The Geek Talk

Who is hij1nx?

My given name is Paolo Fragomeni, it’s an Italian name but I’m originally from California. I’m the co-founder and CTO of Nodejitsu, a Platform as a Service cloud technology for Node.js. I’m also a researcher/lecturer at MIT. I’m a transplant from San Francisco to NYC. I love NYC.

What does your typical day look like?

I wake up at 8 am and I code until 3am. So I guess I’m a morning person. But it depends on how jet lagged I am. I find myself between SFO and JFK a lot. We now have a west cost office at Rocket Space in addition to our Manhattan head quarters at General Assembly.

What do you do in your free time?

I’m an open source advocate. I spend my free time writing code. But I spend a lot of time reading about electromagnetism. And I also play 1930′s style gypsy jazz and flamenco guitar.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started in the early 90′s with C and C++. I operated a BBS. I started building my own scripting languages and custom BBS software. Then in the mid 90′s i learned about Javascript and I’ve been using it professionally ever since.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

Javascript; for productivity. I can write high quality code very quickly using Javascipt. I use C/C++ if I need to program for machine-performance. I’m open open-minded when it comes to frameworks, but for the most part they’re not relevant to my work. Right now I’m dealing with sophisticated problems that can’t be solved using a `magic bullet`, which is what most frameworks are.

Im a full stack developer. If I was building a website I’d use a DOM manipulation framework, there are already a lot of good solutions out there for that.

If I was building some middleware I would use something that was built from the ground up to promote non-blocking IO, such as Node.js. Non blocking IO is important to me because I think real-time is critical to the next phase of the web. Platforms such as Python with Twisted or Ruby with EventMachine can’t do non-blocking without rendering most of its existing/most powerful frameworks useless. Same with Java, etc.

At Nodejitsu, our stack is 100% Javascript. Javascript isn’t perfect, but no language is and in my opinion Javascript is evolving quite nicely. I’m really a big fan of the D language, its a really interesting language. It’s very inspired by C/C++ but supports garbage collection, closures, anonymous functions, nested functions, compile time function execution. It’s got an inline assembler so you can write device drivers with it. Its bad ass.

What OS do you prefer?

Arch Linux VM hosted by Mac OSX. Package managers for OSX are awkward and Darwin development essentials can be held back by their dependancies. Arch is all 64 bit binaries, it’s package manager is so awesome it can even update the kernel. Its simple and feels clean. I know exactly what I’m dealing with. There’s also a strong enough community around Arch.

Current favorite apps?

Favorite app? Chrome! Favorite Company? Mozilla.

Small picture for your Workplace?

I can do even better than a picture. Here’s an article about our workspace in the New York Time

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Mikeal Rogers’ work on Node.js http APIs. Max Ogden’s beard.

What do you prefer? Freelance work or full time employment?

Now that I own a business, I guess this is a retrospective question. I liked freelance. Not much could keep me interested. I’ve worked at startups and I liked that the most. Banks and other big companies tend to have a passion-gap. They employ people who go to work at 9am – and leave 5pm both physically and mentally, so I found it hard to relate to a lot of the people in these kinds of places.

What are your goals for 2011?

Id like to deliver an intelligently scaling Platform as a Service for Node.js. One with a pricing model that reflects usage rather than tenancy. Check it out here nodejitsu . I’ll also continue to work on open source software than can be found here and here. You can follow me on twitter.