KnockoutJS – Meta For You

This blog hasn’t seen much action lately, but that’s a misrepresentation of my online interactions. Most of my interaction in the past few months has been on Stack Overflow Q&A, and some on Stack Overflow “Documentation” as well as a small amount on GitHub. I wanted to aggregate some of those interactions on my blog, as well as perhaps cross-post bits and pieces here, mainly for my own reference.

Let’s start with the first: aggregating the bits and pieces that I want to have easy links to.

Stack Overflow Documentation

“Showcasing all common Angular constructs“. I’m linking to the most up to date version. I wrote V1 of that article, which was subsequently improved by various other folks. It’s the tutorial (and equally important: the style of tutorial) I wish I’d had when I started learning Angular.
KnockoutJS “Equivalents of AngularJS bindings“. Linked page summarizes the state SO Documentation is currently in, at least for low-traffic tags: little and poor collaboration, and some frustration because some decent examples I wrote just don’t get reviewed (neither approved nor rejected). Thinking I might turn my content there into a (series of) blog post(s) here. Not sure yet.

Stack Exchange Q&A

At around 20 questions and 200 answers in 2016 so far I’d say I’m “moderately active”. Here’s a few that stood out when I browsed through my recent history:

On (being able to change) Angular Constants, and Object.freeze. Times like these I count myself blessed having learned about pointers the hard way, before moving on to languages where you hardly (see that you) use pointers anymore.
A late answer to a seemingly impossible situation, where building C♯ code in Release mode actually changed the call stack being logged. With 20/20 hind sight the root cause is obvious, but it had me chasing my tail for almost a day.
A long-winded question on custom JsonConverters with a (more to-the-point) self-answer, grabbing stray upvotes over time, which feels great because it probably means sharing my findings helped others as well.
And another very long-winded self-answered question on Typescript and Chutzpah, with nearly no views, no upvotes for the answer or the question, but on the other hand: interaction with Chutzpah’s creator, helping me find a solution.
Remixing a five-year-old answer on mocking an IEnumerable with Moq into a new answer, the CC-By-SA license and Q&A format at its best.

I also gave SoftwareRecs.SE another shot, posting some questions, but they fit right into my question history: lots of unanswered tumbleweeds. And not for lack of trying, as I spend a lot of effort on making my questions there as good as they can be. The main reason I do that (and the reason I keep coming back to softwarerecs.se, in spite of the tumbleweed-factor) is that thinking carefully about your wishes and requirements at the least will help you find something yourself, if no-one else recommends anything.

And even though I haven’t interacted with Cooking.SE much lately, every stray upvote now and then to my “Cooking fish in a dishwasher” answer makes me smile.

GitHub

I don’t interact as much here yet as I’d like. I specifically wish I remembered more often than a measly four times to create gists, because the ones I did create are ones I tend to go back to. In addition to gists, I’ve gotten to creating only very few issues and pull requests, something I want to work on.

One shoutout by the way to the DefinitelyTyped repository, because that community has to deal with a really scattered committer base, and seem to do so pretty well. My pull request (though small) was reviewed and merged quite quickly.

In Closing…

What to do next? The tags I followed on Stack Overflow for answering seem to have dried up a bit. Perhaps some more interaction on GitHub, as well as re-editing some of the above links into blog posts? Then again, a few weeks of vacation to Hawaii are coming up as well, so it might be a while again before posting…

Okay, the title is about as uninspired as topping a vanilla ice cream dessert with chocolate sauce. But it’s to the point! Also, with slight OCD, it’s nice that my archives will show nicely aligned “Finishing …” titles. This is important for many reasons!

Anyhow, as I’ve announced recently, I had already ~~finished~~ wrapped up one project: BattleTop. Have a peek at the Source, or check out the Live Version.

Elevator Pitch

What would’ve been the Elevator Pitch if I had made one when I started? Something like this:

I’m developing an app for keeping combat initiative so tabletop RPG groups can skip the tedious parts and share the initiative state easily, using (mobile) devices that are present in sessions anyways.

Writing elevator pitches is far from my specialty, perhaps I should’ve said something about “the competition” too: I’ve actually looked for existing apps, and tried a few from the Android Play Store. Only a few existed at the time, and they were very unsatisfactory.

What’s it built with?

I’ll be honest: from the subset of suitable technologies, I didn’t choose based on “best for the job”. Instead, I chose two technologies that I wanted to learn more about, and stayed in my comfort zone when choosing the rest.

The initial prototype was built with:

Html5, because at the time I loved tinkering with the new semantic tags. Also, I intended to ~~learn all about~~ tinker with LocalStorage for saving state between (possibly accidental) page refreshes.
Custom CSS, because it’s “good enough” for a prototype, and switching to SASS or LESS later on is easy.
jQuery, because I thought I wanted to learn how to write jQuery plugins.

Only two days / 11 commits after I had started did I branch off to rewrite things MVVM style with KnockoutJS. I’ve not looked back since. It also paved the way for easy unit testing, allowing me to experiment with QUnit.

How’s it wrapped up?

The frequency with which our group did RPG sessions had dropped dramatically. This removes the need to have a tool, the motivation to keep developing it, and the ability to test it. And this is okay with me. I learned some cool new things, and heck: it even got it to a functional beta version.

To wrap it up I just reviewed all of my code. Unit tests had already been done in August, and even though the code isn’t the fanciest ever, it didn’t have any obvious loose ends or idiotic bugs. So after some minor changes I just added a “discontinued” warning to the code, the live version, and the project site, and that’s that: closure!

Any future for BattleTop?

Not very likely. I think I prefer to focus effort on one certain other project, and after that probably even start new projects before picking up BattleTop again.

But like I said: I’m okay with that.

Tag: KnockoutJS

Aggregated online interactions