So I met this guy named Sam Stiles on the Sails.JS IRC channel. He had this cool idea to do 365 Days of Code. The idea being that he'll commit at least once a day. I think it's a good idea but I knew instantly that it would just be another "first two and a half weeks of the year" resolution. In fact I think I made one commit on January 2nd and haven't committed anything meaningful since and January is almost over.
I guess I wouldn't say nothing meaningful. I have been doing some experimentation with SongBuzz. I'm trying to add the ability to resize the YouTube player as well as manipulate the playback quality. Playback quality is the easy thing from a JavaScript perspective but getting it laid out in a way that maintains SongBuzz's simplicity has been a little more challenging.
I also brought Premin back up again and remember where I left off - which is really sitting in kind of a design stage. I have to pick my next move and start implementing. The struggle I've had is what direction I want to code from: parent or teacher/administrator. My mission for Premin is to empower parents and teachers with tools for communication and collaboration. However I realized that before I can really go full throttle after the parent-facing functionality I have to complete a pretty big chunk of backend support, such as student and enrollment management. Even with online enrollment wizards having a good management interface for teachers is a make/break. It's also an absolute must feature, not fluff like "enrollment wizards." So I'm going to start there, with student management. I think that next school year I'll make a lot more advancements in Premin. I started it on my own accord because I saw the struggles my wife and her school contend with and thought I'd try to make something that would help. The reality it that they may never run Premin but they're still my inspiration. I say next school year because they're in the process of becoming NAEYC accredited. It's a huge process and when they're complete and theoretically running as a fully accredited preschool I'll be able to pick their brains for the tedious things that need to be tracked and implement them in Premin.
I also think it would be cool to have a sort of "accreditation wizard" in Premin that helps schools work with their NAEYC or United Way liaison to fast-track the process. Right now it's tupperware file totes filled with folders. Why are we still doing so much on paper these days?
I'm also pretty active at work with "committable code" in a manner of speaking. I have all of the typical stuff I do at work but I've started a new "Skunk Works" initiative at work to try and foster some innovation and provide people a place to come and learn new technologies. Using this initiative and time (aka lunch time) I've started building new internal apps to make my life a little easier.
I also moved my existing code repos to Github, the important ones at least. I really like BitBucket and I really like Mercurial more than Git. Having everything on Github and being able to provide someone with my Github username does have its benefits, however.
