We were shipping Go services all the way back in 2011! A bunch of my friends were working at other well known companies (of the time) and shipping Go stuff. Service based architecture was pretty popular and people were experimenting a lot.

Walmart picked up Node.js in 2012. Not for their core stuff obviously but they were running a bunch of internal services with it.

LinkedIn was evaluating it alongside Ruby (EventMachine) and Python (Twisted). They ended up picking Node for some of their services.

Highly concurrent green-thread-ish type stuff was all the rage. Go and Node were the front runners. Python was the conservative choice. Ruby was hipster choice :P