Month: May 2014

Back From Scandinavia, Back to Project Coding, Writing and Organizing

vikingI just got back from Scandinavia (and Amsterdam). I went for a million reasons, mostly for the adventure of it. Visiting Stockholm, Copenhagen and Reykjavik I saw about a zillion bikes, great architecture, Tivoli, amazing and beautiful waterways, Viking boat building museums, design to die for and so much more. It’s truly one of the amazing areas of the world. But now I’m back in ‘Merica and ready to get back to working on projects, design efforts and all the things I love to do. This blog post is a summary of my immediate return to projects, here’s the list broken into coding, writing and organizing:

Coding

  • Deconstructed – [site] This is the startup I’ve cofounded with Aaron Gray @agray. Check out our main site at Deconstructed. Check out some of the open source projects we’ve started here and listed below.
  • Deconstructed Docs – [site] [JavaScript] [Node.js] I’m using Wintersmith to build docs with static site generation. The docs are located at docs.deconstructed.io. Previous blog entries I did on building a static site with Wintersmith are available at Wintersmith Creating Documentation and Working in -34c, Wintersmith Customization & Github Hosting.
  • Symphonize.js – [site] [JavaScript] [Node.js] [issues] This is a project I started to use configuration as a basis for creating data for any database, but specifically Orchestrate (see blog entries under the writing section I did for Orchestrate). The idea behind this started since I needed something to generate test data for Deconstructed. This one is incomplete, but I’ll be pushing it forward to a deployable NPM Module soon that will be easy to download and just use. There’s also a possibility that this becomes a service that I make available in the near future.
  • Orchestrate.NET – [site] [c#] [issues] I’ve been helping out Robert Smith and a crew to manage the effort around the .NET client driver for Orchestrate. This is currently functional and we’d love anybody and everybody using it to really test it out. Currently I’m using this for the OrchestrateExecute Project listed below too.
  • orchestrate-rapping – [repo] [go] [issues] [group] Yo yo yo, hit the beat. This is an effort that I and others have kicked off to put together a wrapper for Orchestrate’s API. The reason is simple, we want to be able to develop sitting far away from wifi and connectivity, in a park or a cabin in the woods, with a beer in hand and a fire crackling. All while knowing we’re building something that will work when we reconnect to the land of the internet!
  • OrchestrateExecutive – [repo] [c#] [issues] For a very serious enterprise application, I’ve started hacking together a C# Application using Xamarin that will provide a library tier (that could be used as a sample) to use in building to Android, iOS or Windows Phone and all of the native Windows, Linux or OS-X apps that might be needed. In the application I’ll be using Orchestrate and Deconstructed to build out the application. Stay tuned at blog.deconstructed.io for more on this.
  • …and also inspired by Rick Turoczy @turoczy eternally another fucking side project will be going live soon. 😮

Writing

Organizing

  • Bike n’ Hack – Follow @bikenhack for information and more coming soon.
  • Node PDX – More to come on this soon.

…subscribe to the RSS link, hit the e-mail subscription or just ping me or follow me @adron on Twitter and I’ll keep you posted on the goings on of all my efforts and others. Cheers!

Great New European Technology Invention

One of the things that I’ve noticed throughout Europe is this really cool invention they’ve created here called a schedule. This schedule is something that is based on another piece of technology called a clock. The clock is designed to show the passing of time, something very similar to what we in America have, except that they pay attention to this passing of time. We Americans just seem to race around it in what we call the “rat race”.

This clock progresses forward while people work, relax and interact with each other. It ticks slowly and this is where the real interesting aspect of this technology is shown. As the time passes the European people eat and enjoy each other’s company. They tell each other a particular time, that each of them will show up and greet each other. They then carry on with their day and then meet at this time and enjoy a bit of each other’s company. For some odd reason it seems we Americans just go toward each other randomly and sometimes run into each other for company. But we don’t dare actually follow or respect this passing of time.

The other use of this schedule technology, is the use in transportation. It’s so fascinating that when a schedule in Europe shows that a train will arrive at 14:29 or 9:11 the train arrives at the respective 14:29 or 9:11. The same for this schedule of departure times. It is, unlike the lack of any schedule in America, amazingly useful. It seems, we could really use such a piece of technology in the United States!

The shock of the accurate movement of peoples between places, based on these schedules and their interactions is truly amazing! I highly suggest everybody give it a try sometime!

Coding on Orchestrate.io & Orchestrate.js & Orchestrate.NET

First context, then I’ll dive in.

Orchestrate

http://orchestrate.io/

Orchestrate is a service that provides a simple API to access a multitude of database types all in one location. Key value, graph or events, some of the database types I’ve been using, are but a few they’ve already made available. There are many more on the way. Having these databases available via an API instead of needing to go through the arduous process of setting up and maintaining each database for each type of data structure is a massive time saver! On top of having a clean API and solid database platform and infrastructure Orchestrate has a number of client drivers that provide easy to use wrappers. These client drivers are available for a number of languages. Below I’ve written about two of these that I’ve been involved with in some way over the last couple of months.

Orchestrate.NET

https://github.com/RobertSmith/Orchestrate.NET

This library I’m currently using for a demonstration application built against the Deconstructed.io services (follow us on twitter ya! @BeDeconstructed), a startup I’m co-founding. I’m not sure exactly what the app will be, but being .NET it’ll be something enterprisey. Because: .NET is Enterprise! For more on this project check out the Deconstructed.io Blog.

Some of the latest updates with this library.

But there’s still a bit of work to do for the library, so consider this a call out for anybody that has a cycle they’d like to throw in on the project, let us know. We’d happily take a few more pull requests!  The main two things we’d like to have done real soon are…

Orchestrate.js

https://github.com/orchestrate-io/orchestrate.js

With the latest fixes, additions and updates the orchestrate.js client driver is getting more feature rich by the day. In addition @housejester has created an orchestrate-brain project for Hubot that uses Orchestrate.js. If you’re not familiar with Hubot, but sure to check out the company robot that can dramatically improve and reduce employee efficiency! Keep an eye on that project for more great things, or create a Hubot to keep a robotic eye on the project.

Here are a few key things to note that have been added to help in day-to-day coding on the project.

  • The travis.yml file has been added for the Travis Continuous Integration build. This build runs against node.js v0.10 and v0.8.
  • Testing is done with mocha, expect.js and nock. To get the tests up and running, clone the repo and then build with the make file. The tests will run in tdd format.
  • Promises are provided via the kew library.

If you’re opening up the project in WebStorm, it’s great to setup the mocha tests with the integrated mocha testing as shown below. After you’ve cloned the project and run ‘npm install’ then follow these steps to add the Mocha testing to the project. We’ve already setup exclusions in the .gitignore for the .idea directory and files that WebStorm uses.

First add a configuration by clicking on Edit Configurations.

Edit Configurations
Edit Configurations

Next click on the + to add a new configuration to run. Select the Mocha option from the list of configurations.

Mocha & Other Configurations in WebStorm
Mocha & Other Configurations in WebStorm

On the next screen set a name for the configuration. Set the test directory to the path for the test directory in the project. Then finally set the User interface option for Mocha to TDD instead of the default BDD.

Edit Configuration Dialog
Edit Configuration Dialog

Last but not least run the tests and you’ll see the list of green lights light up the display with positive results.

Test Build
Test Build