Hey Harminder, can you tell us about your background? Where did you grow up? How did you venture into programming?
Spotlight Harminder VirkI grew up in Faridabad (an Indian city) and still live there. I was not at all into computers during or after school. During my childhood, owning a computer was a luxury, and school was the only place to access it and use MS Paint.
After my schooling, I started learning French and got the idea to build a mini version of Facebook for my French school. However, I had zero ideas on how to write code or what it takes to build an app. So I contacted a dev shop to check how much it costs to build a social network website, and voila! They quoted so high that I cannot collect that money even if I work for 2-3 years at a regular job.
This triggered me to explore how to make a website. The initial efforts were to look for a website builder, then I discovered HTML and slowly PHP. After many failed attempts to build a social network in PHP, I decided to scratch the idea and find a PHP job instead; and the rest is history.
What is AdonisJS? What inspired you to build it?
In my early days of programming in PHP, I discovered Laravel (super popular these days) and used it on a couple of projects. Then I changed jobs, moved to Paytm, and was asked to work on Node.js.
I explored if I could build something similar to Laravel. The first version was not that good, but it helped me learn about frameworks and inner workings. During the 2nd version, I thought to make it open source and build it within Paytm.
How many other core contributors work on AdonisJS today, apart from yourself?
I created the framework, Romain was an early adopter and was hyped from day one, and finally, we had the privilege to get Michaël onboard. Michaël is also a Node.js core team member.
What interesting things have people built with AdonisJS?
AdonisJS is a backend framework. So people usually build the core functionality of their products in AdonisJS, ranging from SAAS products to online stores.
I know Kayako built a B2B marketplace using AdonisJS, Cleavr created a server provision service, and Cavai is using it to empower their digital advertising network (they serve over millions of ads in a day).
What are some major features coming up in AdonisJS in the next releases? How can one stay in loop regarding everything new happening with AdonisJS?
We will be releasing the support for Queues, a testing framework, and a rate limiter during the first half of the following year and then planning to move the framework to ES modules (they are the future of modules in JavaScript) during the second half.
You can follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.
What has been the most frequent feature request from users in the project that you haven’t gotten to yet?
That would be testing framework, which we'll be releasing during the first half of the following year.
If someone wants to support the development of AdonisJS, where can they donate?
You can support the project financially on Patreon. More importantly, I am looking for contributors in the following areas: