The friends-of-friends change happened in 2014. Cambridge Analytica's method stopped working back then as apps could no longer acquire permission to query friends of friends.
Viewing source of the internet around the time I was just starting elementary school. Educated me a bunch, especially since the internet back then was super-primitive. People were using VBScript back then. I had no mentors, so when I took a look at Javascript, I got confused as to what curly braces were ("Where's the endif? VBScript has endifs! And what are those silly {} things for?"). I finally got into PHP around middle school early high school when I wrote a really primitive webcomic system for a friend, modeled after megatokyo. Full of SQL injection holes, though I started to figure out and create my own OOP-ish system.
Later: Python (Pylons), PostgreSQL, Java Servlets, Jersey, Play Framework, Jackson (in roughly that order, omitting a lot of detail).
Only ever had a mentor who taught me new things once, when learning the servlets stuff. The rest of the time, I had no mentorship :(.
Right, this definitely seemed more like an article on V8 than on node.js. Though to be fair, the platform running node is arguably very important to node's implementation.