It has been a while since my last post here. Mostly busy with work things and home stuff. Still digging into JavaScript, WebGL and a bit of node along the way.

Tracking things I’ve looked at on this page.

Mostly reading lately

I have been continuing my reading and some sandbox setup amid the chaos as we’re getting ready to have new rugs installed and new hardwood flooring (this one I’ll be doing) put in the hall and my home office.

I’m still reading about JavaScript to prepare for some sandbox work that will involve interactive web applications. I’ve added in a bit of node.js reading as that platform looks interesting for small browser oriented tools both at home and for development and SQA support at work. It is particularly attractive as it is:

• cross platform
• has access to host resources
• looks like an easy install remove process to allow temporary use while debugging something without polluting a system under test with lots of clutter
• runs javascript so easy to modify, potentially even by non-developers.

Still looking at JavaScript related items.

WebGL and canvas look very interesting. I love the power of all the capabilities that full OpenGL provides, but being able to do a decent fraction of that stuff in a browser is very exciting. Canvas is lighter weight but still pretty capable as it seems to provide much of what early postscript supported in an interactive web environment.

Hoping to find time to actually sit down and start writing some code at night or on the weekend with some of these tools sometime soon. Looks likely to remain busy for a while so progress may be slow.

I have downloaded (git cloned in general) a range of javascript libraries and tools…both to use and to look the code over. Always interesting to see what other people have written in a new language.

PHP is on the back burner but still simmering

I still have to get back to a bit of PHP and RESTful API support in PHP work as my current hosting is PHP oriented and any back-end for sandbox work is likely to require coding on the server and a database to persist things to.

Clouds and clouds and clouds…

I’ll probably dig up my AWS credentials (never did much with my free year as I was working for Amazon Robotics for most of that time and didn’t need to use my home account. I’ll also likely take a look at Azure along the way. I’d really like back-end options for sandbox projects beyond PHP. I’m not sure what my current hosting provider offers (GoDaddy) that is within my budget but I’ll look there as well. Ideally I’d find a cloud provider that offered attractive enough pricing that I could have a low end virt and some back-end storage there for a decent price. As time permits (and as I reach the point where I can actually do something) I’ll likely research a bit more and comment here…