stoodder

I think there's value in writing code for yourself at times. Every other time in life engineers are told by their managers, professors, and anyone else who's overseeing them what to make and do. Doing a hackathon in this format minimizes that pressure and gives people a time and place to gather and just be creative for themselves.

I've worked over the last two years on a library called Falcon.js (http://stoodder.github.io/falconjs/). It's your typically MVC/MVVM structure with similar concepts as Backbone (Models, Collections, Views). But utilizes the awesome data-binding architecture of Knockout. Falcon's core belief is that front-end developers shouldn't explicitly have javascript mixed with html (or vice versa). This is made possible only because of how Knockout handles data binding and templating. Falcon adds common sense architecture around that belief. Take a look! I'm always excited for feedback. I've use Falcon in many production level apps both for desktop web and mobile hybrid apps.

This is my favorite 'feature' of knockout. It's as simple as knowing a single attribute 'data-bind' or comment pattern '<!-- ko ... -->'. The only down side that I've seen is not having an 'else' statement :/. That's just a by-product of how knockout's bindings work though and hasn't stopped me once from keeping it my preferred library.

I'd like to invite you to take a look at a library that I've been working on over the past few years called Falcon (http://stoodder.github.io/falconjs/). Falcon is an MVC structure around Knockout that is useful for small-large scale single page applications. I'll be releasing v0.10.0 which includes support for Knockout 3.1 and some other large changes within the next week or so. Always looking for feedback especially from those who've used similar libraries (Durandal). Regardless, I really dig Knockout, glad to see the continued work on it :)

This is especially huge for mobile web where the scroll event isn't fired until after scroll finishes and utilizing touch events leads to a pretty hacky and choppy solution. Bravo.

Gracias, fixing now.

Feedback welcome!

Thanks for the quick feedback! As a quick update, I threw together a todo app that also describes some of the basic functionality of Falcon. Check it out: http://jsfiddle.net/stoodder/2ZX52/20/

I've got a library called Falcon.js (https://github.com/stoodder/falconjs) that essentially provides a Model, Collection, View framework on top of Knockout that I've been using for over a year now on internal and client projects. It works really well for single page and mobile web hybrid apps, it's completely unit tested, and I'm currently in the works of getting the documentation finished up. It's only dependency is jQuery and it comes bundled with Knockout 2.2.1 built in. Feel free to take a look at what I have so far, I'd love your feedback. Again, I apologize for the incomplete state of documentation at the moment but I promise everything'll be wrapped up sooner than later!

RokkinCat - Milwaukee, WI Development Intern http://www.rokkincat.com

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We're a small team of dev. entrepreneurs who do engineering and consulting for other local startups and businesses with new product development. Our mission is to help the area out by providing startup-minded tech talent to an area that's lacking in that resource. Our team consists of recent college graduates who all had day jobs but quite in order to pursue a career in entrepreneurship. We enjoy working with startups, deving for startups, having fun on the job, and most importantly pursuing our own ideas.

What we're expecting from an intern:

  - Local to the Milwaukee area
  - Current college student
  - Works on side projects
  - Willing to work on software for startups and learn about startup culture
  - Learn to create mobile and web apps
  - Basic understanding of version control
  - Deploy production-ready code to Heroku

What you can expect as an intern:

  - Learn new technologies 
  - Time to work on side projects
  - Learn about startups, startup culture, and best practices
  - Receive top-of-the-line hardware
  - Competitive salary
  - Ability to have fun and be a proficient iron miner in Minecraft

If you're interested please send resume and/or example work plus witty commentary to:

work [at] rokkincat.com

- Rick (Co-founder)

I've never left a company because of my managers, in fact my managers were almost always one of the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. The true reasons, at least in my case, for leaving was always the lack of freedom to make my own decisions and the companies' support for "non project related" work. In fact, my manager did as much as he could to support my endeavors, everything within his realm of power at least.

This is awesome! I'd also like to share one of my local Wisconsin startups tackling the same problem: http://spandex.io/

Awesome, thanks for the reply. I'll take a look a bit deeper, but this really helps a lot.

