Node Knockout awesomeness

The judging is underway for the awesome phenomenon known as Node Knockout, a 48 hour competition for Node.js developers to duke it out in a manic sleep-deprived sort of way. We were involved as sponsors, as well as providing some participants.

However, the competition was also exciting for us because we used it internally as a deadline for a new alpha feature we released last week called the Pipe. The Pipe is aimed at Node developers who love working with WebSockets in a very granular way, but who’d rather build fun stuff rather than configuring and scaling their infrastructure.

Several people tried the Pipe during the competition, and we’ve already had some great feedback (and over 2 million messages received). It is still very much an alpha product, but please let us know if you’d like to kick the tyres (email support@pusher.com). We’ll be speaking about it more extensively when we’ve tackled the current round of feedback.

The quality of the entries seems to be awesome as usual (see http://nodeknockout.com/), and we are delighted to see that several have used our service. These are the ones we know about so far, go and vote for them:

• Coding stage – http://www.codingstage.com/ – vote
• KO8080 – http://seattle-js.no.de/ – vote
• Metris – http://nko2-forward.herokuapp.com/ – vote
• Sudodo – http://nko2-zweitagebart.herokuapp.com/ – vote
• Ragechat – http://upallnight.nko2.nodeknockout.com/ – vote

If you made an entry that uses Pusher which isn’t up here, let us know.

We also made our very own entry, alongside our friends from http://gosquared.com. It is called Tanked, and seems to be living up to its name http://tanked.no.de. Realistically, it’s not a very competitive entry, but we had a lot of fun making it. It also gave us the opportunity to use our new product in anger (we strongly believe in eating our own dogfood).

Finally, massive thanks to http://Forward.co.uk for hosting the London event. Their generosity is greatly appreciated, we all had a fantastic time.