Benefits of Outsourcing Node.js Web Development –

Outsourcing or developing an app in-house? This question is what baffles all small and medium sized companies in 2021, as this year marked a huge shift in the market. While it used to be normal to work on software projects without any help from the outside in the past, now the situation is completely different and outsourcing is becoming the leading method of launching new and maintaining existing Node.js web applications. Find out why!

There are many reasons why outsourcing app development is the go-to solution in 2021, but they are not obvious at all. Moreover, some of the most important ones are not even technology related and caused by sociological factors. Since the situation is quite tense, it’s worth spending some time to understand it fully and get ready to make a conscious decision about hiring a Node development company as early during the process as possible.

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The combination of factors that lead to a revolution –

Last two years were challenging, that’s a fact. But how did the pandemic situation influence the market and what other factors contributed? First of all, it changed the way we do things. In times when customers avoid visiting banks and offices, every service provider needs to get ready to offer a digital alternative. In 2020 an already massive movement to let customers buy via apps skyrocketed, drenching the IT labor market of skilled engineers.

As a result, it’s now virtually impossible to hire coders and other experts needed to work on new digital products, as all of them either work for large companies or software developers that operate in the outsourcing model, working for clients that urgently need human resources.

Especially non-digital organizations that need to enter the digital age were struck. While in the past it was normal for companies to recruit even a whole software development team to work on a new project, HR departments are desperate to find candidates now.

The other factor is technological – development of Node.js based web applications requires a very particular set of skills and experience in a quickly evolving technology stack. One may say, in this case, let’s choose a different way, then. But, again, it’s not that simple.

Node.js domination happened for a reason –

Developers love Node and this is completely understandable. It’s also visible in the rapidly growing popularity of this technology. But what is it, exactly?

In simple terms – A universal solution –

Node.js is what the Internet needed for a long time and a solution to problems that caused headaches all over the software development world. It made apps faster and coding easier in a number of ways.

The technology was introduced back in 2009 by Ryan Dahl, who was frustrated by the ways the most popular web server, Apache HTTP Server, handled communication with the clients and executed operations. It was already dated and needed to handle many connections concurrently. Moreover, it easily malfunctioned when even a single line of code was blocked. Resolving such issues required creating more code using sequential programming. Node.js creators found ways to do things in more clever ways.

Not a framework, not a library, so what is it?

It’s quite difficult to define what Node.js is referring to popular terms. Since it is not a programming language, not a framework and not a library, but something different, let’s stick to the way it’s described officially: a JavaScript runtime environment constructed on the foundation of the Chromium V8 engine. It’s sole purpose is to execute code in an efficient and predictable way. Node.js is most commonly used in the backend side of applications and is often paired with frameworks such as React for the frontend parts.

What makes Node.js a perfect choice?

In order not to overcomplicate, let’s focus on three main advantages Node.js has over legacy solutions.

• Works everywhere and works fast

As mentioned before, Node.js is based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine and it makes it cross-platform. The basic reasons it’s important are that it’s fast, open-source (which translates to a high level of cybersecurity) and compatible with all sorts of hardware and operating systems. V8 is one of the best engines available. It compiles JavaScript into machine code with a just-in-time compiler just before executing it and handles memory allocation in an optimal way.

• Real-time communication

There used to be some ways to handle the problem of real time server-client communication in both ways in the past, but they were either not native or very limited. In the 2000s, coders needed to resolve slow Flash or Java applets to somehow make servers and their clients operate on equal rights. Now, thanks to Node.js, a server doesn’t have to wait for the client to initiate communication and can simply start sending data whenever needed. What’s best, it just works.

• Event-driven asynchronous callbacks

In the past, every operation usually needed to be conducted as a separate and independent process. Oftentimes, applications even needed to wait until one was completed before they could proceed to the next one, without taking into account that some were more time consuming than others. Node.js is smarter than that. It assesses what is easy and what is hard, giving priority to less resource consuming tasks, and executing more difficult jobs when ready. Moreover, it does it all in just one thread in a loop. This way, it avoids getting bogged down and lets websites and web applications load and work faster.

• Modularity is king

Node.js does not give coders an overwhelming set of tools from the very beginning. Instead, it’s highly customisable and can be tailored to meet the needs of the application it is used to build. To create a perfect app, developers can use npm (Node package manager) and pick from over a million packages and tailor the tool to the task. What is very important, this tool takes care of dependencies, which makes it easy to use.

• Immense popularity and fast development

Because Node.js is such a hit technology, hundreds of thousands talented developers are ready to help their fellow coders online. No problem is left unsolved. Moreover, many of them create custom packages, whenever they find a new way of doing something in a project they-re working on. Later, they publish their work in npm, so others can benefit from it.

So Node.js is good, but why does outsourcing work so well with it?

Besides the extreme difficulty small and mid-sized companies face when recruiting developers in the current conditions, there are numerous reasons to choose outsourcing in this case. And most of them lead to saving money.

Scalability of the team –

Projects tend to evolve and change. It’s sometimes difficult to predict how many work hours are going to be needed to create a new app and how many engineers are going to be needed to meet the deadline. It may be more or less (in an overly optimistic and unreal scenario.) Some roles, such as designers, may only be needed during certain steps of the software development process. With so many variables, it’s important to have a certain degree of team scalability.

It’s not a very scary issue for large companies that handle many projects at a time, as they often have a surplus of engineers and are free to move them around the structures. But for medium sized organizations, every time someone new is needed.

Time needs to be wasted. By hiring a partner that specializes in creating apps using a particular technology, you get access to a degree of flexibility reserved to the largest corporations. The way it works is completely simple: an outsourcing company already has a large network of experts and can guarantee you a team that will always be a perfect match for your project. If circumstances change, they can reorganize the team dedicated to you in a blink of an eye.

Keeping up to date with the technology –

Node.js is a rapidly evolving technology and gets updated so fast, it has already reached version 17.1.0. To keep up with what changes each month, a developer needs to work with it all the time, which is daily bread for engineers working in software development agencies. Not only, then, outsourcing gives you scalability, but security and confidence that your app is always built with the freshest solution out there.

Keeping costs predictable and low –

Wait a moment, how can getting a middleman between you and the coders result in lower costs than in-house project development? In fact, the calculation is simple and always gives the same results. Let’s just combine what we’ve just learned:

• Minimal risk of hitting the wall, either by lack of workforce or unexpected problems;
• Predictability, as specialized companies know how to plan project development in a rational way and how to keep to the plan;
• Letting you focus on your core business objectives, instead of spending time and resources on things that experts can do better;

And what we get is the reason why outsourcing is getting so popular. It’s saving money by not wasting it.

Who is it not for? 

Outsourcing Node.js web development is not for everybody, there are some cases when in-house development is better. First of all, it’s project maintenance – here it doesn’t matter whether the job is outsourced. In fact, oftentimes it may be cheaper and more convenient to have a team in the office, especially if the same engineers work on patching and updating one app for years. Then, it’s not the best option for large scale organizations, such as software corporations. They simply don’t face the same problems smaller companies do. But as always, the choice is up to you.

Author Bio –

Jakub Skowron, Content Writer at Code & Pepper. Technology enthusiast, literature devourer, and creator of insightful FinTech-related content. In his spare time, he also works with international public art projects.

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