Evented Arduino (with Node.js)

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - Jerry Sievert

I love the Arduino; it's one of the most awesome technologies I've seen in quite a while: its heart is a gorgeous microcontroller with a plethora of inputs and outputs. I also love Node.js: its event driven model is very elegant and the fact that it's Javascript makes it pretty easy to develop in, even for the novice.

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Servitude: CSS and JavaScript Injection Sugar

Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - Jerry Sievert

Multiple requests suck. Let me rephrase that: multiple requests really suck. The more requests you make, the more connections that are made, the more data that is transfered, the longer it takes to for your application to become responsive. Servitude helps you reduce the number of requests made for CSS and JavaScript down to one and injects it into the DOM for you in the order you request -- faster requests mean more responsiveness; more responsiveness means a better application.

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An Introduction to Bricks.js

Tuesday, October 4, 2011 - Jerry Sievert

It's been a few months since I released Bricks.js, and I figured it was finally time to talk about it. Bricks is a fast, and extremely modular web application framework built on top of Node.js that works a little differently.

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Faster (sometimes) Associative Arrays with Node.js

Friday, May 13, 2011 - Jerry Sievert

I had been meaning to spend some time with Judy Arrays but I hadn't quite found a good reason to explore them to their full extent. While attending NodeConf I caught Marco Rogers' talk on C++ bindings for Node.js which gave me a fantastic reason to spend some time in the Judy world. A few days later I came up with this project: Judy Arrays in Node.js. Unfortunately, it's been about half of a decade since my last foray into C++, and at least a decade and a half before that via academia, so while all attempts have been made to adhere to best standards of Node.js add-on development, I cannot guarantee that everything is 100% correct and that there are no memory leaks.

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Of Morality and Software Development

Thursday, January 27, 2011 - Jerry Sievert

It's not every day that I find myself in a conundrum -- not just any conundrum, but a moral one. I rarely think of computers and software in the terms of morality: right and wrong, good and bad, but instead the expression of ideas, a beautiful manifestation of thought. This time things are different.

Let me back up a little bit. It was the height of the WikiLeaks release of the Iraq War Logs and I was outraged. Typically with outrage comes the desire to do something about it: this was no exception. I figured that I could do something about it, but I wasn't willing to risk my own hide by hosting a copy of the data on my own servers. Laws here in the US are fickle. I could be in the clear, but still end up on some watch list. I could legally be OK, but if my travel is suddenly impeded, that's a bad thing. I may be idealistic, but when it comes to the possibility of losing my livelihood or being put on some sort of watch list I tend to take a step back.

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Of Pork, Freezers, Tweets, and Node.js

Monday, January 24, 2011 - Jerry Sievert

It was summer and I was craving pork. Not just any pork, but Tails and Trotters pork -- fed with hazelnuts and absolutely delicious. I somehow convinced my lovely partner-in-crime to split the cost of half of a pig; there was only one problem, we had a freezer but its pedigree was entirely unknown. Rather than take a chance on losing a whole lot of yummy a plan was hatched: we'd bring the freezer into the 21st century (or at least the monitoring of it).

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Node.js Date Utils

Sunday, January 9, 2011 - Jerry Sievert

Introducing my first Github repository: node-date-utils. During redevelopment of my freezer daemon (more to come later), I found a couple of missing Date methods. This is an attempt to fill some of them in.

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