechMagic doesn’t face difficulties with Node.js is that our team uses the best practices. However, newcomers get lost even in the friendly open-source community as there are many options to go. While prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code, the development team might end up making extra effort to improve the software or to add functionality later.

What you should do is implement some proven patterns. Try borrowing from Java and other more mature ecosystems.

Obscure guidelines

Our developers have faced this issue at the start of their careers. Usually, while working with mature frameworks, you expect some clear guidelines for coding, but the Node.js frameworks simply don’t provide it. Different practices and a high degree of variations inside the development team result in a dirty code and prolonged coding time. Accelerating Node.js development requires an individual approach for each project, just accept it.

Poor documentation

Whether you’re a Junior or a cautious and experienced Senior, you’ll not dispute the importance of documentation for any IT project. The main thing for each team member in the development process is to understand how the app works. Where do you find the answer? It is documentation that is supposed to be structured and well-designed.

Choose the right direction

Even though Node.js is still a relatively young environment, that doesn't negate its many benefits. In many cases, it proved to be effective for such companies as Mozilla, PayPal, eBay, Walmart, etc.

All you need to do is to choose the right direction. We’ve prepared some actionable tips to improve Node.js skills, and they’ll save you some time. Or you can contact to hire a dedicated software development team with a professional approach, well-established processes, and guaranteed results.

10 Strategies to Speed Up Node.js Development Process

Parallelise things

Building web applications, you make internal API calls sometimes and get various data. Here are some hypothetical options:

Retrieving these details, developers create a separate middleware for each function. Once they have it done, they attach it to the dashboard route. However, using this tip, we’ve also met difficulties. One function must wait until the previous one is completed, which slows down the process a little.

So, we’ve found a way to speed up the process of Node.js development. We just parallelize things. And it works because of the environments’ asynchronous nature.

Go asynchronous

Seasoned Node.js programmers prefer to use an asynchronous approach in web development as it avoids blocking threads. At least, you should try it in departments that are in critical charge of the performance.

For example, the synchronous code is acceptable if we build a script for working with a database, not a system for processing parallel or concurrent tasks.

What is the distinguishing feature? The difference is whether you are writing long executable code or a small script with a short lifetime. In general, remember one good Node.js rule from professionals: always write asynchronous code.

Just cache it

When working with data that doesn’t change too often, we just cache it to hasten the Node.js development process. You can see the example at the snippet below.

If your blog posts don't come out very often, cache the array of posts and clear it after a while. In the next snippet, you see how you can do this using the Redis module. So, start by checking for messages in the Redis cache. After that, you can deliver an array of messages or get content from the database and only then cache it. After a while, you will be able to clear the cache and create new content.

Knowing that some parts of the code can be run only once, such an implementation will be useful.

Use gzip compression

This is another factor that affects the performance of your app. We’ve mentioned that the browser needs much more time to load statistics resources if we don't use the compression middleware.

Lowercase is a king

Of course, we like encouraging file names to match class names. However, you need to use lowercase files. Myclass.js and myclass.js are equally well for some operating systems, but, for instance, Linux can’t handle it. An easy step to decrease the time for Node.js development is using lowercase.

Cluster your app

Be aware of the Node execution time limits, which lead to a huge waste of resources. Even if you only need to run one process on very little hardware, for now, cluster support will give you flexibility in the future.

Go green

It is important to take care of the environment you live in, sort garbage, and plant trees. Use this approach everywhere because environmental awareness affects your project, as well. If you want to speed up your Node.js development process, don’t litter your app with configuration files. Our choice is environment variables.

Avoid garbage

You shouldn’t rely on the Node garbage collector only. Sometimes it waits for the last moment to free the unused memory. Don't worry about the leak, and if memory usage starts to increase, just provide flags in your Procfile.

Update the stack

Keeping your Node.js version up to date lets you boost application performance and your developers’ work. Various ES6/7 features will provide a more robust stack even without the need to install transpilers.

Look deeper

When speeding up the Node.js coding, remember that you need to tackle the problem’s root, not the surface level. Perhaps you have a weak machine, a flaw in a part of the code, or not implemented automatic scaling. Narrow down the problem first, and after investigating, you can determine the next steps. Also, take care of registering the application’s behavior, which will help you understand the problem’s essence.

However, there is still one more option: hire an experienced and reliable team. TechMagic is always here to have your back, share our vision and best practices, and exceed your expectations.

TechMagic: Our Team and Experience

Hard skills

First, our team is always monitoring technological trends, news of all popular cloud computing platforms, success stories, etc. That’s why we always have ready-to-use reusable solutions to implement.

In addition, our developers have knowledge of SQL and NoSQL, automated testing, and other modern tools and technologies. It helps us quickly identify and resolve any bottlenecks and accelerate node.js development workflow.

Soft skills

Of course, we work a lot on our social skills. Communication, responsibility, and passion are what distinguish our team and help you trust us. We are always in touch to provide you with the most relevant information on your project progress. You always know the role of any team member, their responsibilities, and who is available to answer your questions at the moment.

Our approach

We approach any app development project from the position of a trusted advisor. Our mission is to satisfy the customer and realize our ambitions in the creation of a great product. We’re always ready to face new challenges and have enough knowledge, skills, and passion for providing you with a decent web apps development services.

Case studies

Elements.cloud is one of the challenging but inspiring projects the TechMagic team fulfilled using Node.js. It’s a business process visualization SaaS product for Fortune 5000 companies that have integration with Salesforce.

The team managed to realize the concept of customizable diagrams with robust version control. Thanks to migration from SQL to MongoDB, we got a flexible and optimized application backend. AWS allowed the app to become auto-scalable and more cost-efficient. Besides, to bring process mapping on Salesforce UI, we made two-way integration between the cloud on AWS and Salesforce. As a result, our client received a fully-tolerant, secure, GDPR-compliant process visualization, and AWS management tools.

Visit our case studies page to get more information about our experience.

Wrapping Up

If you’re going to make the most out of Node.js, it would be a perfect decision to hire a professional team of Node.js developers. To achieve the best results, find a dedicated team with vast experience with frontend development services JavaScript technologies. TechMagic is one of such teams that understand which tools and packages will make your product outrun the competitors and fulfil your business goals. Contact us, we are looking forward to hearing your ideas!