Building a modular development environment

[hazeledmands]

Node's module system is great, because your project's dependencies can use different versions of the same code without conflicting. Unfortunately, outside of the node module ecosystem things aren't so easy. For example, what if you have two projects on the same box that require different versions of mongodb, or even different versions of node itself?

I'd like to talk about different ways to deal with this issue, covering existing projects like nvm and nave, as well as an approach more similar to that of node_modules, where binaries are installed locally instead of shared globally between projects.