LEG
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve been hard at work, at work. We created the Light Engineering Group late last year as sort of a skunkworks R&D department. We don’t have product managers or process of any kind really. We experiment with new technologies and markets and pretty much have free reign as far as architecture, languages, server setup, you name it! It really is a dream job for a programmer. I’ve had a couple big projects go out the door recently and that seemed like a good enough reason to crawl out of the dark and write a new blog entry!
ActiveReader
My first iPhone app! This one brings down articles from Active.com and stores them in your phone for on/offline reading. On the server-side the articles are stored in CouchDB which is my new favorite database. I love JSON and I love HTTP—so does Couch. Couch sits behind Pound to make sure only certain URLs are visible to the outside world.
Widgets
We wanted a way for people to embed a simple little widget on their website that pulled upcoming events from our directory, but we also wanted people to be able to customize it easily. widgets.active.com is what we’ve come up with. The widget itself is all Javascript. The site for configuring the widget is a small little Sinatra app running on thin behind nginx
labs.active.com
This site has actually been up for a while but we just launched a refresh with lots of HTML5 goodness. It shows some current projects as well as those that have “graduated” and made it to the big time.