Yesterday’s installment including the TL;DR, Background, The Project, Ground Rules and The Work sections, can be found here. The Design One thing you should know about me: I am a horrible UI designer. I wouldn’t even begin to talk about UX. My goal here was to make something that my wife would find easy to use. I knew that if it was easy for her to use, she would use it. And I knew I would too. It’s also the reason I decided to focus on the App side first. I knew it would take me longer than the server side. I can write server side APIs in my sleep! My first pomodoro was spent just...

TL;DR: My yearly performance review revealed that I have a tendency to over architect code. I write too much too early. Using the Pomodoro Technique, a few ground rules and a rigorous commitment to coding only what was needed, I created an iPhone app with a full stack backend in 20 hours over the course of 11 days. My wife and I are now using the app on a daily basis. All the code is open source and can be found here (server) and here (iPhone app). Background I work on a small development team for Didit, Inc. We are dedicated to an Agile methodology that suits our needs (mainly Kanban) and we have an...

Many of us in the nodejs community sat back and watched as the theatrics of last weekend unfolded. We read the posts and comments, sometimes laughed or just shook our heads – so silly. I’d like to present here our use of nodejs in a production environment. I’ll provide more detail below, but here is a summary of why we use nodejs for our web application and services layer: 1) Full BDD environment 2) Common language, from server to browser 3) Vibrant and growing open source community 4) Mature package manager 5) Functional programming is fun Behavior Driven Development BDD is the next...