RESTalytics — our Node Knockout entry This past weekend I took part in Node Knockout, a 48-hour coding competition where teams have to build an app in node.js from scratch. On the team were Drew Wilson (design), Kevin Thompson (frontend), and Aashay Desai and myself on the backend. Our entry, RESTalytics, is a sweet-looking analytics dashboard for monitoring REST API usage. We also developed a drop-in library (node-restalytics) to be used with any node....
Compass + Sassy CSS = giddiness The designer in me has been wanting to break out for some time, and since going back to freelancing, I’ve found some extra time and ran out of excuses to brush up on CSS. In the spirit of DRY, I’ve discovered Compass, a CSS framework that makes it easier to write cleaner HTML and make CSS a bit more “programmable.” For me, defining variables and abstracting cross-browser CSS are the biggest benefits so far....
Speak It, Baby! This past weekend, I attended Semantic Seed’s StartUp Camp (Mobile Edition) Bay Area in Santa Clara. On Friday night, I pitched an idea about a notification platform that calls people when certain things happen. The first use case would be to build a Twitter client using purely old-school audio telephony, so that even someone with a landline phone could use Twitter. My idea received enough votes to be one of the dozen or so teams to start working....
Continuous availability deployment of node.js apps I’ve been thinking about the problem of highly available node.js applications and how to keep things running smoothly when deploying new code. Ideally, when deploying, you don’t want to lose existing connections, and users should never see HTTP 502, 503, or 504 proxy errors. Although it’s possible to perform hot-code replacement in node.js, it’s not an approach I think is mature yet in handling all the little corner cases that may come up....
How to share Backbone.js models with node.js I’ve been building a node.js app for a project for a while now, and I just redesigned the architecture of the client (a single-page HTML5 app) to use Backbone.js. The problem that I needed to solve was the ability to reuse common data models and business logic both on the client and the server, so that I wouldn’t have to have two different representations of the same model....
On my own It’s been two months since I left my software engineering job at IBM to explore the world of consulting on my own. At first, consulting projects have excited me because of the freedom to choose what to work on and how to do it. Of course, with freedom comes great responsibility to make wise decisions that you have to stand by. I’ve seen people create great things and I’m part of some now, but I’m starting to feel another startup itch of my own....