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Q_the_Noviceon Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

I built an electron app for organising and watching saved movies. In my part of the world, a lot of people still rely on external storage devices to share movies and music.

Q_the_Noviceon Ask HN: What is your side project for 2018?

I will continue working on NodeZA: https://nodeza.co.za - will focus on content creation and interaction between members.

Q_the_Noviceon Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

http://node-ping.herokuapp.com (Repo: https://github.com/qawemlilo/node-ping) - This is a very simple tool that monitors the availability of some of my websites and sends me an email if one is down. Hosted on heroku on the free tier, running for 3 years without much maintenance :)

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Q_the_Noviceon Ask HN: What blogging platform are you using these days?

I'm using my own static blog generator: https://github.com/qawemlilo/node-blogger, tried WordPress for a short-while but found it a bit too bloated.

Q_the_Noviceon Ask HN: What is your job role and what are the side projects you are working on?

Lead developer for a small London based start-up. Side project is a Node.js community platform: http://nodeza.co.za.

Q_the_Noviceon NodeBB: Node.js-based forum software

Also found the coding style a bit complicated and confusing - looks like they are passing the User module to other modules(in this case the auth module) and adding methods.

Q_the_Noviceon Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

Gulp is written in a way I've always wished Grunt could be used and I have already started using it in new projects. RequireJS is still my front-end module loader of choice.

Q_the_Noviceon South Africa's Nelson Mandela dies

Such short sightedness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrBCgiFhmNA . Do you have any idea what it was like to be black or non-white in Apartheid South Africa? First educate yourself about our people's history before posting ignorant public comments.

Q_the_Noviceon Play, Scala, and Iteratees vs. Node.js and Socket.io

FIY, npm does not allow you to push a module version more than once.

Q_the_Noviceon Use a Google Spreadsheet as your JSON backend

I have once used Google Spreadsheets as a database for a bookmarking app: https://github.com/qawemlilo/Bookmarks. What I did different was that I published my spreadsheet as a CSV doc and then used YQL to convert is to JSONP.

Q_the_Noviceon Announcing Backbone.js 1.0

Backbone.js has made me a better JavaScript programmer, thank you Jeremy and everyone else that has contributed to this wonderful project.

Q_the_Noviceon Re: Why we stopped using Drupal for our platform

This post really resonated with me. I'm a Joomla! developer and the learning curve for the Joomla! Framework and CMS is a bit steep but once you understand the extensions architecture building web apps becomes enjoyable. Being able to break down an app to templates, components, modules and plugins is what I feel makes a system like Joomla! (or in your case Drupal) worth the time investment.

Q_the_Noviceon South African province spends $15.4M (140M ZAR) on WordPress site

It gets even better, the company that designed the website doesn't even have its own website: http://letlaka.co.za/.

Q_the_Noviceon South African province spends $15.4M (140M ZAR) on WordPress site

I'm from South Africa and this simply demonstrates the extent of corruption within our government departments. It is not uncommon for government departments to inflate tender budgets so as to benefit from kickbacks. I'm appalled by such such acts, firstly as a South African citizen and secondly as a hard working web developer.

Q_the_Noviceon Show HN: Backbone + Node.JS bookmarking app

I am learning by doing and would appreciate some feed back.

Q_the_Noviceon Don't get bitten by Javascript variable hoisting in loops

JavaScript variables are passed by reference, the variable `i` on the statement: `var msg = txt[i];` will always reference the last value after the loop has executed.