nebenan.de | Backend Developer | Berlin | Full Time, Onsite-REMOTE-Mix | https://nebenan.de
Nebenan.de is a free local online service to strengthen neighbourhoods: neighbours can connect to exchange recommendations, things, help and news. We are looking to fill a senior developer position to help us with the backend part of nebenan.de.
nebenan.de | Backend Developer | Berlin | Full Time, Onsite-Remote-Mix | https://nebenan.de
Nebenan.de is a free local online service to strengthen neighbourhoods: neighbours can connect to exchange recommendations, things, help and news. We are looking to fill a senior developer position to help us with the backend part of nebenan.de.
Germans do use the word 'handy' when referring to a mobile phone.
To us, 'handy' sounds like it could be the actual English word for mobile phone. When we hear 'public viewing' we think of people watching soccer together outdoor on a big screen. And I guess that most of us first think of a laptop computer when we hear the word 'notebook'.
Take a LibreOffice/OpenOffice document as your template and send a simple http request with the values you want to replace (with support for images and what you call 'repeatable parts'). The system will then return a link where you can pick up your generated pdf.
I find it very useful to have an environment/toolchain that allows for quick validation of assumptions. Just something where I can quickly drop some code to see if it does what I think it does. If I get more comfortable, I start to write tests. For some stuff it helps me to put the hight level concept on paper in a flowchart or diagram.
Run some code formatter over the source if you get angry about indentation or other stuff that works you up.
Don't underestimate the human behind the old code. It might look wild to you, but the other coder had probably something in mind. :)
EDIT: about the fighting: Make peace with the code. You can't time travel away the problems. For me, I need to constantly adjust my mental attitude towards unfamiliar code. Sometimes that even helps a bit.
If you know JSON, you probably are somehow my target audience.
Imagine you could take your normal Word document and just put in some placeholders. Then send some JSON and this Word document (as a template) to my service. You would get a PDF in return.
Instead of MS-Word documents I use OpenOffice documents as templates.
OpenOffice is a word processor like MS-Word. Also a nice user interface etc. it is just build with different goals in mind.
Not in a way that an end user would not be frustrated at some point. I could read those files, but the output could be too different from what an end user would expect.
You are not the first one to ask about doing this in/for Microsoft land.. I'm working on this. If you drop me a mail, I would come back to you once there is something to see.
> A professional quote done before the end of the meeting.
I have actually some code ready that takes templates, generates forms out of them (even for offline mobile use) and uses template2pdf as backend.
But explaining that in a short message is hard for me. So there is no website or good documentation on that yet. This will change very soon.
That is a fantastic use case that is easy to understand and explain.
> Try to find a way of showing the template/input without it being a download.
I've tried to gimp up a nice graphic several times. I will ask a friend to help me with that. This is actually something I wanted from the beginning but never had the time/energy to finish. It just never looked good and raised more questions than it tried to answer.
Having some more pre-designed templates is also a good idea. This might not attract the right audience via search engines, but could be of real value to potential customers. (And value for non potential customers.. which is also nice.)
About https. I am ashamed that I've not yet purchased a recognized certificate. There should be a self signed certificate running, but since I did not set up my own CA, this is not really ready for production. The example code in the documentation does not verify the ssl endpoint. I need to fix that..
How do others handle this?
I wanted to buy a signature from a CA that is recognized by the majority of browsers and build my own CA for the API.
https://beastiebytes.com/more.html