I joined my current employer 1 year ago today. Happy anniversary to me!
The team I joined are entrenched in NodeJS, and while I'd dabbled with it in the past I'd at the time never had to build anything even remotely resembling a real application. In my PHP days I'd been a heavy user of Laravel, and I was perplexed that Express was the closest equivalent the Node ecosystem had to offer.
Despite longing for something more, I dug in and made sure to learn and understand the ins and outs of Express. It's a decent tool and definitely helps you get things going, but I missed having an ORM, migrations, authentication providers and all the other bells and whistles I'd gotten spoiled with.
When I found AdonisJs during the recent holidays, I was ecstatic. It was basically Laravel, ported to JS. But cooler yet, because it not only provides a lot of the familiar functionality that I missed in Express, but is written using the cutting-edge tech that I haven't even had a chance to play around with yet. Things like generators, async functions and classes (okay, I already use classes extensively, but still!) along with other ES6 goodies are all core parts of the framework and you are expected to use them.
While I haven't had too much time to play around with it, I hope to build my next side project using Adonis. Good times ahead!