Web Site Overhaul

I'm back in consulting mode these days, so I went and spruced up the web site a bit. You'll find mostly the same content, but there's a new design featuring improved typography and a slicker adaptive design for those small screens we tote around everywhere.

I went and did a technology refresh across the whole stack as well, so the code has all been coverted from CoffeeScript back to JavaScript. All jQuery has been abandoned in favor of plain modern JavaScript (sometimes jokingly called vanilla.js), and the more app-like pages have been rewritten as AngularJS apps.

The test suite was already pretty comprehensive, but I've made it even slicker with supertest. I've also written a handful of tests in karma for the angular stuff. Pretty slick, but I still have more I could build there.

I've also been quite delighted with using browserify as my browser-side module system. The contrast of the insanity of requirejs vs. my up-and-running-in-twenty-seconds experience with browserify cannot be overstated. @substack FTW. Losers, go home.

A few years ago I abandoned maintaining my own photo management software in favor of just using flickr, but I used my old photo gallery application as a nice easy sandbox to learn AngularJS, so that has been updated and has better keyboard shortcuts and performance as it's a single page application now.

My folder structure has also evolved significantly, moving away from a Ruby on Rails type layout to a group-by-coupling approach which I find immensely superior. Of course this whole site is open source on github, so check out the overhaul everything got in the v5.0.0 tag.

Oh yes and the deployment system has been totally revamped in light of my new and deep love for ansible and Vagrant, so I can bootstrap a staging system from base OS image to fully deployed with a single command now and the whole issue of OSX local development not matching Ubuntu deployment is completely solved now.