What programmers learned at MeetMe’s fireside chat with TJ Fontaine

It’s no secret that over the past year TJ Fontaine has become absolutely essential to the Node.js project.

Technologists from around the region came together to watch Fontaine in action at MeetMe’s headquarters in New Hope, Pa., this week.

It was a side stop of the Node.js on the Road tour, which resulted in a much more intimate and technical talk about Node.js.

Fontaine shared a ton of valuable information for a room full of MeetMe developers, and others, who use Node.js for work.

The questions asked by the group opened up new perspectives on how to approach creating a platform in Node.

“After working in Ohio for 14 years I was asked to take on this open-source project,” Fontaine said. “So I moved to San Francisco and went on to help create something amazing for the world to use.”

Fontaine showed a lot of enthusiasm for his role in the Node.js project, spending most of his talk on very technical, application-specific functions.

Showing Node in action, he explained the DTrace function and how it helps coders see the process of running instances of their platform.

He went on to discuss recursive objects in C++, along with Node’s role at Joyent (which maintains Node and is Fontaine’s employer). “Using a debugging plugin as a way to reconstruct your files is critical to learning how your platform works,” Fontaine said.

He was very adamant about using stack tracing, debugging and watching for memory leaks on a daily basis — in order to truly understand what the processes are.

MeetMe meetup organizers say they’ll continue to keep their group growing. Senior architect at MeetMe, Jason Lotito, showed a lot of passion for the ongoing event.

“We plan on staying focused on sharing technologies that our teams are passionate about here,” said Lotito. “It’s a win-win for everyone, because we get to be involved in the tech community, learn and share some laughs and beers by the end of the night.”