Joyent Software Engineer Robert Mustacchi reprised his recent presentation at Scale 10X, “Using SmartOS as a Hypervisor” for our Joyent Cloud Meetup on Tuesday, January 31st. He also took the time to field some queries during the lively question and answer session. For more about SmartOS, keep up to date with the latest at the SmartOS blog. And be sure to keep an eye on our Twitter stream for updates and details about future meetups in case you’d like to join us for pizza, beer and computing next time.

While talking to fellow Node.js enthusiasts in San Francisco for Node Summit this week, we asked what seems like a simple question: “What is Node?” We got answers ranging from the basic but technical to the detailed but metaphorical, and provided by a wide range of experts from companies of all sizes working in a number of different fields. Going to show that through the power of simplicity, Node.js promises a wealth of opportunity.

Here are some of the people who answered the question:

Eric Meijjer, Iconoclast, Microsoft
Isaac Schlueter, npm creator and engineer, Joyent
Rik Arends, CTO , Cloud9
Derek Collison, CTO and Chief Architect, VMWare
John Rymer, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Glen Loughheed, CEO, NodeFly
Colin Rand, Associate Director of Technology, AKQA
Adam Bragg, Tagalong
Hunter Loftis, Lead Engineer, Products and Labs at Skookum Digital Works
Ben Lowenstein, Co-Founder of Colingo
Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, Vice President, Platform Architect, Yahoo!
Paul Serby, CTO, Clock Limited
Charlie Robbins, CEO, Nodejitsu
Paul Baumgart,  Founder, ProxV

We here at Joyent have been looking forward to Node Summit for months now, and wanted to send one last reminder that you can join us tonight for some pre-summitting at the ThirstyBear Brewing Company from 6:00pm to 9:00pm — and since we just got a new round of funding, we’ll be picking up the tab. Just let us know you’re coming.

Of course, you can also find us at the Mission Bay Conference Center for Node Summit proper tomorrow and Wednesday. And there are still a few badges left if you haven’t registered yet for the conference!

In the cloud, we are rapidly moving from providing development environments to running critical applications in production. This shift means application must run seamlessly and predictably well.

So what does it then mean to run applications “predictably well?” And how do we augment and improve running application “well” through time?

Read More »

Photo by Flickr user Creativity103.

This week, Joyeurs can be found at the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara — if you’re in town for the conference and have questions about our SmartDataCenter software or our other products and services, don’t hesitate to introduce yourself. We’ll be on hand with our friends at the Telx booth on the show floor through tomorrow.

This evening at 4:00pm PST at our office in San Francisco we’ll be hosting the weekly Node.js Office Hours. With the release of version 0.6 and the new, native support for Node.js in Windows, there’s certainly much to discuss! Sign up to attend at for free nodeofficehours.eventbrite.com — where you’ll also find the information to join remotely via IRC.

The Joyent Cloud team is in Austin this week for GDC Online, one of our favorite events of the year. Why? Because it’s an opportunity to talk to some of the most exciting technology innovators out there — game and mobile application developers, including our customers like Kabam. Also? Barbecue. Drop by booth 604 on the show floor to say hello on Tuesday or Wednesday!

Another week, another chance to drop in on Node.js Office Hours. Sign in on Eventbrite if you’d like to drop by our office on Wednesday from 4:00pm to 8:00pm PDT. If you’re looking to get started with Node.js and live closer to Sydney than San Francisco, Tom Hughes-Croucher will get you Up and Running with Node.js at a session for the Web Directions South conference.

Tomorrow morning, Tuesday, October 4th, Joyent Cloud General Manager Steve Tuck will be presenting the details of the new and improved Joyent Public Cloud for our webinar tomorrow at 10:00am PDT. Registration is entirely free, and we look forward to fielding your questions about new features, benefits and pricing.

Tomorrow evening, the SmartOS team is also hosting the Solaris Family Reunion at our headquarters in San Francisco in case you happen to be in town for Oracle Open World. That starts at 6:00pm PDT, and space is limited so register now.

And on Wednesday, October 5th at 4:00pm PDT we’ll also be hosting the regular Node.js Office Hours session. By now you should probably know the drill, but just in case you’re one of the many new converts to the power of Node.js, you can find all the details to register to attend, dial-in or chat on the Office Hours page on Eventbrite.

If you didn’t know, Joyent is big in Taiwan — so big that our own President of Greater China Howard Wu has appeared on popular local news host Sisy Chen’s show not once but twice to discuss the technology industry and entrepreneurialism. In the most recent feature, our Chief Technology Officer Mark Mayo also makes a few cameos, as do some Tyan servers ready for standing up your own Joyent-powered cloud like our friends at MiTAC.

More of Howard shooting the breeze with Sisy after the jump!

On Wednesday, September 28th Joyent is sponsoring the Node Hack Day at the Surge Conference in Baltimore. Just to give you a sense of how much fun it can be to play with Node.js, check out the highlights from the finale of Node.js Knockout in San Francisco last month, and be sure to catch up on days one and two. Additionally, Bryan Cantrill, Dave Pacheco and Tom Hughes-Croucher will all be speaking on Node.js and Cloud Analytics — check out the speakers page for details and updates.

And just as a reminder, our Joyent Node.js Office Hours are also now on Wednesday, and you can sign up to attend in San Francisco this week or just visit the EventBrite page any time for details on how to call in or chat on IRC.

Cull.tv is “rebooting music videos for the 21st century” according to Co-Founder Katherine de León — though for those of us old enough to remember MTV back when all the network did was play music videos, the site is a refreshing throwback to the days when you could “turn it on, leave it on.” While NewTeeVee points out that the startup isn’t alone in trying to re-engineer the music video experience, it is unique in that the site is built with Node.js.

John Hurliman, Cull’s CTO, wrote a blog post describing the basics of putting the site together, and shares how Node.js shined even in a surprising place:

[O]ne area where we are treading new ground with node.js+JavaScript is with our real-time recommender. The common wisdom is to use node in computing-light, I/O-heavy workloads. Machine learning and recommendations are often thought of as very compute-heavy, CPU-bound tasks. In reality, when your working set grows large enough and you go beyond simple collaborative filtering to making content-based decisions (requiring access to more and more data) and applying several layers of rulesets as most production ready recommenders do, you are I/O-bound again and worrying more about building a massive data pipeline than shaving off the last 10% of clock cycles.

If you’re looking for an example of a well-designed, well-implemented web application built entirely using Node.js, check it out. Of course, it’s also great if you’re just looking to check out some cool new music!