Agreed. I spent the last few months building my first Node.js app (and MongoDB) and I resonate with a lot of what's being said here. I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from exploring Node or Mongo, because I think both are amazing projects and have huge potential, but I do think anyone considering either should stop and think carefully before taking the plunge.

Things that stick out in my head:

1. What the author says about the Node community moving fast is absolutely true. Be prepared to spend time upgrading to the latest versions often or deal with dependency hell as you try to ensure you've got matching legacy versions of libraries.

2. Coding async is weird at first, but you may grow to love it (as I have). Over the months, I've discovered many cool tricks and patterns that help keep the nesting to a minimum.

3. Be prepared to fill library gaps, and submit patches if necessary. This means not being afraid to dig into the source code of the libraries you're using. Most libraries have limited documentation so often the only way to figure out how to use them is to get in there and see how they work.

4. Best practices may not apply. In the case of MongoDB, I had to redesign my schema in order to run certain queries now that MongoDB won't support until sometime in the future.

All in all, I'm really glad for the experience and will definitely consider both Node.js and MongoDB for future projects. What will really be interesting is seeing what I miss about Node/Mongo after jumping back into Python/MySQL. :-)