[jed_watson]

I run a web development company in Sydney called Thinkmill (http://www.thinkmill.com.au).

We use Node.js for everything we do, from mobile app backends to websites to web apps. We've been using it for nearly two years, and found it fantastic - compared to technologies we've used previously it's faster to develop in, faster to run, easy to deploy (especially with platforms like Heroku) and the value of npm and the ecosystem of high quality open source packages is hard to overstate.

We have also developed an open source Node.js model-driven CMS / web app framework called KeystoneJS (http://keystonejs.com) which is built on Express and MongoDB and has been getting some great feedback :)

The biggest lesson / gotcha has been getting into the different mindset - especially when we started, there wasn't a lot of 'hand holding' available compared to other languages and frameworks, and there were few established best practices to follow. I think it's easier these days (there's certainly more out there) but I'm very familiar with it now so it's hard to gauge from a beginners point of view.

It's easy to fall into traps with callback patterns and error handling, for example - so you really need to get your head around what's out there (like the async library for example), and how to structure your application and code.

[chrisabrams]

Keystone.js looks pretty sweet, I'm gonna try it out this weekend!

Before using Node.js had y'all done a lot of work with async code-bases?