September 17, 2015

<Meaningful Commit> <Meaningful Commit> <Meaningful Commit> <Trying to fix CI Build> <Trying to fix CI Build> <Still Trying to fix CI Build> <Trying to fix CI Build> <CI Build has become self-aware> <Trying to fix CI Build> <CI Build is actively breaking itself, laughing at me> <Trying to fix CI Build> <CI Build refuses to cooperate> <Works for me> <DevOps angry> <Meaningful Commit> <Trying to fix CI Build> <Trying to fix CI Build> <Meaningful Commit> <Meaningful Commit> <Transition to new CI build vendor> .

September 2, 2015

tl;dr: In this post I’ll highlight three modules that you can use to to run your node app in production: using forever, nodemon, and PM2. So it’s pm2 vs forever vs nodemon. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses: forever is the most general, nodemon the best suited for development, and PM2 is the most comprehensive and best-suited for production. Production Ah, Production™. That happy place where everything is supposed to go smoothly and serenely1, where programs are their supposed to be their best, most efficient and bug-less selves.

August 27, 2015

update: This post was last updated on 4/16/16 w/ more-recent react-router. tl;dr: React is the only framework you ever need to learn again! Proclaim it’s superiority from the mountaintops! No longer will we be trapped in the chains of Angular, Ember, Backbone…REACT IS FREEDOM. Eh…Jk. React is really great, but please don’t be that person. We need to love all the frameworks equally, lest we just keep reinventing them over and over and over…and over again ;) I’m way off track of this tl;dr now.

August 18, 2015

Avast, Ye Old Images! If you’ve been trying out Docker or maybe just reading about it, you probably know that one of it’s strengths is the way in which builds progress by layer. RUN commands all get executed in their own intermediate container. This is great for lots of reasons, but if you don’t use the --rm=true flag when you run docker build, you’ll get stuck with lots of these guys after a while: ##Make it so

August 18, 2015

*tl;dr: You might have seen or read the Docker tutorial Dockerizing a Node.js web app; this is another take on how you might go about doing just that if you need a more flexible approach than the one you can find in the Docker docs (how are they not called docks?!).* Head here to check out the sample Dockerfile. ##Ahoy! I’ve been working on a small side-project/really-small startup called Charityware.

January 31, 2015

##Stones People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones. –Donald Knuth

January 31, 2015

##iojs If you’re even remotely involved with the Node community at all, you’ve likely heard about a fork (of sorts) that has been in process for the past several months. That fork is iojs, and it aims to try out an open-governance model that the Node/iojs community has more ownership of (rather than waiting on Joyent). There’s a great NodeUp podcast that you can listen to if you want to get more if the inside scoop on iojs.

January 27, 2015

#Get Functional ##tl;dr most of our programs are more complex than they have to be functional approaches tend to result in code that: is easier to read has fewer source lines is simpler places fewer demands on the developer simplicity is really difficult watch this, use lodash, learn you haskell (or another functional language) ##Mmmm…Functional I’ve been on a bit of a functional kick for the past couple months and have really been loving the way taking a more functional approach has helped me reason through and improve my code.

January 16, 2015

I will update this post with more resources as I find them – check back for more (Just starting out in web development? This post is written for you) Starting from scratch One of the things that I’ve learned since becoming a developer is that sometimes “you don’t know what you don’t know.” That is, sometimes you just have no idea how much you don’t really know. This can be daunting, especailly if you’re just starting out.

January 6, 2015

##That Was Easy A friend of mine shared Rich Hickey’s 2012 RailsConf Austin talk Simple Made Easy with me recently. His thoughts on complexity and simplicity were really helpful and have encouraged me to build better software that’s not obsessed with objects. I’ve already seen my SLOC-count go down significantly and am able to better reason about my programs. Anyways, I strongly encourage you to watch it if you haven’t yet already.