Some things I learned in September

###Javascript and Data Visualization

My company wanted a custom viewer for analytics data, perfect occasion for experiment with data visualization powered by Javascript. I started by taking a look at D3.js, which is the library used by the GitHub guys to draw their amazing repo graphs. It's incredibly powerful, but requires quite a bit of coding to get stuff done. I then used Chart.js for a bit. It's smaller, simpler, and faster to learn. This all comes with the downside of being less powerful, and with not enough of the features I needed out of the box. Also the development seems to be going really slow at the moment. So now I'm working with gRaphaël, it's built on top of Raphaël and has more of the things I was looking for ready made.

###Node, node, node!

With the project I mentioned above I finally had the occasion to spend company time working on Node.js. I like how lighter it is compared to Rails, and I'm definitely gonna keep experimenting with it.

In fact I used Node + Heroku to setup my personal landing page.

Sneak peek: having setup an Node + Express + Coffeescript task more than two times, and being DRY, or lazy, I've decided to put it in a repo. Stay tuned!

###Bower

They've done it again! After Bootstrap the Twitter team has released Bower "A package manager for the web". It's the bundler or npm of your web packages. Smart! One of those things you say "How could I've lived without it?"

###Other Javascript stuff

Moment.js, a slim yet powerful library to manipulate time.
I've played quite a lot with Jade, it's really cool, but not as flexible as I hope, or maybe I need to dig more in the documentation…. Anyway, I found this nice Javascript Template Chooser.

###CSS Frameworks

I looked into alternatives to Bootstrap. Here's what I found:

###Jenkins

I've finally been able to plant the seed of the TDD and CI culture in my company. They bought me a Mac Mini, and I've set it up with Jenkins. It's been a bit painful, but really fun! And now we have the tests running at every push and two nightly builds, development and qa, distributed via TestFlight. It's a shame I'm the only iOS dev who writes tests :(

###Ruby

I had a quick, and not finished yet, blast at making a ruby gem. Enter Swagify a gem to add some your commands and scripts outputs. I'm not gonna talk too much about it here, as I don't consider the learning experience over (it never is btw).

###Readings

###Something funny

Sloppy UI - It's all about the flaws in iOS 7 design
the_coding_love(); - Funny gifs to ease the dev life
Developers as Animals

mokacoding