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My talk about Twitter-Node at PDXJS

I was recently invited to talk about my Twitter Node project at last night’s PDX Javascript Admirers meeting. I was really nervous about giving my first talk in several years, but I did alright. My slides are up on Heroku.

The big win of the talk, however, was Scott’s showoff app for composing presentations.

Where's Waldo: Track user locations with Node.js and Redis

Where’s Waldo is my little node.js/Redis project to keep track of users in an app. Say hi!

hi waldo!

Tracking hits on every request can get costly, and I didn’t want to hold up the more important server processes with this. So, it felt like a good fit for a quick asynchronous web server. Node.js and Redis fit the bill perfectly.

Node.js For My Tiny Ruby Brain: Keeping Promises

I’ve been hacking on node.js for a week now. I won’t go into why I think it’s awesome, you probably already know (thanks to bloggers like Simon Willison).

My second raw “hello world” speed test went something like this:

A note on the Github/Twitter Proxy

In my last post, I made a quick note about how the FriendlyORM had some issues in Postgres. I made a few quick hacks (all in the interest of finishing this up and launching it yesterday). A few hours later, James Golick managed to fix the issues in a special postgres branch.

Get your Github news feed in Tweetie

A few weeks ago, I started hacking on twitter-server, an API wrapper for the Twitter API. It’s a Sinatra extension, where I toyed with the idea of adding top level API methods like #twitter_statuses_home_timeline to a Sinatra application. I’m not altogether happy with the way the XML is rendered, but it works with Tweetie.

Background Jobs Reloaded

So, Tender has been rolling for weeks with the new job structure: how’s it working out?

Structuring your background jobs

This morning while dealing with a support issue, I asked this question on the twitters:

Do you create a single (background) job for an event (AfterPostUpdated), or multiple jobs for tasks (SendPostEmails, UpdatePostCounts)?

In Tender Support, updating a discussion spawned a job that looked something like this:

New to the CAN: Widget, json fixes, etc

I just pushed a new version the Calendar About Nothing:

poetic tweets

Saul Williams’ trek through the midwest between shows sparked some musings on Twitter.

Driving from Denver to Kansas City. My mind travels at a faster pace than my body. I mark my way with words. If the newest technology enhances transparancy then this is an ideal time to share your process. Share how your mind works. How do you think?

WTF does that cron do?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great system administrator. I was a windows guy for so long, so my only exposure to linux was haggling with shared hosting accounts to run my stupid php apps. While my linux/administration skills have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, I still get caught up on something as simple as cron jobs. The syntax is very terse, and probably easy to parse for computers. For the rest of us… Well, what the hell does this mean?