Members of the Node community develop new packages and projects every day. Because of Node's evented nature, callbacks permeate these codebases. We've considered several of the key ways in which events might be queued, dispatched, and handled through the use of callbacks. Let's spend a little time outlining the best practices, in particular about conventions for designing callbacks and handling errors, and discuss some patterns useful when designing complex chains of events and callbacks.
Luckily, Node creators agreed upon sane conventions on how to structure callbacks early on. It is important to follow this tradition. Deviation leads to surprises, sometimes very bad surprises, and in general to do so automatically makes an API awkward, a characteristic other developers will rapidly tire of.
One is either returning a function result by executing a callback, handling the arguments received by a callback, or designing the signature for a callback within your...