NodeJS Internals and Architecture

My favorite thing in software engineering is the art of making it transparent.

Node is one of the most popular runtimes used on backend engineering yet I feel it is the least understood. I surely felt this way at times.

I spent months working on a course to demystify NodeJS Internals and Architecture and distilled this in this comprehensive course.

I built this course is for the engineers who can’t stand working with something opaque.

They love to understand what is running behind the engine.

They enjoy tearing apart 1 the line of code into its original 1000 lines.

They question why is the output of a Node program is unpredictable.

They want to know when does the Node process exit.

They want to know why Node takes so long to start in some cases.

They appreciate how Node works on all operating systems and would like to know how it does that.

For example by understanding the internals of HTTP module, you can write a backend in Node that accepts and process more requests. Every line of code you write you would think of how and when Node will process it.

By understanding the event loop and the different stages you can tune and re-order your code to achieve best performance and even consistent result.

Ever wrote a program in Node that fails 1% of the time while succeeds 99%? Understanding Node architecture helps you make your program predicable. As opposed to adding workaround because you don’t understand. We all did that.

It is all about removing blockage and letting the main loop phases “breath”. When we build software the problem is we often go against the grain. Understanding where the friction is in Node allow you to work with it as oppose to against it.

In this course I cover the following

– NodeJS Architecture

I cover the various phases in the event loop and what exactly happens in each phase, how promises are just callbacks, how and when modules are loaded and their effect on performance, Node packages anatomy and more

– Node Internals

This is where we go one layer deeper, how Node truly achieves asynchronous IO with libuv, and how each protocol in node is implemented. How concurrent node works on both user level threads and process level.

– Node Optimization and Performance

Now that we understand the internals and architecture of Node, this is where we discuss tips how to make the code runs more efficiently and more performance. And only when we exhaust all other avenues Node provides ways to extend it with C++ add-ons where JavaScript just can’t no longer hold.

This course is for intermediate students who are familiar with Node and want to understand how it works. While not required, I recommend taking the fundamentals of operating system course as a prerequisite of this course.