Oliver Nassar

February 2011 Dev

March 08, 2011

Most notable as to what I did this month is that I haven't posted enough. Even remotely enough. My NodeJS posts seem to be getting pretty good traffic, but I just haven't been posting the smaller pieces of getting some obscure server env. stuff up and running. I'll try and do that more often day-to-day.

So, way-way more NodeJS. I mean, almost entirely NodeJS. It's rad stuff, but it's also very raw, so what I've focused on this past month is creating wrappers. I've written a really nice one I'll OS soon that is very useful for accessing MongoDB.

MongoDB being a document-storage system that uses JSON notation, it's really powerful, but kind of difficult to wrap ones head around coming from a RDMS background. The wrapper takes care of callbacks for basic CRUD operations (create, remove, update, destroy). It also handles connection to a database and collection (similar to a table in the RDMS world).

I also recently (not in Feb?!) tackled a Bin Packing Problem. That was a toughie, and still is, but in the end, the code ended up being pretty simple, minimalistic, and elegant.

Hmmm, I guess worth noting is that I've got a pretty solid, lightweight library I tend to reuse for small php/db driven sites. I deployed it with someone I work with (my first time being solely server side and not being involved in any of the client side dev). It operates nothing like a framework, but just little helpers. Very light, very organized, and very manual (eg. not the automation of a framework), but just brute simple to get up. I may throw that up in a zip here at one point incase it can help anyone else. It's secure, fast, and flexible for small projects.

Anyway, I can't think of too much else I did this month dev wise. Still haven't caught up on my HTML5 and CSS3 like I wanted (ignoring Python). But hopefully soon.