The Art of Idea

Anonymous asked: Corey, I have a start-up in Austin seeking experienced advisors and wanted to present our concept.

Send an email, under 500 words, to corey@coreybutler.com.

Anonymous asked: images are not working on post : creating-an-amazon-payments-seller-account

Yeah, this is a problem with Tumblr. I’ve moved the blog to http://artofidea.com and am in the process of getting a new image host.

Anonymous asked: Great article on going from contract to FT. You gave really sensible advice!

Glad you liked it! Please note that this blog has moving to http://www.artofidea.com (this article is there).

Anonymous asked: how do i file my taxes as a w-2 contractor

You’d file the same way as you would for a regular job. Technically, as a W2, you’re not really a contractor. You’re legally a temporary employee of the contracting firm who sends your paychecks.

Good news everybody! This blog is going away. Wait, that’s not very good news at all.

Actually, the blog is just moving. I’ve always intended the coreybutler.com domain name for another purpose, and in 2013 that project will finally take shape.

This blog is finally being given a name and a new identity at The Art of Idea. The articles here are being transitioned to the new site, and you will see lots of changes on artofidea.com as I work to implement something more than the stock theme that comes with the new blogging engine.

The new site has a new RSS feed, as well as the ability to subscribe via email. I also have a lot of new material to release in 2013.

Until the migration is complete & this domain is ready for it’s new purpose, this site will remain. However; there will not be any further updates to it… everything is already working on the other site.

I look forward to seeing you all on the new site!

Are you an Ext JS or Sencha Touch developer looking for a gig? Perhaps you’re a Flash or Flex developer looking for a switch? Or maybe you’re just darn good with JavaScript? If any of this fits you, please get in touch with me!

Brian Moeskau & I have formed ThinkFirst, LLC. The company itself is young (kinda), but certainly not new to Sencha frameworks. Brian co-founded Ext JS back in 2007. I’ve been helping clients build applications since founding a consulting firm in 2002. But we have a problem… there is so much demand we can’t fill all the contract opportunities coming in!

Come work with us! We have full time and part time opportunities.

Does anyone know of a private npm registry hosting service? I’m thinking about starting one.

Background/Challenge

Like most people developing Node apps, I use npm regularly. Simply put, it is awesome. More recently, I have been building a lot of my own modules. In most cases, they need to remain private. However; I still need to distribute them to specifc developers… sometimes in different organizations. I’ve been looking for a simple way to do this, so I recently setup my own private npm registry. It works pretty well, but the workflow & management of it all feels a bit muddy. I have a few ideas on how this could be cleaner, some features I think would be awesome, and I see opportunity. But, just because I do doesn’t mean anyone else does. This makes for several questions…

Questions

Assuming there aren’t any services providing this (I haven’t found any yet), I thought it might be worth creating something. So, my questions are:

1. Is this something you, as a Node developer, would be interested in?
2. If so, what type of features would you want?
3. Are you currently maintaining you own private npm registry? Pain points?
4. How much time do you spend organizing, refactoring, and distributing your node code?

Any feedback would be appreciated. I’m really just exploring the idea at the moment, so I have no specific expectations. I don’t even know if this is a good idea… I thought some discussion/feedback would help determine that.

Thanks to anyone who participates!

It has been pretty quiet on this blog for a while - more than I was anticipating. I’ve been pretty involved in my projects and have a lot of (positive) things going on in my personal life. So, I figured I’d take a moment to address some happenings.

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I’ve been working with NodeJS for just under 2 years now, primarily from my Windows-based desktop. NodeJS was restricted to *nix platforms, which gave me a lot of appreciation for the Macbook Pro I was loaned. Seeing as my desktop is a workhorse that’s more powerful than the combined computing power of most of my data center, I installed some virtual servers to use Node on Linux. This works quite well, but has some annoyances. For example, I develop with Eclipse and Aptana, and I ended up writing ANT build scripts to automatically upload my changes to my virtual server.

Yesterday, an interesting effort from Microsoft was released, providing some cool functionality for Windows users. Take a look at the video below.

If you’re unfamiliar, Microsoft started contributing resources to a native NodeJS port a while ago. The workflow wasn’t very smooth though. Installing Node modules meant manually cloning them from Github. It just felt dirty in comparison to the Linux alternatives. It appeared as though Microsoft was (and is still) targeting IIS integration, i.e. more as a plugin to IIS than a replacement.

Now I haven’t used Node with Azure yet, but a few key points really stood out. The biggest was the fact that npm appears to work as it does in Linux. That is a big win for my workflow.

I also really liked the fact there is a NodeJS Azure Emulator for Windows. I’ve been training a lot of people in the ways of Node lately, all of whom are Windows users. Walking people through a virtual server installation was consuming a lot of time. Now, it appears as though a single link can get these folks up and running quickly.

My first question was whether or not I could use the emulator to develop my applications locally, but still deploy to my existing Linux servers. I’m sure Microsoft wouldn’t be terribly thrilled with this, but they’ve at least taken away my reason for completely switching to a Mac.

Since I’ve been wrapped up in the wonderful world of Node, Linux, and JavaScript, I really haven’t had much time to consider Azure as a platform. I’ve been looking at Rackspace, Amazon EC2 (which I use today), and several other VPS providers though. This video made me look, and the pricing for Azure is actually pretty comparable (in some cases cheaper) than what I’ve seen with these other services.

Of course, I have some testing to do. We’ll see how well this holds up with the ever-changing world of NodeJS and the multitude of packages that sprout up, but I am currently encouraged by what I’ve seen.

UPDATE: There’s a nice little tutorial on using NodeJS on Windows 7 over at dailyjs.com.

Git has become a popular source code management system, and Github has contributed to its continually gaining popularity.

Though there is a learning curve, using basic features of Git is pretty intuitive, especially with several of the freely available tools available today. However; getting your environment configured to work with Github can be a test of patience.

This guide is relevant to any Eclipse-based IDE, but for demonstration purposes, I’ll be showing how to connect Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2 to Github. This guide should also work for Adobe Flash Builder, CFEclipse, or any other Eclipse-based IDE.

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