When dealing with large applications there are a lot of cases where you need some sort of scheduled task or cron job. Modifying these and redeploying them can be a pain as they are separate from your service/code. In addition, making sure the correct version of your software and the cron jobs are running on the right servers can add headache to troubleshooting.

Since your NodeJS service is an always running process, and you have things like setTimeout and setInterval at your disposal, setting these up in your NodeJS service can solve all these problems. Additionally, since you already have all your models set up, doing cleanup tasks on your databases or caches are a breeze.

While developing these tasks, I realized that if and when I cluster these services, I will run into an issue where multiple tasks will run at the same time, and this was not a good thing. I searched for a while for a solution but I could not find anything, so I decided to write it myself.

Coming from a background in Linux server administration, of course my first editor was Vim. I really like Vim as a basic editor, but when I started programing it really did not fit my needs. I realize that you can highly customize Vim and make it much like “modern” editors of today, this just seemed way to complex for me and I wanted something a bit more user friendly with mouse support.

The editor everyone recommended to me was Sublime 2. I enjoyed the look and feel of Sublime, but it still did not seem as user friendly that I hoped. Even so, I decided to go ahead with it as it seemed to be the best option at that time.

I used Sublime 2 as my primary editor for about 2 years. I had it very customized to my liking and I was very confortable with it. So changing editors at this point was not even on my radar.

About 6 months ago I stumbled across Atom, an editor still in beta from GitHub. It was promising an awesome packaging system, theme support, GitHub support baked in, and powered all by NodeJS and web technologies. At the time I was really getting into NodeJS and decided that I wanted to give it a try to see what it was capable of.