Last March, an angry software developer deleted a JavaScript code package from the Internet. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but the result was thousands of broken websites, and a cascade of online errors. In stepped Trinidadian Laurie Voss, CTO of the web company npm. Mark Lyndersay tells the story of a coding rescue mission.
In March 2016, the Internet shook, when a small, fairly straightforward, but widely used snippet of JavaScript code disappeared from the code dependencies of hundreds of online apps and software connections. And at the centre of the controversy that arose was a Trinidadian software programmer, Laurie Voss, who had to take dramatic and unprecedented steps to restore functionality to broken online software.
Voss is officially the chief technical officer (CTO) of npm, a code packager and repository for the JavaScript language that adds functionality and capability to thousands of online services and apps. The software company was a hobby project started by Voss and Isaac Schlueter, who met at Yahoo in 2008. After they both left the search company, Schlueter became involved in Node.js, a JavaScript runtime built using the Chrome Engine.
The project took off in 2009 with the creation of npm, which packages and archives the code snippets created by developers, and by 2013 Schlueter reached out to Voss to evolve npm Inc from a serious hobby into a business. Voss had been working in the world of the startup, and signed on as CTO.
