One of the most useful tools when you develop mobile portals is a simple web page to check the headers your browser is sending to the server. Which User-Agent? Accept-Language? Accept-Encoding? Accept-Charset?
A good opportunity to write a tiny node.js application (with just a bit of Underscore magic).
(... continued ...)After a few months of Rails development, I start to really enjoy working with dynamic languages. Coming from a Java background, it takes some time to get used to work without a proper IDE with code completion and good refactoring tools; however, after a while the development experience becomes more natural, especially if you pair a dynamic language with a schema free database like MongoDB.
I was really curious to try some other (dynamic) way to develop web applications, so I decided to build a website to sell my old furniture, and I picked node.js because... well, a lot of people is talking about it. I understand that's not a sensible reason to choose a technology but hey, I just wanted to sell a few things. Have a look at the result, if you are interested (I still have a good wardrobe for sale, anyway).
At the end of the development, these are my notes/impressions.
Overall development experience
Developing the website has taken me about 12 hours. I estimate I spent roughly 30% of the time to google for information, and 20% to integrate the design. So development is reasonably quick.
Programming a web application in a event-driven fashion (the node.js way) feels a bit weird, but it's not a problem for simple webapps. I can imagine that if you need to write some complicate business logic that might be quite challenging though.
Node.js and Express
(... continued ...)
My bi-weekly update... a few interesting things happened.
Unexpectedly, I started working on my first iPhone/iPad application. That's something I didn't foresee because my objective-C skills are virtually not-existent, but my friends at The Dusseldorf Experiment are helping me out. My goal is to create a mobile application for Trunk.ly, the new bookmarking service I use. The iPhone version is ready (albeit minimal), I hope to be able to start the iPad one this week. And no, I don't want to become an objective-C developer; I already have my problems switching daily between Ruby and Java.
Last weekend I attended the startup weekend in Bruxelles; like my previous experience in Austin I enjoyed the event so much, but this time our team also went on to win the price for the geekiest project. That's a screencast of the demo if you are interested.
Unfortunately I had to miss Fosdem this year; I was planning to go on Sunday, but a bad cold convinced me to stay home.
I read Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling. I have mixed feeling about this book: while it offers a lot of useful suggestions, if you (like me) have already read all the possible books about SEOs, bootstrapping startups, lean startups and outsourcing to Virtual Assistants, this book won't tell you anything more. So, it's a useful summary, but nothing really new.
Usual contracting work going on, nothing new on that side. The three contracts I have are more than enough to keep me very busy right now, so I don't see any news in this area at least until April.