VADOSWARE

… Or you shouldn’t. I don’t know, I’m just a random person on the internet. Don’t let random internet blog posts make your decisions for you, carefully weigh the options and decide what’s right for you. Or don’t. Disclaimers aside, many people have brought up the fact that despite hosting much of the best open source code on the planet, Github itself was not open source. Recently there was quite a rustling over an open letter to Github, which seemingly spurred Github to make all the actions they were taking to make the platform greater more publicly accessible.

So the Fx0 is one of the best designed and best performing FirefoxOS phone that was ever made — and it’s been put under super heavy discount, following mozilla announcing the shift in focus from phones to IoT. If you’re looking to buy one, feel free to head over to Amazon (they’re currently selling for ~$50, when in the past I saw them up there for roughly $800): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UULNTHK Naturally I bought 4 when I realized this awesome phone (that I actually went to japan to try and buy from AU, the carrier that had it) was available.

A disturbing amount of open (and closed) source javascript projects that I’ve worked on are severely lacking in tests, whether unit or otherwise. Of course, I do find time to click around the apps and make sure they basically work, and while I find that works for smaller apps, it’s obvious that if you want long-term stability, and any one to even take a look at your app, one of the most basic requirements is having properly functioning tests.

Disclaimer: The opinions written here do not reflect those of my current employer, or any previous employers. These opinions are solely my own. This started as a comment on Hacker News, but the thread it was in didn’t deserve such a rambling comment. Figured my blog would be a better place to put it: I don’t understand why there is a “debate” about ad blocking at all. No advertising company has the right to determine how I use my personal computer.

I recently started the process of porting an Angular 1.x web app I had to React (ES6, package managed with JSPM), and am having a pretty good time writing the code for the app. This was less of a port and more of a complete re-write (as none of the code from the angular version is really re-usable, per say). If you’re not familiar with ES6/ES2015 features, I highly recommend Mozilla’s blog series on ES6 Features, written (in most part) by Jason Orendorff.

Splash screen for Firegraph Instagram API login for Firegraph Random picture Firegraph Sidebar navigation inside Firegraph After months of on and off development, I’m finally releasing version 0.1.0 of Firegraph. Firegraph is a FirefoxOS read-only (due to some API key restrictions) packaged webapp for accessing Instagram. While staggeringly incomplete, it does offer basic feed viewing functionality for users that download it, and that I’m proud of!

Recently (a few weeks ago?) WebAssembly was annouced. I glossed over the announcement the first time I saw it, but after a few weeks and some time to digest (along with being distracted by other things, like starting a new job, and being funemployed), this story has landed on my doorstep again. This time through, however, The words are jumping off the page and it finally makes great sense to me.

Today I wasted a whole bunch of hours struggling with caching at the front-end and backend of an application that I am developing — so I figured I would put what I ran into here to help other lost souls. What I’m developing is an Aurelia based app, with a Flask backend. After getting my Flask application set up to serve static files (which was surprisingly hard to discovery, mostly because flask prefers to have static files served from somewhere else, like NGINX), I was failing to see instant changes to my app.

So for a weekend project I’ve decided to work on a site that makes conference schedules across languages, platforms, and countries easily available. I decided to use MeteorJS for this project, a relatively young web framework that really puts the “shared” in “shared back end and front end codebase”. While I have known about MeteorJS for a while, the last time I looked at them they were 0.x software, so although the demos had lots of interesting functionality, I wasn’t quite ready to take the dive (at that time, I think I was till kicking the tires on Knockout, and AngularJS).

A tool I learned about during my days using Martini, Gin is a fantastic auto-reload tool for Go. It’s extremely simple, and generally Just Work™ with most other frameworks/basic net/http. Install it: go get github.com/codegangsta/gin Check out the source code: https://github.com/codegangsta/gin The project I’m using this for is pretty exciting — more on that later.