>Another thing I do which may shock many JS people is to actually check in the build directory of my setup into version control, because this makes deployment much easier and ensures that I will always have a working version of the code in the repository, even if some external dependencies should change in the future. This also eliminates installing extensive tooling on my production servers, which itself is a large burden and creates many security issues (for a simple setup consisting of rabel, react, require.js and a few support libraries, node.js downloads about 350 MB of source files onto the machine).

Kudos. I can't remember how many 'open/source/Free' git repo that I cloned can't compile or have problems compiling. Personally I think it is NOT open source unless the user can compile and get an exact copy of the software that is in the app store.