Introduction
In the following sections of the onboarding, we will cover multiple technologies. We will also provide some useful resources to help you learn about them. It's normal to feel overwhelmed at first by the number of technologies and tools we will be using, but the idea here is for you to grasp the main concepts of each one.
Node.js
Node.js is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine (V8 is the JavaScript execution engine that was initially built for Google Chrome. Written in C++, V8 compiles JavaScript source code to native machine code). We use the V8 engine to execute JavaScript code outside a web browser. Node.js represents a "JavaScript everywhere" paradigm, unifying web-application development around a single programming language, rather than having different languages for the frontend (client-side) and the backend (server-side). Node.js operates on a single-thread event loop, using non-blocking I/O calls, allowing it to support tens of thousands of concurrent connections without incurring in the cost of thread context switching.