April 2016 Summaries

The author maintains and contributes to the Node.js SDK for Bandwidth App Platform. They recently added built-in support for Promises in the upcoming version of the SDK, despite initial hesitation due to concerns about adding extra dependencies or forcing developers down a certain path. Promises help solve problems like the "pyramid of doom" and are mostly interchangeable across different libraries that implement the Promises/A+ spec. The author chose bluebird as the Promise library for the SDK due to its support for older versions of Node, speed, and optimization. Additionally, bluebird's .asCallback() function allows developers to use traditional callback style programming if desired. This provides flexibility for end users who may be more comfortable with callbacks or prefer Promises.

The author shares their experience of building a Node.js server that formats an image for display on a Pebble smartwatch. They discuss the challenges of optimizing images for low bandwidth devices and how they used Node.js streams to manipulate images without writing intermediate files to disk. They also explain how to use GraphicsMagick for Node.js to perform various image manipulations, such as cropping, resizing, adjusting contrast, mapping colors, dithering, and outputting the final image in PNG format. The author encourages readers to explore other features of GraphicsMagick and create their own creative applications using this technology.