There’s a blog post being passed around various circles right now titled Node.js is Cancer.

The quick summary is the author doesn’t like node.js, thinks it’s bad for IT in general, and comes up with several sort of thought out reasons to back up his stance.

I’m not going to debate the entire blog post. I’m pretty agnostic about node.js, I’ve tried to use it a few times. I just generally prefer Python/Tornado. I do take some umbrage to one paragraph in the blog post thought.

If you’re using Node, there’s a 99% probability that you are both the developer and the system administrator, because any system administrator would have talked you out of using Node in the first place. So you, the developer, must face the punishment of setting up this HTTP proxying orgy if you want to put a real web server in front of Node for things like serving statics, query rewriting, rate limiting, load balancing, SSL, or any of the other futuristic things that modern HTTP servers can do. That, and it’s another layer of health checks that your system will need.

No, as a sysadmin I wouldn’t try to talk a developer out of using node.js, well, much anyway. My reasons for being hesitant to go down that path wouldn’t be for the reasons the author of the blog post goes into though. My primary reasons to ask if we should go that direction are:

1) It’s a new stack to support. So more work keeping it up to date. I don’t care what you bring to the table, this is always something to consider if the value of the new technology is worth the additional effort to maintain it.

2) Do we have enough developers to support it? Otherwise, am I going to to have to learn how to program server side javascript because a developer gets hit by a bus? Where I’ve been, it’s always fallen to the sysadmins to support the technology when the developers can’t.

As for the reasons the blog author thought a sysadmin would resist… well if that’s the case then I don’t think Java would have ever made it. I mean you want me to support a VM running ontop of an OS with ugly cryptic error messages? Yea right. Python? Umm hello, Perl works, why don’t you silly developers stick with that?

In case you missed it, the last couple sentences were sarcasm. I, and most systems administrators like technology. I like load balancers, any day I get to play with the F5’s is a good one. I’m going to write lots of health checks anyway. Even if that new app is written with Python using wsgi, I’m going to have to write health checks for it anyway to know it’s up and serving appropriate content.

Ted Dziuba, I get it. You don’t like node.js. Don’t bring us sysadmins into your argument though. We’re here to support our organizations and make sure people can get their jobs done in the way that’s best for them to do it. We support a lot of technology we don’t care far. We know of lots of technology that if people would just use it, our jobs and theirs would be easier. We also know the world doesn’t really work like that. We’re problem solvers, whether it’s fixing something that’s broken or providing engineering experience to get something working. We don’t dictate technology, we make it work. So seriously, leave us out of your battle. We’re not interested.

* Disclaimer: I’m blaming all typographical errors on the fact I haven’t finished my coffee yet. I’ll also blame the slightly grumpy tone of this blog post on that as well.