Let’s Chat

It’s good to talk

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with some forum based technology, trying to find an ideal platform to take and add lots of modifications too to integrate fully with another app. The idea is that in said other app you will click “help” and it will take your code and post it directly to a forum, where people can offer up code solutions which you as the original poster can click the “try it” button that then puts it back in the other app and allows you to test it against your test systems.

There’s a whole other bunch of features and gamification that needs to happen to help build up a desire to help people with rewards for those that help the most, needless to say there will be a lot of customisations so I spent a little bit of time playing around with a few technologies and the one we’re going to use is NodeBB. It’s also worth mentioning they have a nice indiegogo campaign going and more support is required!

Everyone we’ve shown the forum to likes it, it is still quite immature, they only started in mid May (2013) and the code has come a long way, and it is continuously improving. With help from me ;)

#NodeBB got it's first pull request today, from @soimafreak ! Guess that makes us a "real" #OpenSource product now… #github #nodejs #redis

— NodeBB (@NodeBB) June 27, 2013

Building a stable platform for the future

I have some constraints around what I’m doing, one is I’m still new to Javascript, learning, but new; luckily I have people I can bug if I get stuck which really helpful. I also have to make the discussion boards easy to support for the people that will be looking after it and easy to integrate it with our exiting app as and when needed.

The next biggest issue with building a solid platform is a good choice of frameworks, using a frame work like PassportJS rather than writing individual login methods, implementing configurable logging with something like Winston and using templating solutions like Dust (Dust seems really god but not maintained any more, I guess it’s perfect?) or Jade (Jade is only server side but ClientJade fills that niche)

All of these frameworks will just make my life easier in the log run, I’ll hopefully be able to work quicker and it should give other sone thing less to learn assuming I choose libraries they are familiar with anyway.

So there’s a few things that need to be looked at from a supportability point of view and to enable easier development by us and then there’s all the extras we need to work on, because of the level of integration and needing to poke almost all elements it will be interesting to see how the plugins will work for NodeBB. I’m desperately trying to work out how I can maintain heavy customisation of the code and still contribute back shared goals, I’d prefer not to fork and become so separated that we can’t push back contributions, hopefully we’ll be able to work out how we do that!

What challenges you?

Over the last few weeks

I have been wondering what most people find challenging in the “modern” IT world. There’s been a recent upsurge in tools and technology that address most problems which only leaves me to wonder what is filling that gap? What is the current big annoying problem, maybe it’s not being able to push your architecture into multiple clouds, or having to live with the constraints of small root disk volumes; Who knows? Hence the poll :)

A week in the Valley

While out and about…

Over the last week I’ve been out in the bay area meeting with an important client talking about their needs and how we’re going to make things better for them and for us, all in all a good trip (apart from the plane crash). This was my first time to the bay area and it seems like a nice enough place, it lives up to expectations in some areas and not others, I’m sure with more local knowledge it’s possible to overcome some of the issues I had with the area. The main issue I could see (granted it was only a week) is that it’s not as nice to live there as it is in the UK or even as nice to be around and in like London.

In London, everything is a walk away or a short tube journey, and better yet if you’re willing to travel more than an hour each way each day you can live in the countryside and just commute in; but in the valley everything is a short car journey away, the public transport seems a bit hit and miss and Taxi’s aren’t cheap!
I think its things like this which will be the end of the bay area over the next 10 years unless it changes, and I’m not the only one to think this and as time moves on I think we’ll see a shift in tech start-ups away from silicon valley into areas that are nicer to live.

Which is what brings me back to London, there’s a good start-up culture, there’s more investment going on and there’s some good companies starting to appear, unfortunately for tech startups the UK still isn’t brilliant, but it will get there in time and it probably just needs a few more years and some brave people to trail blaze.

I think London has the makings of a nice tech hub for Europe and will over the next few years start exceeding the bay area, the only thing it’s really missing at the moment is the massive success stories that appear in the bay area every few years, sure there’s some good companies but none are a apple, google or facebook.

I think I could survive out there to live for a while but not forever, it’s nice being able to go to the beach, forrest, mountains what ever you want all within a reasonable drive but there’s too much convenience stuff, like fast food, corner shops and drive throughs. Like Walmart, it’s got a purpose but not for me, Trader Joes seemed better, but no soft drinks just fresh goods and booze… Maybe in time I would have found stuff that felt a little more “me” and a little less American but I’d have to go and give it a go to find out!

For me personally I don’t really want to live in London, it’s just too busy but living out in Hampshire makes London an awkward commute, do able but not every day. As time goes on I’m still hopefully that more start ups will start offering flexible working like we have at Alfresco where going in for 2-3 days a week is the norm and everyone is trusted to do the work, and who knows over the next 10 years maybe more will start filling the M3/M4 corridor which will make living in a nice place and commuting to a nice tech company is all possible.

It will certainly be interesting over the next few years how the tech industry in the UK changes but I’m certain it’s picking up speed.

Doing it the hard way

Lets make it really complicated

Over the last two weeks i’ve been playing with some open source project that has a bit of a kick starter going to fund their idea. I came across it through my boss who probably found it on redit but in essence it’s a forum using nodejs as the backend and some Jquery at the front end but all in all it looks pretty awesome; sure it has a few flaws but it’s less than 6 months old.

In my first venture into using it on my laptop I came across a bug with the title of a new post, when you reply it locks the title to stop you editing it on reply, unfortunately it didn’t unlock it so when you went to post a new topic you were unable to set a title. I decided that I could raise a ticket or I could just have a look at it so I had a lock and submitted a fix to them; to my amazement they accepted my fix! We decided that this is a good platform to use for what we’re trying to do at work but it needs a few core fixes followed by quite a bit of integration and customisations, the core things we need to fix in the product (in order of importance) is

1. Deployment to bespoke path
2. Increased logging for debugging
3. Additional authentication routes

So I decided that not knowing the code I should start at working on point one, it makes it useful and gets me involved in a lot of the code so hopefully I’ll learn something. It seemed a sensible place to start, it was a sensible place to start; unfortunately being a new project there isn’t a lot of documents or sites to google for this stuff so I’ve been learning the hard way.

The main challenge is learning the code, the other is working out why things were done in a certain way. So one of the issues I have is that currently there’s something like 6 config.json files all used for different things, with different config so I need to backwards engineer all of it, a little annoying seeing as with some better technology choices it could just be one config file, but then I also don’t know why things have been done that way.

Challenging me more!

Up until recently my experience to nodeJS had been rather limited but I had used some cool things like express, Winston and Jade but I has always had the luxury of talking to the developer that wrote it to help me understand why it was done that way and how I should use it; this time I’m on hard mode, I have to understand it from reading and I have questions! Hopefully the people running the project will have some time to spend helping me get up to speed and answering my stupid question, I read through the code and I just don’t know what’s going on, I think this is partly down to not really being a programmer and partly to not knowing the language very well so everything is a little odd; at least I hope thats the case, if it is just bat shit crazy then at least I’m confused for a reason :)

I’m definitely going to persevere as I’m, sure it will be useful and it is in the project teams best interest to help me understand what it does so I can start submitting “awesome” changes back to the project even if they don’t want them :)

Either way I’m looking forward to diving into the code a bit more and trying to guess what it’s doing; hopefully I can make it work for our purposes while providing useful (although not needed) features back to the project. I’m also looking forward to increasing what I’m doing in complication so I can start doing the more bespoke work we needed with integrations and maybe adding an achievements framework or some sort of gamification to the forum tool