Trevor F. Smith

Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling. Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before. Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more. I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid... - Trevor F. Smith

Easy unit testing in node.js and the browser, based on the assert module. - Trevor F. Smith

JavaScript build tool for Node.js It's `make` for JS. - Trevor F. Smith

I wanted to delve into what skills actually make a good full stack marketer. This way startups can know what they are looking for in a real marketing hire and this way marketers can know what skills they need to hone in on in order to get hired at an early stage startup. - Trevor F. Smith

The goal of the JS Test Runner is to be able to test JavaScript (JS) code using an approach that test driven programmers will feel comfortable with; particularly in the context of Continuous Integration (CI). JS Test Runner provides a JUnit "test runner" based solution that calls upon a "headless browser" to execute unit tests. At present the runner uses PhantomJS as its headless browser. PhantomJS is WebKit browser with no graphical user interface; it has a command line interface. JS Test Runner is also loosely coupled with JUnit so it should be possible to integrate it with others including TestNG. - Trevor F. Smith

Spectacular Test Runner for JavaScript. - Trevor F. Smith

Chai is a BDD / TDD assertion library for node and the browser that can be delightfully paired with any javascript testing framework. - Trevor F. Smith

CSS to make HTML markup look like plain-text markdown. - Trevor F. Smith

Forge was started to take away the friction around online payments. If you have an idea to sell something, you shouldn't have to worry about payment gateways and expensive setup fees. You shouldn't have to worry about custom credit card processing code and PCI compliance. We at Forge have solved all of those problems for you so you don't have to worry about it. - Trevor F. Smith

PeerJS wraps the WebRTC implementation to provide a complete, configurable, and easy-to-use peer-to-peer data API. Each peer simply provides a identifier with which other peers using the same API key can connect. - Trevor F. Smith

Who would have thought that after a year, charging 3x more would have resulted in 819x more monthly revenue than otherwise. That gets you to your financial goals a lot faster. After just 6 months, you’re pulling in nearly $36k per year! Making real money as a business changes a lot of things. More revenue allows you to build a real business where you have the resources to invest in things like better support and new features. One of my mentors (a guy who’s built 5 successful software companies) told me that when a company would object to his prices being slightly higher, he’d respond along these lines: “At $5/month I can’t build a real business. If I can build a real company, I can help you to blow up your business. I can provide support, product upgrades, and create more and more value for you. At $5/month, I can’t do anything real to help you build your business.” Something to think about when pricing your next app. - Trevor F. Smith

A tool for finding a real cause for slow SQL. - Trevor F. Smith

fatcache is memcache on SSD - Trevor F. Smith

Hot swapping is the process of replacing code while the application is running. It allows a developer to see changes immediately - no recompiling, no waiting on page reloads, and no clicking to get to the application state where the code was changed. Just save the file and you’ll see the changes. - Trevor F. Smith

StackMob provides an easy to use, reliable, flexible core for all of your mobile application development projects. Get started in minutes, without worrying about spinning up servers and databases and preserve all the essential backend services you need. With StackMob, you get the benefits of a fully featured backend in a robust, scalable cloud based platform. - Trevor F. Smith

Gerrit is a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system. Gerrit makes reviews easier by showing changes in a side-by-side display, and allowing inline comments to be added by any reviewer. Gerrit simplifies Git based project maintainership by permitting any authorized user to submit changes to the master Git repository, rather than requiring all approved changes to be merged in by hand by the project maintainer. This functionality enables a more centralized usage of Git. - Trevor F. Smith

AOL just released quasi-profit numbers for each of its divisions for the first time. As expected, AOL's dial-up subscription business--the business that powered AOL to astounding global success in the 1990s--still accounts for the vast majority of AOL's profits. Indeed, Gibson's future is not evenly distributed. - Trevor F. Smith

The following is the normal person definition of a monad. I’ll explain how it maps to the type theory definition later. A Monad is an object whose methods return monads. Note that this is a recursive definition. Monads are objects where methods return monads which are objects where methods return monads which are objects … This property is called chaining and is the distinct feature of monads with which you can identify them in languages where they are not explicitly named. The second important property is the ability to branch an execution path. Because you can take any monad in the execution chain, and start multiple new chains from that monad, you can get an execution path tree. These two properties are the main properties that make monads interesting. - Trevor F. Smith

A general purpose library for building credit card forms, validating inputs and formatting numbers. - Trevor F. Smith

One of Panopta’s strengths is its configurability to meet your specific monitoring and notification needs. Translating all of these configuration options in a simple and intuitive user interface and experience is challenging, so to meet this challenge, we built the Application Wizard for Bootstrap. The Application Wizard is a Bootstrap addon that allows multi-step forms to progress in a natural order while remaining flexible. - Trevor F. Smith

We manufacture awesome printed leggings, swims, tops and skirts from our little design studio in Brisbane, Australia. Awesome. - Trevor F. Smith

This tool has been built to allow previewing of font combinations in a fast, browser-based manner. There have been numerous printed books through the years that allowed a designer to put a headline font next to a body font, and this is an attempt to recreate that for the web. - Trevor F. Smith

Create & Sell Custom T-Shirts with Zero Upfront Costs. Buyers pre-order their tees online on your campaign page, so you don't get stuck paying the bill. - Trevor F. Smith

Creating And Selling Your Own Products - Trevor F. Smith

Polyglot.js is a tiny I18n helper library written in JavaScript, made to work both in the browser and in CommonJS environments (Node). It provides a simple solution for interpolation and pluralization, based off of Airbnb's experience adding I18n functionality to its Backbone.js and Node apps. - Trevor F. Smith

Chaplin is an architecture for JavaScript applications using the Backbone.js library. CoffeeScript class hierarchies as well as object composition Module encapsulation and lazy-loading using AMD modules Cross-module communication using the Mediator and Publish/Subscribe patterns Introducing Controllers that represent UI screens Rails-style declarative routes that map URLs to controller actions A route dispatcher and a top-level view manager Extended model, view and collection classes to avoid repetition and enforce conventions Strict memory management and object disposal A collection view for easy and intelligent list rendering - Trevor F. Smith

Develop and test your JavaScript applications as CommonJS modules in Node.js. Then Stitch them together to run in the browser. - Trevor F. Smith

If it wasn’t obvious from both the title of this post, and from the frankly negative quote above, this is not my favorite object-oriented pattern in JavaScript. I’ll go into this in further detail as I teach the pattern, but the reasons have to do with semantics, usability, verbosity, and blatant indirection. If you don’t pay too much attention to the details, the pattern is actually rather usable. But when you get into the meat of how this pattern simulates classical inheritance from a prototypal system, you see the flaws in the foundation. That said, the pattern can and has been used effectively, and there is one distinct advantage it has over other OO patterns in JS. We’ll get to that later as well. - Trevor F. Smith

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It‘s agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology. To simplify app development, brunch watches your files for changes and automatically wraps your scripts and templates in common.js modules. I particularly like the "Bunch with hipsters" app skeleton. - Trevor F. Smith