If you ever used a content distribution platform, like the Google Play or Apple's App store, I'm sure you noticed the terrible way in which they handle content discovery, rankings, communication with the publishers and the vetting process. To some extend Bodega solves all of those and every day it's closer to the vision that we had when we started it. And we weren't even high that day. Well, I wasn't, Aaron was high on life. And crack. Mostly crack. I apologize, crack isn't funny. Unless you're a plumber, in which case it's hilarious.
What wasn't very clear at the beginning was the technology that we would use it to write it. We started with PHP because Aaron had some code that we could reuse from another project. Testing became a nightmare. I'm not a huge fan of dynamically typed languages for server programming, they make it a lot harder to validate the code and avoid silly mistakes and without highly efficient testing setup they can make your life hell. So one weekend when I got sick of setting up Apache once again to test something, I just sat down and rewrote the code in Javascript using Node.js. I know, I know, "you don't like dynamically typed languages and you rewrote it in js?", keep reading...
Node.js was a great choice for Bodega. Testing became trivial (we're using Mocha). Between our unit tests and jshint support, I can live with the dynamic nature of the language.
What makes node.js great is npm and its extensive collection of packages. That tooling means that you can focus just on the code that you need to write to finish your project not the code that you need to start it. That's why I picked it.
If I didn't have a day job I'd pick either Go, Haskell or just do everything by hand in C++. I have to admit that I like Go a lot (even though the system level graphics hacker in me shakes his head at a language without native vector support) but it's hard to argue with the fact that node.js allows us to move very quickly. So Bodega is written in node.js and uses Posgresql to store all of its data and that combination works amazingly well.
It's a Free Software content distribution platform that actually works and it's just the start. In my obviously biased opinion it does a lot of really interesting things that make it a very important project, but that's a different topic.
