Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Retrospective: Week Ten

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In an ongoing effort to make this chain as valuable as possible to myself (and possibly others), I perform a weekly retrospective of how the past week went (notes from last week). I do this on Tuesdays to avoid conflicts with B'more on Rails, which usually holds events then.

WHAT WENT WELL

  • Learning the CouchDB changes API.
  • Reaping the benefits of last week's efforts with node.couch.js. I spent the bulk of the week prior learning node.js by way of this library which listens to the CouchDB changes API. I had installed a newer version of node.js that did not work with the node.couch.js available on github at the time. Updating it for node.js 0.1.33 was a great learning experience then. This week, I was able to use that library to really probe the changes API.
  • Day 2 of learning node.couchapp.js (a node.js reimplementation of couchapp).

OBSTACLES / THINGS THAT WENT NOT SO WELL

  • Last week, I had hoped to explore 2 or 3 additional CouchDB-related node.js / Javascript libraries. I got through 1.
  • The CouchDB changes API proved more daunting than I had expected.
  • Part of my difficulties with troubleshooting the changes API could be traced to my lack of familiarity with node.js. Because it is so new to me, I am never sure if any problem is caused by node.js, the node.js library, or the underlying technology.
  • Day 1 of learning node.couchapp.js. I really flailed that day.

WHAT I'LL TRY NEXT WEEK

I am not quite sure at this point, but I would like to tinker with:
  • coffeescript—with all of this Javascript work, I am interested in giving this a whirl.
  • node.couchapp.js—one day of quick intro may not be enough of this for me.

Day #72

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