Honest question, if I have a software idea and am thinking about patenting it, but then don't (although I've developed the idea), what happens if someone else re-creates the idea and then patents it themselves. Would I now be infringing on their patent?

I felt the same way. I still bought the app because I've really wanted something like this. But, weirdly enough, I did look at the iPhone stats first and felt the same way. Other than that, great app!

If anyone's interested in this library and uses knockout, I wrote a simple binding for a buddy using it. It's not the best, but it's a decent start.

https://github.com/stoodder/knockout-raty

Yea, you're correct. This has been one of those "duh" moments. Thanks for the reply!

Gotcha, thanks for the correction! I've removed my post. Could you clarify if or= still exists? I was reading the change log for 1.3.1 and I think I may have interpreted this line incorrectly "Conditional assignment of previously undefined variables a or= b is now considered a syntax error.". Thanks!

I worked with this as well and supporting IE7 can be very tricky. While it works really well for successful file uploads, if you're anticipating to return any type of error response (ex: 400, "invalid file type") then you'll need to add some workarounds to your server code and the iframe-transport file that comes with this. Primarily you'll need the following two adjustments:

* Your response must be at least 512 characters (we added white space padding to our JSON response). This is because IE overrides any 400-500 response with its friendly error messages unless you provide at least 512 characters of data. If you don't do this you'll get a cross site scripting error (because you'd be trying to read in the friendly error page, which is not on your domain)

* You'll need to add the response code in your response text because there's no way (please correct me if I'm wrong) to read the http status of a loaded page's headers in an iframe. You'll then need to modify the iframe-transport to read in the status code from your response text and make the appropriate ajax calls in jQuery.

This is obviously quite a bit hacky (and took me forever to figure out). Let me know if anyone else has any insight into this. I'll probably write this up in more detail in a blog post to come.

Yea, I completely get what you're saying and for the most part agree. To be frank, I think the author of the article made an error in deconstructing on the 'Math' object (at least at a global scope). 'Math' provides a namespace for all of its methods and a similar approach should be taken to other libraries/pieces of code. I also agree that keeping things simple and straight forward makes sense, but you're doing it by forcing one to abide by those standards although someone might have completely legitimate reasons for explicitly scoping their variables.

Either way, I think it is what it is and the benefits of CS very much outweigh the cons. Thanks for the feedback

Why not allow CoffeeScript to use the 'var' keyword, explicitly telling CS that this variable should be scoped locally even though it may be shadowing another variable? This seems consistent with their approach of allowing (although optional) native javascript syntax such as {}, and []. This still allows CS to stick to it's paradigm of forbidding shadowing unless we explicitly state that we know what we're doing.

Have you A/B tested the retention rate of those users? I'd be interested in seeing if you kept more users with the prettier layout.

Love the idea, would be great to have a 'quick' link at the top that could jump me down the page to the correct section. For example. When I search for border, I get all of the possible permutations of that style. It'd be nice to have 'border, border-left, border-right' etc. listed at the top. When I click on one, I get taken to it's section on the page.

This is great. I wonder what other applications will come of this. I have two concerns:

1) How does it know who you are? presumably through some type of check in service, but what happens if there's two people with the same name in the same spot. Not a high-likelihood problem, but still an interesting one.

2) Does this hurt the idea of tips? How can I tip my Starbucks barista?

Overall though, I think this is a great innovation and, if it catches on, will definitely change the way we think about purchasing things in general (and the way stores sell things). Checkout lines? What?

SEEKING WORK I've got a load of experience in PHP, jQuery (and native JS too), CSS(3), MySQL, Python (Django), Photoshop.

My most recent websites are: http://www.qrplz.com, http://www.jawnt.com (still in Dev)

Big fan of writing libraries, widgets, and other cool coding bits to solve interesting problems.

Here's a few pieces of my other work: http://stoodder.deviantart.com/gallery/ (past photoshop work) http://code.google.com/p/dragonflyjs/ (admittedly, this is out of date)

Contact me at: stoodder@gmail.com

Sounds like something that a 3rd party javascript library could handle :). Point made though.