Bootstrap

12 Mar 2012

I have been programming exclusively in Node.js for almost two years.
Prior to that I was programming in Java, Python and Ruby. I find that picking one language and sticking with it makes you more fluent. When I lived in Argentina the same was true for speaking Spanish. It was easier to master the language when you did not switch back to English.

I have a small consulting firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico and we work on different Node related projects. Currently, I am looking for full time work. I would like to find a small company where I can make a difference and where there are mutual synergies between our interests.

All of the projects I work on have a common theme of tools that I use. I do both front end browser work and back end persistence work. The glue that holds these two pieces together is Backbone.

I believe that all projects on the web should have a public facing REST Api.
This enables any developer in the world to access your data programmatically while at the same time enable your internal developers to build out the web site with the same API calls. This is a similar approach that Amazon took when they decided to open up all of their computing via their EC2 infrastructure.

On the front end all of my websites use a CSS Framework. Currently, Bootstrap from Twitter is the rage and I am happy using that for my most recent projects.

On the back end I use MongoDb and Redis. To me, Redis is one of the most interesting platforms in the history of computer science. It is the first time that a robust framework can be used to serve data structures to multiple processors at the same time.

I use Redis mainly to build search indexes. One of the things I spend a lot of time doing is reading data feeds or REST Api’s from the Internet and then building indexes based on the type of data I retrieved.

I have a website that allows a user to define what keywords are in the index.
Then, the user can search across that space by clicking on a word cloud of indexed terms.

The program is generic enough that the data model across all of the different feeds is the same. So the JSON or RSS feed is transformed into a common data structure via a set of custom callback functions. Since this code is open source, the developer can define those callback functions to put the data into a standard form.

Because this data is a common JSON format it can be visualized via D3.
The word cloud itself is written in D3 by Jason Davies.

All of my projects run on Amazon EC2 which I have been using since 2008.
I love Amazon for web site delivery and data delivery. Besides Rackspace, it is clearly the leader in the field.

I look forward to a conversation with you to further discuss synergies between our mutual interests.