From Plow Boy to Code Slinger: A Love Story
My Early Life
Was full of kidding around…
Living on a farm
It's not all fun and games
Less like this…
And more like this:
Or this
Then one day…
I bought a computer
The best one you could get at the time.
Q*bert was OK for a while…
But then I discovered BASIC
You mean I can tell the computer to do anything I want it to?!?
Or Play & Record Music On It?
But then tragedy struck…
Death by Koolaid
Fast forward 8 years
To a world of infinite possibility
and 60 emails a month!
And literally dozens of colors!
But wait!
I can make my own web page?
The helpdesk years
Imagine a room full of
And
Then along came the phone help desk.
The desks were tiny!
And the customers were angry
Really angry
So I got a job in the accounting department
Where I learned PHP
On the clock.
Why PHP?
Because PHP was everywhere.
Linux
Apache
PHP
MySQL
Fast forward a few years…
To a world ruled by
Giants such as
- Wikipedia
- Wordpress
- Yahoo!
- Photobucket
- And yes, Facebook
But there was a problem…
Web applications were slow
and spent most of their time waiting for data from somewhere else.
Until Ryan Dahl said, "Enough!"
and node.js was born!
What made node.js revolutionary?
- Data access (IO) didn't block
- You could write your software in Javascript
- The community was very welcoming
- Lots of tiny, composable modules
- Easy to find and publish new software
Past Projects
- Gourmet Trading productivity tracker: jQuery, PHP, MySQL, Terminal Services & Thin Clients
- USGS: data packaging and transport system — PHP, 7Zip
- Agricultural ERP app: Django, MySQL
- Medley: Django, PostgreSQL, Solr, RabbitMQ
- AndBang/Shippy: Backbone/HJS, node.js, Redis/Lua
- Digital Services Platform: AmpersandJS, node.js, Riak, WebRTC, XMPP/Prosody
What I do today
Native Web Apps for Business
The Stack
- Modern HTML (5?)
- Modern CSS (3+)
- JavaScript Client-Side App
- API Server — node.js (or anything)
- Data Store: Riak, PostgreSQL, Redis, MSSQL, MongoDB
A Brief Demo
Any Questions?
- Team: https://andyet.com
- Code: https://github.com/aaronmccall
- Email: aaron@andyet.com
Plow Boy to Code Slinger: A Love Story
By Aaron McCall
Plow Boy to Code Slinger: A Love Story
How a Columbia Basin farm boy became a cutting edge coder.
