[bdcravens]

Is it really a trap? What's the value of being different on the backend? Node.js is a rich ecosystem, and it's not like you're digging a career hole (at least not at this point in the lifecycle). Once you really settle in, that's when you can put your energy where it belongs: solving business problems, not learning a new set of tools.

I say all this not as a Node fanboy; I've spent most of my career in ColdFusion and Ruby. I get the same doubts when I start something in Ruby (which is certainly further along in the lifecycle than Node). I'll jump off into something new and sexy, get a little stuck in the learning, and realize I'm doing my customer/employer a disservice. I'll go back to Ruby, and find that I end up with a more elegant, well thought out solution based on my experience in that space.

For instance: I recently had a hairy problem that I was convinced a fancy microservice to manage concurrency etc would be necessary to solve. I then found out that using my existing application, and using the connection_pool gem already in Sidekiq, gave me a better solution in a fraction of the time than I was planning on building.