This was the first post I wrote for the meanstack.info blog I have created for all things MEAN, now merged with kyrcha.info, the site you are at.

Dear visitor,

Hi! My name is Kyriakos Chatzidimitriou. If you would like you can find out more about.me. I like to consider my self an intelligent systems, data and software engineer and this is my blog about the MEAN stack, i.e. MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS and of course about Javascript and Javascript libraries in general.

At a certain point in time, during the last couple of years, after reading some inspiring books and along with the rise of cloud computing, the software-as-a-service paradigm and start-ups, I wanted to start building things and creating real products that provide real value to real customers.

Even though being a polyglot has many merits, since for example you can learn a lot by studying other programming languages and provide yourself with a fresh perspective to your current dev stack (see Matz’s talk on being a language designer in Euruko 2013), something I am actively pursuing, I also found fascinating the idea that you could have “one language to rule them all”. A Lingua Franca for building SaaS applications. From database, to server-side, to client side. With that respect, MongoDB, NodeJS and ExpressJS were no brainers to pick for my main dev stack. The last thing was to decide which client-side JS framework to pick-up: BackboneJS, EmberJS, AngularJS, CanJS, other? Again after some digging around I decided to go for AngularJS and complete the puzzle. I’d like to devote a couple of lines to the posts of other developers that got me started with the MEAN stack and aided me decide:

• The MEAN stack post on MongoDB’s blog
• A comparison post on the client-side JS frameworks
• A way for NodeJS, ExpressJS and AngularJS integration

By no means I consider myself at this point to be an expert on the MEAN stack. I started using the MEAN stack since September 2013, I’ll be always learning and along the way I am making this procedure public. If others can benefit form it, the better. My familiarity with the Javascript language and its frameworks is just getting started so bare with me if you spot any mistakes on using Javascript. I promise I’ll get better.

I am starting this blog so that:

• other developers could get the help I got from other blogs like that,
• make me a better MEAN stack developer by trying to organize my thoughts better in order to write posts open to public criticism,
• create a link to the MEAN stack community and receive feedback,
• act as a long term memory storage for practices and techniques I am working on and
• serve as a reference for future coworkers that are starting with the MEAN stack.

These are my adventures in the world of the MEAN stack …

Best,

– Kyriakos Chatzidimitriou

PS 1. Some links are affiliate links, which if you use, you will make it easier for me to maintain the site and get even more books, to learn more stuff and write even better posts.

PS 2. Occasionally, M will mean MySQL since a) other problems suit document databases and other relational ones and b) I am really liking the Sequelize framework.