Bingo.

When I started at the startup I previously worked at, while we were working for pennies and not making money, it was "our company" because I had equity along with the founders. Once we started making money and could have reasonable salaries it went from "our company" to "my company".

I'm a PHP developer, can I ask how you made the transition to Node? Did you just start hacking away at personal projects with Node? Any advice on resources?

Personal projects mostly yes.

r/node was a big help. I also make sure to learn JavaScript, not NodeJS exclusively. A firm understanding of JavaScript is the best way in my opinion. So start using frontend JavaScript stuff. Angular, React, etc. Once you're very comfortable with that, start building your own stuff. Ignore the "but why would I build my own when so much better exists?" because it's not about building something someone else will use, but to help you understand the workings of what you're building more.

Once you are comfortable in the frontend, NodeJS is just as easy.. Learn the core modules, and ecosystem.

On the frontend you should already be using something like Browserify or Webpack, so you'll already be familiar with using CommonJS based requires.

That's interesting. I already have a lot of experience with Javascript so it might not be so painful.

What do you think about Rails vs Node/Express/etc when it comes to startups? Are more choosing Node lately, or is Rails still the startup gold standard?

This is the comment I've been responding to btw:

> I've been a PHP developer since 1997. December of 2014 I left PHP completely for NodeJS. Best decision of my life.

Can I ask why you feel that way?

Sorry for the interrogation, I'm just really curious and thinking of a transition myself.

> Sorry for the interrogation, I'm just really curious and thinking of a transition myself.

No worries, keep asking all you want and I'll do my best to answer them.

> Can I ask why you feel that way?

Mostly because I was getting burnt out in PHP, the community was getting pretty hellacious, and because I wanted to do something new.

Regarding the Rails question, I actually when decided to leave PHP I was debating on learning Rails/Ruby or moving to NodeJS. But because I had been tinkering with NodeJS already (I wrote a pretty extensible IRC bot with a few friends to get the hang of things) and because I already have an understanding of JavaScript I would go NodeJS.

It helps that I'm not jumping between 4 languages in my stack, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS to 3 languages.

Why I feel it was the best decision is mostly because it made me a overall better developer. I started learning a lot more stuff, and found out very verbose things in PHP are simplified in JavaScript.

I mean, look at popular PHP frameworks vs popular NodeJS frameworks... Laravel and Symfony are orders of magnitudes bigger than Express and Hapi/Sails.

PHP while getting better at it, has the NIH mindset whereas NodeJS is about building small packages that do one thing and one thing only and everyone uses them.

> What do you think about Rails vs Node/Express/etc when it comes to startups? Are more choosing Node lately, or is Rails still the startup gold standard?

I think NodeJS is a solid alternative. There's huge companies using NodeJS now, Walmart, Netflix, PayPal just to name a few. And with the fact that NodeJS and iojs team have come together and the Node Foundation exists is great. iojs has been expanding heavily and that's good. NodeJS v4.0.0 is due out in the coming weeks and I can't wait.

Because employees aren't always there for the paycheck, and it is to a startup founder's advantage to select for the ones that aren't. There are a fair number of people out there that would rather work for a job they believe in than maximize their paycheck.

Of course.

Now, would you rather hire the dummy who has no clue how to get shit done but believe in your "LinkedIn for puppies" or the expert who will take you there without caring for your idea?

This post makes it sound like it's a requirement that employees believe deep down in their soul in your idea, while it is not at all required to do a good job.

False dichotomy. You can probably get reasonably competent people who believe in your idea, and experts who are halfway interested in it.

Given the choice between the two of them, I'd rather take the reasonably competent person who's really excited to be doing the job, rather than the expert who's halfway interested. You can train technical skills; you can't train motivation. And someone who's motivated will usually improve rapidly, so after a year or two, you may very well have an expert that's highly motivated.

It's not that false. Remember, whatever you measure will improve. That's a warning. If you select for believers, you will get "believers". Most of the employees are coached from high school to simulate enthusiasm at job interviews. You can hear this in almost every jobseeker's seminar, school, motivational speech, you can even see this in pop-culture. Some would argue that eventually people can be so good at faking enthusiasm that a person who focused on actual skill and drive will be at disadvantage.

Well technically speaking that dichotomy is false, people who are passionate or "believe" in a startup aren't necessarily dummies, and conversely, skilled professionals in specific fields aren't necessarily careless about a company's goals or vision. It's not a black and white question.

> you can't train motivation.

That's where that pesky paycheck comes in.

Well, I doubt you ever want dummies in the strictest sense, but as for "experts who don't care", I'll just say that there's a time and place to bring in "mercenaries" to deliver specific abilities for nothing but money. Nothing says your workforce can't (or shouldn't) be made up of a mixture of people working for different reasons. In fact, it'd be pretty hard to put together a company where everybody wasn't working for a mixed-up combination of different reasons.