[bipin-nag]

He is one of the topmost contributors to the node.js ecosystem if not the most. He has given a plenty of good libraries. Besides the reasons he gave to leave node.js, I feel that he was under-appreciated and over-worked many times. With components he tried to create a toolchain, wrote express and koa for server, jade for templating, mocha for debugging etc.

He tried to do a lot many things single-handedly. Which is why he needs a lot of maintainers. I don't blame him for overloading and stressing out. That is the way how it goes in node.js. Working in node.js is like battling a multi-headed beast. The core javascript keeps evolving, node.js isn't even in version 1.0, API changes a lot. There are lot of blanks to fill and too much time goes into boilerplate stuff and managing existing code.

It is just not rewarding and fulfilling to contribute to node.js. On top of that he faced a lot of friction from other contributors. He had some really difficult times, like express-connect conflict, bower-components conflict. Having handled conflicts too many, some people also consider him as being rude and too self-centered. Besides he is young and is probably one of the first things he has done he is serious about.

Many times before I asked to myself how does this guy do it. In a community where to contribute even a little one has to put in a lot of effort, his contributions are gigantic. I hope he continues to work, although not at too many projects . His experiences will definitely be handy.

[enome]

On top of that I remember the first nodeup podcasts and on twitter some key member from the community would bitch about express all the time. Ranging from express is bloated to middleware is a shitty abstraction to you don't need a framework in Node.js. It was really weird because express was (is?) one of the most used framework in the Node.js community and here you have people that other people follow and listen to tell you that it's crap.

[tjholowaychuk]

Haha yup, I wont lie I have been an asshole at times, mostly because you sort of have to defend yourself when you're surrounded by people who attack your work, but after a while I realized it wasn't worth it so I just sort of detached (no longer on IRC, the mailing list etc). Defending your work isn't worth becoming rude yourself. Communities always form cliques that's just how it is.

The core node community was very unreceptive to change since the very beginning, to be honest Ryan and Isaac were some of the few humble people in the bunch. I've always been a "threat" to "the node way" of doing things, whatever that means. The elitism gets a little old.