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?

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