One of the reasons I wanted to do a bootcamp is my own overflow of application ideas. This past week is the first time that I felt like I could start to implement one of my ideas using JavaScript. I’ll be posting a bit more about that in the near future, but first I wanted to share a little bit about the app ideas that are fighting for my cognitive process.
If you’re interested in any of these projects, please let me know!
- Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
Stage-Hand
For the better part of the last decade, I’ve spent my vacation as the assistant stage manager for a small music festival. This position actually led to me also working the stage at a larger festival this past summer. For a variety of unrelated reasons, the distribution, posting, and updating of the stage schedule was just a fiasco for both festivals this year.
I had already been looking for small scale projects that I could complete during DevMountain, and this seemed like a perfect project to tackle. On the one hand, a lot of it is super simple from a technological perspective (i.e., can be done with a really basic, single-page, CRUD app). On the other hand, some of the functional constraints will require me to take that simple application into some not so simple (at least not simple for a noob) areas, areas such as near-real-time communication and offline communication.
This past week, I realized that I had about 80-90% of the skills needed to make the super, simple version of this app - WOOT! I’ll be making a post soon about my progress on the initial version.
Meta-Mark
I actually have several ideas that involve cloud-based or social bookmarking (ala del.icio.us & pinboard.io). Since this is a reoccuring theme for me, it seems like I should build the basic bookmarking functionality as an NPM package, or some other type of module based sub-project.
Trek
I actually don’t want to say too much about this one, other than it is one of the primary driving forces behind me wanting to be able to code my own apps. So stay tuned for trek related awesomess!!!
Cohort.io
The idea for Cohort.io really hit me hard a couple of weeks ago. If you haven’t read my “DevMountain - First Quarter“ entry, I’d suggest reading that before continuing.
The idea behind Cohort.io is to leverage TDD and continuous integration to provide an assessment platform for students learning to code as a group (aka cohort).
The basic process will be:
- Students sign-up as a cohort member using a common git service (e.g. GitHub, BitBucket)
- Instructors upload assignments for a cohort using a TDD or BDD approach.
- Students push their commits for each assignment.
- When a student’s git service receives a push, Cohort.io runs the student’s code against the instructors’ test suite.
- Cohort.io then notifies the student of their achievement and posts the student’s stats in comparison to their cohort members. Students will also receive brownie points for more frequent pushes (i.e., students are rewarded more for committing and pushing after completing each test or requirement than they are if they wait to submit code that passes multiple tests).
Ideally, this will app/service will help novice students implement best practices almost from the beginning. In theory, it should also be able to be used in non-instructional based competitions.
BOM
My last burning idea is related to my interest in robotics. I’ve been fortunate to work in the robotics industry for the last three years, as well as tinkering with hobbyist level robotics. Where I’ve been working, we use an extremely outdated Bill of Materials (BOM) software package. I’d love to build a web-based BOM package, geared toward small and mid-sized manufacturers as well as hobbyists.