Last week I gave a short talk at BelfastJS outlining WebSockets: what they are, how you use them, examples, warnings and alternatives. That should cover the basics I think. A few months ago I spoke at BelfastRuby and it was good again to be sharing some knowledge with a bunch of people enthusiastic about technology and the local community. Hopefully we can keep things going and help make Belfast a supportive environment for those involved in the knowledge economy.
I’ve just released the latest iteration of hometi.me, a little nano-app I’ve mentioned before. Deliberate Practice It’s only a trivial app but I’ve a bit of free time before the start of a contract so I thought it would be good practice to redevelop it, a task I’d been ignoring for a long time. Goodbye CakePHP, Hello Sinatra The original app was put together quickly with CakePHP, a PHP-based framework I’ve used since my first paid programming gig.
Last month, at the inaugural Super Happy Dev Castle, my buddy Dave Rice told me about a project he was working on involving node.js, an event-based I/O system for Javascript. Javascript outside of the browser? This concept seemed almost ridiculous to me at that time but I thought it was worth a look and cobbled together a quick “Hello World.” I was greatly amused by creating a command-line app with Javascript but did nothing more about it until last week.