July 25th, 2014
The new Cloud9 IDE which I had previously blogged about
is now live! I participated as a user in the public beta and found they had
really taken it to the next level.
As a developer, there was a gem in the release announcement -
the new Cloud9 IDE is built on Docker! Docker has been
on my list of things to get up to speed on for a while. It looks like Docker is
becoming the default building block and enabling a whole suite of applications
that previously wouldn't have been possible because of the ops nightmare.
Seriously, Cloud9 give you an Ubuntu backed browser based IDE, with sudo
access. Before something like Docker building something like this securely would
be next to impossible.
I can't wait to see what other previously out of reach business ideas Docker
enables, and I'd love to hear from Cloud9 about their experiences building with it!
Tags:July 9th, 2014
Check out the new look! I've updated the styling of this blog to be based on the
Bootstrap Blog Example. I had previously
been using the html5up striped layout, which was cool,
but I wasn't impressed with the page speed because it relies on a lot of javascript
for layout.
I've customized the Bootstrap Blog Example with a theme from Bootswatch
to give it a bit more pizazz. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Page speed
is much improved!
Tags:June 27th, 2014
I've used Cloud9 IDE for a few years now, for as much development
as I can. In some ways it's not as powerful or customizable as using a native
environment, but the tradeoff is worth it: you can sit down at any computer with
a browser and an internet connection and be back where you left off, literally
in seconds. I use Cloud9 to author this blog.
For personal projects, I mostly use node.js, which has
fantastic support on Cloud9. You can do debugging, breakpoints, live variable
inspection, etc. All the things I've never been able to set up in my local
development environment using Sublime or whatever. So in that respect Cloud9 is
actually ahead! One of my projects is node-midi,
a native node.js module for MIDI i/o. I haven't been able to develop node-midi
on Cloud9 because although it has a C++ compiler built in (this is actually amazing
when you think about it!), node-midi requires ALSA to be installed to compile
successfully on Linux. So I was out of luck - until now.
Cloud9 have released a new beta, where every workspace is backed by an Ubuntu VM,
and you have sudo. I was lucky enough to get access to the beta (which was
pretty easy - I just asked)
and once I setup a new workspace for node-midi I did a sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev
and then successfully compiled node-midi.
The new Cloud9 beta is amazing and not just for that reason. The new Terminal is
much more stable - I do most of my development on a Chromebook over 3G tethered
to my iPhone, and had occasional terminal weirdness which i haven't seen in the
new beta.
Now the only thing it can't do is actually run the tests for node-midi. This may
be possible because in theory with sudo access I might be able to actually set up
enough of ALSA to use the virtual MIDI ports, but I haven't been able to make it
happen. That would be mind blowing.
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