I am 19. I grew by doing the work, showing up at events, and contributing to open source. Before I turned 19 I tried a lot of ecosystems. None of them held me the way JavaScript did. It is a huge, solid ecosystem. Everybody already knows that.
The beginning: when I entered Node.js and JavaScript
In early 2023 I was building programs in C# when I noticed something small: I was especially avoiding ASP.NET. The reason was simple. I was still far from the web.
After that I started trying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then an algorithm put a bootcamp in front of me: Insider Code Academy. Out of the more than fifty bootcamps I had applied to in my life, this was the only one that accepted me.
During the bootcamp we learned web fundamentals. Out of 700 people, I was one of the 10 who made it through the cuts into an internship. I interned for two months, and after it ended I kept learning. I also interned at Collective Idea and Valentura, and picked up a lot of technologies along the way. When I turned 18 I started university and also started working full time at Valentura.
I already knew the open source ecosystem a bit. I leaned into it harder and kept contributing. Over time I noticed three things pulling me the most: performance, observability, and reliability.
Express Performance Working Group and Express Triage
On 28 April 2025, a message from my friend Mert Şişmanoğlu started everything:
I've also been trying to see what others are talking about. Express started a performance team, for example.
Maybe it would give you a perspective
Mert Şişmanoğlu
It caught my interest. I looked it up right away. First meeting of the working group, then the second, then the third… and I have been with that group since then. I met a lot of people and worked with them. We analyzed performance differences between unpublished and published versions. As a group we wrote a tool that can run on GitHub Actions or a self hosted runner, across different infrastructures and Node versions. In those first meetings NSolid came up as a way to see what the process is doing without stuffing extra code into the app. NodeSource was already in that room.
I tried not to stay inside the perf wg repo only. I contributed to other repos too. That is how, seven months ago, I was invited onto the Express Triage team, the people who sort incoming Express issues and pull requests.
Joining NodeSource
All of this is a rough sketch, of course. But I am very happy with where I am. I am also sure of this: if I grew enough to join NodeSource, the biggest reason is the friends I chose. Wherever I have been, I picked the people I could be friends with carefully. I supported them, and they supported me.
For a while I had already been working with people at NodeSource through working groups. Those rooms also let them watch how I work. I joined NodeSource as a Software Engineer. This post is the short story of going from contributing to Express to joining NodeSource.
What comes next?
I will keep growing, keep learning new things, keep making new friends while remembering the value of the ones I already have, and keep contributing to open source.