Extreme Enthusiasm

I just attended CodeJam: Cutting edge web application development, a two-days course taught by Gabriele Lana and Sandro Paganotti and organized by Avanscoperta. (Disclaimer: I also offer courses through Avanscoperta and I had previously worked together with Gabriele.)

What was it like? In short, it’s like watching the reasoning, techniques and tools of two master software craftsmen at work. This was not an easy tutorial; the process was not simplified to make it easier to follow. Gabriele and Sandro applied all of their usual tools and process. This is the main value of the course; you can find as many Node or Angular tutorials, books and videos as you want. What you will not easily find is how accomplished Node or Angular professionals actually go about their business.

Gabriele in particular is fond of the “play by play” video series by Peepcode, where you can watch over the shoulder of an accomplished professional how they solve a problem. There is a lot of practical, untold information in that; information that we as a community don’t yet have a way of sharing. It’s about technique; how you use the shell, the editor, the keyboard. How you use screen real estate. What tradeoffs you make when you have to choose finessing versus delivering.

My particular interest in this course was to get up to speed on contemporary techniques for building web application. The old school of building applications by serving a new page of procedurally-generated html at every request is, well, old school. The new school is a single html page that contains a full application written in Javascript, while the server provides only REST persistence services.

The main gist of the course is that Sandro and Gabriele build an order-taking application for a restaurant. There is a mobile site that will be used by the waiter taking orders on a mobile phone, and a kitchen site that will be used by the cooks to see what dishes have been requested, and signal that the dishes are ready. The application is built with Angular in the frontend, and Node in the backend.

Participants follow the development on a Git repository, were a sequence of stages is saved in different branches. You could follow what the trainer was doing on your own machine and make experiments; or you could just watch what the trainer was doing, and listen to what he was saying. It didn’t matter if you didn’t complete the section (I rarely could) because the next stage would start from a fresh checkout of the next branch from Git.

The pace of the course was intense. The two trainers packed a *lot* of useful information. They showed different ways of doing things; for instance, the kitchen web site was built on just two files (one html and one js) and received events from the backend via websockets. The mobile site instead was built on a rails-like directory layout, with separate folders for models, controllers, etc; and it received events from the backend using Server-Side Events. Gabriele showed many different Node and Mongo techniques and libraries; Sandro showed many different Angular techniques.

Of particular interest was project automation with Grunt, which integrated many different tools together. For instance, whenever you saved a file, it would automatically run JSHint (check code style) and Karma (run the automated tests) and then reload the application in the browser. The initial directory layout was built with Yeoman. The introduction of Javascript and CSS libraries was managed by the Bowell package manager.

Gabriele explained his screen management philosophy: he uses a tiling window manager; how he completely remapped his modifier keys to type faster and with less strain on his body; how he uses Vim, how he uses the Unix shell.

I was impressed with Node. It’s an engineering marvel.

Last but not least, I should mention the course organizer Alberto Brandolini who provided us with delicious food during the day, lunch and evening. Thanks Alberto!

I invite you to check out the repository on Github. I’m very happy I attended this course!

This entry was posted on 8 February 2014 at 10:17 and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.