I would agree that JavaScript is better than php at this point. The problem with that suggestion is that the JS world is so fragmented and to be successful, you need to exercise judgement to decide what the right tool for the job is. OP is too new to have that judgement, so he needs a clear path to follow. Do you happen to know what a good path to learning nodejs from scratch is nowadays? I suspect that picking up either Learn JavaScript the Hard Way or an Egghead.io course on redux/react would be a good idea...maybe?