Helvetica Cardigan is an implementation of the popular ‘fridge poetry’ curio.

It was completed in 48 hours during the Node Knockout 2012 coding contest by myself and Le Roux Bodenstein. The name comes from one of the combinations we made with the default ‘hipster ipsum’ wordset. You can add your own fridges with your own words too.

Although it was finished back then, I spent some time cleaning it up last night to make it a bit more interesting to blog about. Primarily I added the ability to embed it into other pages, and improved tablet support.

There is a bug which causes node to crash at the moment. I have set up a cronjob to reset it every few minutes until I have a moment to debug it properly

It has been released under a MIT license and the source is available on GitHub.

This is the first in a new series of articles on painful lessons that I have learnt from real problems I have faced in the past. This is an effort to stop future generations from running into the same mistakes, or at the very least, it will give them something to find via google when they get stumped.

Since I’m still busy collecting my thoughts on why I was afraid of angular, specifically illustrating what about the inferred dependency feature worries me so much, I decided to take a break from the topic to start publishing some of my war stories.

Recently I shared some of the thought processes that I went through when trying to understand why I chose to use Angular.js for a little demo project I was building as a learning exercise.

This article is about what I took away from my experiment on a more intellectual level.

Werewolves.io is a VOIP-based multiplayer game for 7-16 players.

While the first iteration of this application was built in 48 hours as our entry into the 2013 Node Knockout Hackathon, we were not able to complete it in that time.

I subsequently revisited the project and completely refactored the code, wrote hundreds of units tests and even bots to allow me to test it more easily.

Last week the startup I have been working for started wrapping up due to lack of funds. It’s not been unexpected, so I’ve kind of put the week aside to try being ‘funemployed’.

It has given me the time to catch up with old friends, do a little bit of writing, but also to spend some time processing everything that’s happened over the last few years.

I was finally writing the announcement for a project I built on a whim a few months ago, but when I tried to justify why I had chosen to use Angular.js specifically on that project I came to a deeper realization.

Main Features

• Downloads and mirrors the photos on tumblr blogs locally.
• Provides a photo mosaic interface to navigate through them.
• Rate images 1-5 stars to keep track of your favorites.
• Allow faceted search on metadata (such as tags).
• Infinite scrolling or paged view modes.
• Keep track of images you have seen, only showing new ones.
• Rudimentary tablet support.

I built these slides for a presentation on Browserify I gave at a Node.js Cape Town user group meetup recently.

To make it a little bit more interesting, I used browserify to build the slides themselves. I then used browserify to pull in the code that it built back into the slides to use it’s own code for the examples!

You can find the browserify slides, and the code used to generate them on my github account.

Build Tools

As the slides progress the entire thing becomes more complex with various levels of transforms and clever trickery. At some point the code even switches entirely to coffeescript (because typing yaml is easier than json).

I used a variety of packages from places like bower and npm, and I used grunt to automate the entire build process. If I were to do it over today, I would definitely be using gulp instead, since it’s just so much closer to how I instinctually perceive a lot of these tasks (streams all the way down).

Other Tools

Disc is a tool that visualizes the module tree of the bundle generated, allowing you to catch files that might have been included in error, and it is definitely my favorite slide in the deck.

I used Impress.js and a couple of other libraries to make it look nice. Impress was especially fun to mess about with, as it presents you with a css3d virtual space to distribute your slides on while it zooms between them.

It really tickled my inner yak-shaver to the point where I spent an embarrasing amount of time building a functional transition api that would allow me to distribute the slides based on a formula. Basically I wanted to tell the slides to ‘do a barrel roll’.

My decision to start NodeCPT has a couple of different motivations, which I will deal with mostly separately in this post.

The big picture.

Why a Node.js group and not just Javascript?

I firmly believe that Javascript is going to be one of the most crucial technologies in the coming years, supplanting a lot of technologies that have become very entrenched in the industry up to now. I really want to help that along however I can, because I am just incredibly excited about the what the future holds for us.

I think that the value proposition of javascript on the server is not being able to share code with the client, but rather being able to share developers. I think that the same language on the front end and back end, breaks down barriers and ultimately encourages more people to understand the ‘full stack’.

I also find Node.js exciting because it is an amazing opportunity to shake off a decade or more of technical debt and intellectual baggage. I would rather encourage people to think about the internet and technology in new and wonderful ways, than try and drag their familiar toys along with them. I’m just not interested in sitting through a presentation about how to use random jquery module X in your wordpress theme.