Pittsburgh Node Meetup: Optimizing development workflow with Grunt

I am not a Node developer. I’ve only used Node to play around with JavaScript, not for any real work or personal projects (yet). The last time I used Node was two months ago, for a talk I gave at Pittsburgh TechFest 2013 in which I wrote JavaScript code running on Node, but did not actually talk about it, and only mentioned that I had written it and put it up on my GitHub repository for the talk.

That is why it took me so long to attend my first Pittsburgh Node meeting. I was simply curious who was involved in the local Node community and what tooling they were using. The meeting was about Grunt, a Make-like task runner. Nate Good of ShowClix presented.

Attendance

There was a fairly large group of people who attended: around thirty. Node seems to be popular in town.

The talk

Overall, Grunt seemed like Make or Rake. You can use plugins and define your own tasks. So there seemed nothing special about it, other than it is a useful tool corresponding to similar tools for other language ecosystems.

Conclusion

Since I don’t really use Node, I went to the meetup out of curiosity more than anything else. I will probably not attend again. There seemed a lot of enthusiasm though.