Forward 4

So, in an effort to be more “engineery” (because you have to come from the right “pipe” to be “engineery”), I’m going to up my game and speak at some conferences.

To get my feet wet, I’m going to help TA with Brian Holt at Forward 4 in February (check out my horrible picture here).  We’ll be talking about React and CS fundamentals in general.

This should be lots of fun, and my first time talking in front of some a wide and broad audience.  Come check us out!

“Field Trip” fun…

I hate getting tripped up on silly interview questions, and I usually always rework them afterwards to see what brief moment of dumbness I was suffering during the interview.

On a “field trip” I took recently just for fun b/c of who it was, I had a problem presented like this, with a jsFiddle link to my current solution below.

GRRRR at how easy this was in thought after the interview… unamused

An interview question, to create a generic function that will give a path for cursor animation on a “search menu” that is displayed like:

A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y
Z

With a path given like “R!L!DDDRRRR!” when searching for “BAT”.

The problem assumptions were that you are always dealing with uppercase letters, no special characters, no spaces, etc. The beginning always starts at ‘A’. You are also given a dynamic width (to worry about), so your function can traverse any size menu. I got tripped up on this after getting barraged with a bunch of core JS language questions, so here’s a stab at the solution, minus some additional work to not traverse boundaries (outside the matrix or in places where there are no selectable letters).

http://jsfiddle.net/marshallbu/x9LwD/

Nice new App Creator in ServiceNow

Well, I wish I would have had this at a previous job.  This is really nice approach to building apps in the system, and will definitely make it easier and quicker to build IT apps without muddying up the core application, and further “hindering people from trivial tasks”.  With the amount of hacking I used to do in there, I wonder how hackable this is in the sense of keeping everything contained.  I’ll probably do some tinkering with their demo site just to see.  Well done ServiceNow!

P90X? So 2012. Try the App Creator. | ServiceNow Community.

(Also love the new Santa Clara office building I saw a couple of weeks ago, guess that means no more “renting”)

[update]: Another tidbit one of my friends at the ServiceNow conference just sent me, a way to tie a real editor (Sublime in this case) into working with SN scripting: https://fruition18.service-now.com/sn_sublime.do

Do it the MEAN way

After fully playing with AngularJS for a recent hack at work, I fell in love with it’s simplicity.  Using ExpressJS, NodeJS, and AngularJS together is awesome, but then I ran into some headaches (that I easily worked through) using Redis as the NoSQL db.  After reading this article, I think I know what I’ll be experimenting with on the next (next) hack day.

The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog, The MEAN Stack: MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and Node.js.

Can’t get much simpler for quickly and nimbly building an app for a hack, and potentially further expanding it’s awesomeness.

D3.js

In a recent hack day at work, a coworker approached me about toying around with D3, a cool Javascript library to do really rich, interactive visualizations of data.  Since my last hack day I only decided to quietly redo my marshallupshur.com site, I decided to jump in on the fun.

In a nutshell, D3.js is AWESOME, THE BEES KNEES, EPIC…. and a great way to make you remember geometry laughing

We ended up creating a visualized way of monitoring events with our home product, so you can see alarm notifications, arming info, etc. all on a cool little graph.  Best thing about, it’s all real-time, must better than the cached long poll list that is there now.

Tech used: node.js, socket.io, d3.js, html5, css3, phantomjs, …

Great fun, I hope to participate in more of these hack days, as it has branched out into me hacking together things for other hobbies of mine…. grin