Projects
Sunday, 13 April 2008The following are a few projects that I’ve developed:
Fightinjoe.com
If you’re reading this, you’ve already seen this project. A wise man once said, “every beginning Rails developer should write their own blog software.”
This is my attempt at doing things differently; it is not only my first Merb project, but it is also my first jQuery + DataMapper + PostgreSQL + Vlad project.
This project is open-sourced at GitHub.
Vs.
My first Merb project quickly spun off two additional projects. With a large knowledge of “Ruby on Rails”http://rubyonrails.com and the mainstream stack it utilizes, I knew what I needed to do to build my first Merb blog. What I didn’t know was how.
I didn’t need a Merb tutorial, I needed a Rails-to-Merb translator. I couldn’tfind one, so I built one.
The goal: expedite the translation of knowledge between two subjects in the same discipline. In other words, make it easier than ever to reinvent the wheel.
Right now in version 0.1 it is closed source and closed to outside contributors. My goal is to change this in upcoming releases.
Merb AutoScaffold
I woke up this morning with a bright idea – make scaffolding easy and automatic for any Merb app via a simple Gem. 6 hours later merb_autoscaffold was up and running locally providing all the functionality that Rails scaffolds have to offer.
The goal is to grow this not just into a robust scaffolding solution, but also to have it work together with MeX as a proof-of-concept of how easy it is to compartmentalize and distribute functionality in Merb.
Fork and contribute to Merb AutoScaffolding on GitHub.
MeX
My first Merb project also necessitated an exception tracker. But with all of these new projects springing up, I was torn between developing a plugin that could be dropped into any app, or a centralized web service that any app could talk to.
I decided on the latter and used it as an excuse to create my first flat Merb app: MeX (Merb eXception).
Drawing heavily on the exception_logger Rails plugin, MeX has been rewritten to work with Merb, DataMapper, and jQuery.
Version 0.1.0 is out now, which provides the same functionality that exception logger provides, except in a stand-alone form. Future versions will add authentication as well as the ability to use the app as a plugin inside of a Merb app or as a Ruby Gem for easy deployment!
The project is open-sourced on GitHub.
Tribewanted.com
I’ve also had the pleasure of working for Tribewanted to redesign and re-engineer their web presence. The experience was one-of-a-kind, with me spending three months with the project on an island in Fiji with no electricity or running water.
I never thought my commute to work would be a 30 minute boat ride across the ocean and up a river to a small sugar plantation town. Working locally with Tribewanted, however, was a huge benefit for being involved with the community, and has made my continued remote work that much more productive.
Kinzin.com
Kinzin is a place online for families – a safe harbor for sharing stories and pictures and staying in touch. While I haven’t been involved in the recent iterations of Kinzin, I was responsible for the first alpha release and helped with the development of the subsequent two beta releases.
With Kinzin, I had the pleasure to work with a sharp and specialized team, which was a great opportunity for me to forego being a jack of all trades and focus on being a master of one. I was responsible not only for much of the engineering of the internals of the site, but also for several plugins and Rails extensions we developed internally to aid development, testing, and general usage.
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