I\'m having trouble understanding exactly how process.nextTick does its thing. I thought I understood, but I can\'t seem to replicate how I feel this should wor
You should certainly read the link fgascon provided, and perhaps
https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/3335 for more background.
Use process.nextTick for when you want to call some code before any IO, but after the calling context has returned (usually because you want to register listeners on an event emitter and need to return the created emitter before you can register anything).