follow blogs onto your dashboard

create as many blogs as you want

update, repost, comment on, and like posts

search and sort posts in one blog or many

1.5 weeks · Ruby on Rails · Backbone.js · Marionette

Tumblero is a tumblr-inspired social sharing app that seeks to combine a cheerful, fun design with greater search and sorting features for a friendlier user experience. Follow blogs onto your dash and create, like, reblog, and comment on your favorite posts. Search by tags and sort by Recent, Trending, or Popularity anywhere - across your dash, through a blog, or site-wide. The Backbone.js front-end allows for a single-page, AJAX-based design that never has to reload.

• Rails counter-caching and action hooks ensure reposts always maintain the same notes, likes, and comments as the source post while minimizing database queries
• A composite subview design in Backbone.js with Marionette's event manager and AJAX plugins for liking, following, and commenting allow instant global event syncing without refresh
• Reddit-like features: Recursive nested comments on posts, sorting by popularity/trending through dashboards and individual blogs, instant notifications when others follow, like, or comment on your posts, and activity feed

Drag and drop search radius

Check out the web demo

Get it on Google Play and iTunes

chaffy · · demo · site

2.5 weeks · AngularJS (Ionic) · Firebase · Cordova

A 100% anonymous, location-based chat app built on Ionic (an AngularJS framework for mobile), Cordova/Phonegap, and Firebase with Google Maps API. Swipe around your bar, your concert, your area - or pick any city around the world. Create a chat right at your spot to broadcast an event, share what's happenin', or just hang out!

• Chaffy was built almost entirely through a labor of love, frustration, and self-discovery in the remotest corners of StackOverflow. I was interested in web and UX design, but had almost no experience in Javascript much less any coding experience when I first heard about Firebase and Angular. Intrigued by the idea of being able to write an entire mobile app in Javascript, I forked a simple Firebase chat demo and began building on top of it. The code itself is pretty traumatizing to look at now, but it reminds me how much I simply enjoy tinkering with building things.
• In terms of database structure, I realized the performance bottleneck really lay in minimizing calls to Firebase. This meant denormalization (i.e. providing more data than necessary at the endpoints). As I realize now with the Meteor framework, NoSQL databases such as Firebase and Mongo are more conducive for denormalizing than traditional SQL.
• The anonymous chat space for mobile is pretty light - the vast majority of messaging apps are for those already in your network. A bit of research suggested that a good part of the problem was that without high participation, most chats end up filled with "anyone there?" type comments, so in terms of UI, I focused on making clear 'hot' and 'active' chatrooms at a glance for users.

Expect Chaffy 2.0 to focus on speed and minimizing memory usage, while providing fuller chat features such as emoticons and picture exchange. The latest version of Ionic has also become much more optimized for Android.

pick up items, powerups, and fight bosses

0.5 weeks · PhaserJS

A full-featured Space Shooter game written in the PhaserJS gaming framework, featuring multiple levels, powerups, enemy types, bosses, and color tracks (collect all three Red, Green, and Blue tracks to beat the game!).

While PhaserJS's deep library helps compress lines of code, I chose to follow a modular, OOP approach based on prefabs (classes) for DRY-ness and easy scalibility in the future. Orgo also shuffles and recycles sprites to minimize browser memory. Expect greater world-building to come!

For a similar game I wrote from scratch in plain Javascript and HTML5 Canvas, check out asteroids.js.

Rails Lite is a simple reconstruction of the famous MVC framework, built from the ground up for a greater appreciation of its internal workings. There is a particular focus on how Rails controllers handle routing. See the code on my github.

For similar Ruby-fundamentals projects, check out:

• Chess: human-vs-human Ruby terminal game
• Checkers: Ruby terminal game
• ActiveRecord Lite: a light version of Rails' ORM for a deeper understanding of ORMs

coming soon

on web and mobile

in development · NodeJS · Express · Angular · MongoDB

Hungry? Swipe left to like yummy photos of food near you. Check out the hottest dishes and food deals in your area and order instantly.

MunchHero is an upcoming app built on the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, and Node), with Ionic + Cordova to port to mobile. It uses the Foursquare API to browse trending photos of food at venues near you. You can swipe right and left tinder-style to vote on pics, and click for ordering info.

2 days · Javascript · HTML5 Canvas

The classic game in HTML5 Canvas and Javascript. Randomly generates apples and includes pausing.

• Rising difficulty levels
• Special powerups with greater scores and immunity
• Scoreboard