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Slap-Slides: Arduino Powered Veggie Chopper Slide Deck Controller

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Derick Bailey

A few weeks ago I half-jokingly tweeted about my desire to turn a SlapChop in to a presentation controller … like I said … “half-jokingly” I give you the Slap-Slides, proof of concept! (no audio) <iframe> The code is written … Continue reading →

Posted in Arduino, Javascript, JohnnyFive, Prototype | Leave a comment

Prosthetics And Orthotics: Building Backbone Plugins

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Derick Bailey

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…  It was almost a year ago that I announced a book on building Backbone.js plugins. Since then… nothing. Well I finally got tired of sitting on it and over the … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, Books, Marionette, Principles and Patterns | 7 Comments

A First Look At My Arduino BBQ Thermometer

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Derick Bailey

I’ve uploaded a first look at the Arduino powered BBQ thermometer and software that I’m building. It’s using an Arduino Uno with Ethernet shield.  The probe is a 100K “meat probe” (aka “thermistor”) that I took from a store bought … Continue reading →

Posted in Arduino, C, Hardware, JSON, KendoUI, Mobile | 3 Comments

MarionetteJS v1.0

Posted on March 25, 2013 by Derick Bailey

Hot on the heels of the Backbone v1.0 release, I present MarionetteJS v1.0! I quietly released it over the weekend, and I’m glad I did. I already had a bug report and have released v1.0.1 to fix it. :D The … Continue reading →

Posted in Backbone, Javascript, Marionette, Open Source | 14 Comments

Event Aggregator And/Or/vs Mediator: A Tale Of Two Patterns

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Derick Bailey

Design patterns often differ only in semantics and intent. That is, the language used to describe the pattern is what sets it apart, more than an implementation of that specific pattern. It often comes down to squares vs rectangles vs … Continue reading →

Posted in AntiPatterns, Backbone, Design Patterns, Javascript, JQuery, Principles and Patterns, Workflow | 12 Comments

Tips On Submitting A Conference Session

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Derick Bailey

In the last 3 or so years, I’ve had every conference submission I’ve entered, rejected. Now that doesn’t mean I haven’t spoken at any conferences – I’ve been invited to a handful and have had a ton of fun at … Continue reading →

Posted in AntiPatterns, Community, Education, Retrospectives | 10 Comments

On Testing “Trivial Code”

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Derick Bailey

I can’t resist jumping on the band-wagon and telling people that they’re wrong, so here goes… :D Mark “Ploeh” Seemann wrote a post on testing trivial code. There have been several responses saying he’s wrong and that you shouldn’t test … Continue reading →

Posted in AntiPatterns, Principles and Patterns, Quality, Test Automation, Testing, Unit Testing | Leave a comment

Method Rewriting: Running With A Lit Stick Of Dynamite

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Derick Bailey

I had a problem I wanted to solve. I thought to myself, “I know! I’ll use function rewriting!” and it was good… I solved the problem. But I also introduced some other problems regarding method references and event handlers.  Method … Continue reading →

Posted in AntiPatterns, Backbone, Javascript, Principles and Patterns | 7 Comments

Some Notes On Screencasting

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Derick Bailey

I put together some notes for my team, on building some screencasts. I thought they came out fairly well, so I wanted to share with the rest of the world.  Note that these are my opinions based on the work … Continue reading →

Posted in OSX, Quality, Screencast, Tools and Vendors | 9 Comments

Building Sample Apps in Ruby, NodeJS and PHP

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Derick Bailey

In the last three years I’ve gone from full time .NET development to full time Ruby on Rails and then full time JavaScript. It’s been an awesome ride, so far, but it’s not done yet. I started digging in to … Continue reading →

Posted in Community, NodeJS, PHP, Productivity, Ruby | 27 Comments