I have been doing a lot of refactoring recently on some common libraries used across multiple projects. One of the big things I’ve been finding is that these libraries should not create or initialise state. A good example of this is common configuration.
At first it seemed fine to create singleton objects within the library but as the library was used across more varied projects it become clear that these singleton objects needed to be extended to fit the needs of the application.
We use CoffeeScript extensively in the GigStamp codebase at the moment. Initially we used watchers to compile the coffee-script in to JavaScript and then the app would run on the compiled code. But as the code has grown in to several node modules it became awkward to be watching and compiling the various separate parts so we started running it directly.
This however has brought up a few complexities as we are running transpiled code. Debugging the code has been one of those complexities.
We have just got back from an amazing weekend at Camden Crawl, an amazing urban festival with lots of great up-and-coming new artists gigging in pubs and clubs around Camden, London. Urban festivals are where I think GigStamp really shines, we created some bespoke artwork for festival’s gigs which came with a great ticket-like share post to user’s twitter and facebook streams.
With awareness and activity starting to build inside the app I’ve started the process of building stats and charts in to GigStamp. I’m excited as we start to imagine what the user, artist and venue pages might have on them and also what tools we can give people to be able to promote themselves and see how well they are doing.
There is a lot of talk about components in the UI space. I’m currently working with Econsultancy on building a library of components for use in their website. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the WebComponents spec here.
A bit of history
I first started experimenting with the concept of components when I built the Lloyd’s of London website back in 2009. I designed the concept of modules, components and layouts which could specify nested elements and could have slight variations which I called types.
I feel like I’ve been in my little hole for months now … oh yeah it has been, since October! I’ve been beavering away in my evenings building a simple idea:
I’m a music fan, how can I collect and remember the gigs I’ve been to?
Together with Gordon Duncan who came up with the original idea I have been building GigStamp.
The check-in app for music fans
The app is really very simple on the surface. It finds you at a gig, you choose some stamp artwork, add a message and boom … you have your stamp.
I am working on a rewrite of markdown writer, my playground for working with backbone.js and HTML5 offline capabilities. There are a few new features which I am building in to what is currently a very basic app.
One of them is enabling you to log in using Github and save your offline articles to a Gist. To do this I have had to connect with Github using OAuth2.
Dave Taylor - Software Engineer
