event posts page 8

Went to a refresh cleveland event tonight, ReactJS: A hands on introduction. We worked on a simple contact list application tutorial created by the speaker. It was a nice simple introduction to React JS and ES6. I paired with someone, and we made it about halfway through. I will have to look at it in more depth later.

React JS is a view library for javascript that uses virtual DOM diffing with the real DOM to increase rendering performance. It also uses JSX to combine templates with view controller logic. I have been interested in it for a while but never really played with it where I got to actually use it. This was in part because I was most interested in server-side rendering with it and couldn’t get that to work, and because it requires some transpiling to use it in browsers when using JSX.

This was also my first time really using ES6. I’ve been reading a lot about it. Some of it looks interesting, but it also requires transpiling to work in many browsers. Some of it can be cool, but also foreign and hard to parse for someone new to it. I’ve thought it would be cool to write in ES6, transpile to ES5 and ES3, and then use mustard cutting to determine which to serve. It’s hard to figure out how to transpile to ES3 though, and that would significantly complicate my workflow. It doesn’t seem to offer quite enough to be worth it for me.


House fire down the street

To continue with my fire theme (see Van fire), I was awoken around 0500 to the sound of some yelling and then some fire trucks. I couldn’t see any fire or smoke from my bedroom window, but could see the trucks and firefighters and neighbors outside. I could hear some talking and at one point chopping and breaking glass. There were so many fire trucks with flashing lights that a red glow came through the curtain, reminding me of a certain Seinfeld episode. They took up like half the block parked along the street. One firetruck parked right in front of our house. They were there for a couple hours probably and kept me awake for at least that long (I often have trouble falling asleep). The event got a brief blurb and video on the channel 5 website.


Van fire

On my way home from my brothers, I saw a van on fire. Really on fire. The whole thing was enveloped, the van itself looking like a dark skeleton trapped within. The flames would sometimes jump to at least twice the height of the vehicle or flow across the lane width beside it. Firefighters were around it spraying away. The flames would fluctuate out and in, though always completely covering the van. This was on 480 West.

I witnessed another fire related incident recently as well. I saw a large plume of smoke on my way home from work. I was on 77 North and it looked to be a ways away. I had seen smaller plumes before and had wondered what they were, but never investigated. That day though, I had nowhere to be and was in my car, so I decided to find it. I just drove in its general direction until I got close enough to it. It was on the east side of Cleveland. The traffic around it was terrible and it was really slow going in its vicinity. I didn’t get the best view of it, but I did drive down the roads adjacent to it and saw the huge, rolling, multicolored plume of smoke billowing from pretty close and got brief glimpses of the flames and possibly the building. I saw streams spraying into the smoke and flame. The traffic was bad enough that I got my fill looking at it trying to get out of the traffic jam.


The Happs

New Cogneato people

For a small company like Cogneato, it’s always exciting to bring in new people. New personality, new ideas, new experience, new opportunities. We hadn’t brought on any new people for probably two years, and had even lost a few from our maximum. And most importantly for me, we have only brought in two new developers in my entire tenure, only one of whom remains.

With increasing business and one of our “contenters” (who do client communication, work on content, light development, etc) leaving near the end of the year, we decided to bring on not one but two more people. One of them is a contenter (who has already started) to replace the one leaving, but one is a developer. We just signed her on last week and she will be starting by the beginning of December. She doesn’t have a lot of web experience, at least on paper, but has a masters degree with a focus on programming. It will be nice to have some help and to have another person to discuss development things with. I’m excited.

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GiveCamp 2013

Finished my third Cleveland GiveCamp last weekend. Another successful event. This year, my project was a new web site with more features for Bike Cleveland. We were doing well enough with that project that I was able to help another project Saturday night and Sunday, a web application for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Environmental Education Center.

Bike Cleveland

Bike Cleveland is a bicycle advocacy group for the greater Cleveland area. They had an existing site that was in WordPress, but wanted it to be more engaging for members, allowing more involvement and discussion. Our group was composed of a team lead, four developers, a designer/ux person, and a learning teen with photo editing knowledge. Our client was good with WordPress, able to install plugins and what not, and generally understood what we were doing, so he was very easy to work with.

We started Friday night discussing what he wanted. We decided what was most important and what we could skip if time was short. He wanted to involve members with forums, an ability to submit events, forms to submit accidents and thefts, to have buttons to share things, and to emphasize ways to become involved with the organization. They also wanted the site to work on mobile devices so that people could use it from phones while out cycling.

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GiveCamp 2012

This past weekend I went to my second GiveCamp. GiveCamp is an event where a bunch of developers/designers get together with local charities to build them websites, applications, databases, etc. to meet a need of theirs. The product is started Friday evening and finished Sunday afternoon. The developers donate their time and get food, fun, and great experience in return. It’s a great way to learn new techniques, practices, even languages, as well as meet new people in the industry, often some of the well known in the area.

This year my team was to build a website for Buckeye Industries, a division of New Avenues to Independence. Buckeye Industries is a business enterprise that provides training and jobs for people with disabilities. They have info on the New Avenues site, but wanted to separate out the content into its own site. So it was basically a new site except for the content. Sarah Dutkiewicz was our able project leader. She did a great job working with our client, organizing things, and keeping us moving even through some troubles. Our client contact, named Karen, was very helpful and probably the most enthusiastic client I’ve met. The rest of our team started out as five people but then dropped to four as one went to another project.

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Givecamp 2011

Last weekend I went to GiveCamp in Cleveland. GiveCamp is a weekend of developers and designers building sites and applications for various charities. There were like 202 people there, working in the Lean Dog boat and in the hallway of Burke Lakefront Airport. There were 22 charities, each assigned a team appropriate to their needs. 21 of the projects were completed or nearly so in the one weekend allotted.

My project was Cleveland Carousel. My team also included a designer named Greg and another developer named Jon Knapp, who kind of managed the project most of the time. We had continuous help from at least one of the Cleveland Carousel people at all times. We also had a couple dedicated project managers come help us out for a little while as well.

The clients had a simple WordPress site in running with four pages, but they want something with a lot more content and pictures and a custom design. They came well prepared with a detailed plan of what they wanted, allowing us to move quickly with our small team. They worked with Greg to come up with a design, worked to put all of the content in place, and gave us continuous feedback as we built the site.

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