Facebook should introduce a clothes tagging feature

The next big feature that Facebook should bring out is clothes tagging. This will allow parents to tag clothes that they've given to friends' kids and track how many times they've been passed on. Recipients of clothes can give clothe-tag-thanks to those who gave the clothes as a gift or a hand-me-down.

The data collected from the clothes lineage (assuming you can identify the label) could be used to calculate the hardiness of the clothes and manufacturing quality. The more kids that were able to wear the same t-shirt or shorts will be the ultimate vote in quality. You could also determine which kid treats their clothes the roughest if there's no lineage from them onwards.

This will also help track when friends and siblings don't return clothes they borrowed. Tag that blouse in a photo of you on Facebook and then link-tag it in your your sister's photo. The public humiliation will ensure that she returns it to you.

NodeJS Express Automatic Content Type

Try this in a NodeJS Express application. Add a route as shown below and take a look at what the web page shows:

app.get('/mytest', function(req,res){
    var testdata = {
        segment: 'Five',
        value: '42',
        environment: 'development'
    };
    res.send(testdata);
});

Before you go to this page in your browser, probably something like http://localhost:3000/mytest you should bring up the Developer Tools, on Chrome you can do this by hitting F12 or Ctrl+Shift+i.

In the browser you will see:

{
  "segment": "Five",
  "value": "42",
  "environment": "development"
}

In the Developer Tools take a look at the Response Headers in the Headers section. You will see that Content-Type is set to application/json; charset=utf-8

Now let's change the mytest function to the following:

app.get('/mytest', function(req,res){
    res.send('this is my data');
});

The browser will now show you:

this is my data

If you look at the developer tools you'll see that the Content-Type is now text/html; charset=utf-8

NodeJS/Express detected the type of data that you're sending back to the browsers and adjusted the Content-Type appropriately.

Audit Controls or People

In my senior year at college I took Auditing along with a number of other accounting majors. I was on track to become an accountant, and in fact became an accountant, until I mainlined some source code and was unable to turn back.

The only thing that I really remember from that auditing class was our professor telling us about controls and people. His comment was: "You can put in as many controls as you want to enforce or prevent something from happening and someone will always find a way around them. At the end of the day you need to hire the right people who don't need those controls in place."

When I heard this it made absolute sense and have always sought to surround myself with the right people and by default trust everyone. There have been occasions when I've been let down which is what you'd expect with a large enough sample size. As I mature and become better at accessing people the disappointments have dropped.

This ties in nicely with the Agile Manifesto and the autonomy that you give to teams to self form and determine what they can get done in a sprint. If you have the right developers on the team the controls can be minimal or none. Trust is the key. Awesome results are the end products.

A Dozen JavaScript Libraries

Just spent a couple of hours this evening listening to Rob Richardson give an awesome presentation on A Dozen JavaScript Libraries.

He covered:

1. jQuery
2. Lo-Dash
3. Handlebars
4. Modernizr
5. Moment
6. Normalize.css
7. Twitter Bootstrap
8. jQuery UI
9. Backbone
10. Angular
11. JSHint
12. Jasmine
13. RequireJS
14. Rafael

in enough detail to arm you with the ability to select one of them for a future project. It also looks like he's extended the Baker's Dozen (13) metaphor to a JavaScript Dozen (14). I'm guessing that JavaScript has the math library to do that.

Also love that he's using reveal.js for his presentations.

Good work Rob!

MongoDB for Node.js Developers

mongoDB.org, the makers of MongoDB, run an great online course called M101JS: MongoDB for Node.js Developers.

The course is 7 weeks long. Each week will take you about 5 to 12 hours to complete and they deal with:

1. Introduction
2. CRUD
3. Schema Design
4. Performance
5. Aggregation
6. Application Engineering
7. Mongoose/Final Exam

Overall I scored 90% for the course. Each concept is well presented in bite sized chunks with a good video clip of 2 to 10 minutes long and usually followed by a quiz to help solidify the concept. They build on each other from easy to difficult.

If you want to get credit for the course you have to keep up and do it as each week becomes available as the homework credits only stay active for one week. This, in my opinion is a good thing as it focuses you to dedicate time every week to getting this done.

The course has great explanations on replication and sharding, makes it seem obvious and simple.

The final exam covers everything you've done in 10 moderate to difficult questions. You'll get a great sense of accomplishment once it's complete.

MongoDB Education provide you with a database of 120,000+ emails from the Enron Corpus which makes for an entertaining set of questions (about 3 of them) that use this database to test your query and update skills.

Of the 7,599 students enrolled, 1,482 students completed the course successfully, a completion rate of 20%.

OSCON Clientside MVC

The Clientside MVC page on the OSCON site

Tom Cully (BigCommerce Ltd Pty)
11:50am Friday, 07/26/2013

http://mozart.io/

Clientside MVC provides:
- scalability
- clientside apps exist mostly as static assets allowing greater use of CDN tech

SEO Problem
- webcrawlers and other automated clients that don't run JS
- implementing graceful degradation is possible...
- only early solutions exist e.g. Mozart Concerto

BigCommerce created Mozart to address their deficiencies in the other MVC frameworks. Mozart is written in CoffeeScript.

BigCommerce currently have their Operation Slick running in A/B testing with a 60% probability that a customer will get it at this point.

Mozart Demos
todomvc.com

github.com/tomcully/mozart

HTML5 Unreal Engine

OSCON The Google Open Source Update

The Google Open Source Update page on the OSCON site.

Chris DiBona (Google, Inc.), Shawn Pearce (Google), Carol Smith (Google, Inc.)
11:00am Friday, 07/26/2013

A bunch of updates around Google's summer of code. I attended this because of the Git Update in the schedule.

Git Dev over last year
- 3,037 commits
- release about every 6 weeks
- 248 contributors

Hosting Linux Kernel
- time taken is 2m30s to clone Linux Kernel from google's hosted servers
- GitHub takes 5m37s
- Kernel.org takes around 6m

Google has improved speed by changing the algorithm.

JGit 3.0 ("jgit debug-gc")
Gerrit Code Review 2.6 ("gerrit gc")

Android OS project
android.googlesource.com
548 repos

Gerrit Code Review appears to be a competitor to GitHub but perhaps only for an intranet. Not sure if it's hosted.