Oliver Nassar

January 2011 Dev

February 08, 2011

Since I'm running themes on the other parts of the site where I recap the month, I figured it'd make sense to be doing that here as well.

Quite appropriate that since my last gig, I've learnt more in 3 weeks that I had in the 5 months before hand. Most notable would be all my work with NodeJS, but that's only among others:

I'll be doing a follow-up to my post node.js: first impressions.. where I basically wasn't as impressed as I should've been.

The reason for this short update is that I'm very much blown away by node now. It's speed, it's extensibility, it's familiarity for client side developers, and most of all, it's community.

Mongo on the other hand, is still kind of tricky to wrap my head around. It's my first real exposure to the whole NoSQL thing. It's apparently very fast and flexible (think no table schemas), but within the node realm, it can be a little tricky to work with (eg. for accessing any data, if you want to use it, you need to specify a callback for after the data has been retrieved from the data-store).

Anyway, those tidbits aside for separate posts, January was a great month for venturing into new areas. I dev'd a pretty simple Facebook App that had me learn some of the intricacies of their platform and got Python installed so I can start playing with that as well.

Feb. will no-doubt be tonnes more node stuff, and hopefully github-ing some of the wrappers I've had to write to make the project at work work properly.