Health to the Web

Last fall at the HTML Developers conference I attended a talk about IoT and programming using an Arduino Uno board with a node library "Johnny-Five" which sent updates to Firebase. Wow It was cool. So end of last year I bought an Ardunio kit from Sunfounder with the purpose of learning myself but also teach programming and electronics to kids. Finally after much procrastination, I started this weekend with my son. We completed the basic hello world exercise . Tonight we wired and programmed a button to turn on and off an Led. It took two goes at wiring the board but we got it working. Hold down the button and the light comes on, release it and it turns off. Example here I think combining electronics and software programming could be an interesting way for kids to learn. Having the feedback of an Led blink on and off will hopefully stop kids from getting bored. I'd love to do some kind of tutorial for kids in his school, would be fun. Tonight I had to bribe ...

To test on IE on Mac I use Virtual Box and an IE image (which Microsoft provides). Setup as follows. download virtualbox from Oracle download an IE image from Microsoft (mac page) ; choose VirtualBox as Platform unarchive the IE image (I had to download TheUnarchiver) as recommended by Microsoft; right click and choose the unarchiver to open; should unpack a .ova file start virtual box choose File -> Import Appliance and choose the .ova file you unarchived it should create an entry in the BV list which you can run should startup and you can run IE To access localhost I use my machines IP name instead of "localhost" 10.0.2.2 also works for localhost (don't forget ur port number if you have one) Links Import ova files to VB: https://www.maketecheasier.com/import-export-ova-files-in-virtualbox/

This contains links and project related to my learning of Angular 2.0. Building a new Angular2.0 app I followed this youtube vid and built a basic to do app. See the plunker here  for what I built. Its interesting because its a good guide and written in es5 not typescript. But I think its out of date (using alpha angular js library and component syntax seems to have evolved) so next I'll follow the quickstart guide on angulars site . ...and here's my implementation of  angulars quickStart implementation (still ES5) . I included a basic DI of a service which is used. It works but I know there's more elegant ways to accomplish DI. Next up, I built the Tour of Heroes tutorial on the angular 2.0 site. Its here in my github . The tutorial on the angular2 site does not include routing but John Papas github implementation does. So next is to add some routing to this app. Strategies for upgrading existing apps Some useful links I came across for dealing with 1.x a...

My links and notes as I learn more about React "React is a library for building composable user interfaces. It encourages the creation of reusable UI components which present data that changes over time." "React is all about building reusable components. In fact, with React the  only  thing you do is build components." I'm finding the React docs are pretty good for a beginner I worked  on this tutorial and built it out. Nice touch that they include all you need including simple server in the starter kit. Allows me to build something straight away. R eactDOM.render() instantiates the root component, starts the framework, and injects the markup into a raw DOM element, provided as the second argument The ReactDOM module exposes DOM-specific methods, while React has the core tools shared by React on different platforms props  are immutable: they are passed from the parent and are "owned" by the parent. To implement interactions, we introduce mu...

Just read a good article on Angular App Structure .  I left a comment and as I wrote it I realized (duh) that a significant part of the problem is one of consistency: Organization by type is inconsistent with what the logical application architecture is.  Over time, that inconsistency leads to bad design decisions and all other kinds of mistakes large and small. When there is consistency through the app from features to architecture to physical code, it makes it easier for everyone, easier to think and reason about the app, make design decisions, add more code, share a common terminology, work together etc. And when I say "easier for everyone" I include the product team, qa, management, designers and developers. Thats not to say there can't be differences between logical architecture and its physical manifestation. Sometimes that is necessary. But I think its works best if the logical and physical are mostly in synch and material differences are exceptions.  Buil...

Well, the Twixt team (of which i'm a member) heard the kind of news on Tuesday Nov 17 2015 that you really don't want to hear: "all Twixt positions eliminated immediately" Big surprise. Business Unit head, senior mgt, product, support, backend and frontend teams, over 20 people, all laid off. Including myself. Wow. Twixt was started almost 3 years ago as the first new Product AppNexus built in a number of years. Twixt was the brainchild of Andy Atherton, business lead and Vlad Gorelick eng lead. I started in August 2013 when there were 6 devs. Since then the team grew to over 20 people spread over San Francisco and Mountain View offices. Twixt was a startup within a startup (AppNexus). The twixt team was purposely located on the opposite coast from AppNexus in NYC to allow it full freedom to grow and innovate. Twixt went live over a year and a half ago. At the end of 2014 we exceeded our targets for customer spend. We were all excited and proud when over $100M in s...

I almost forgot about this one. I participated in a video shoot as promo for working at AppNexus. Man, I'm so "deer in headlights".