I've been working on creating a platform for a non profit to get veterans coding (http://operationcode.org/). We're a slack based community and have been rolling out some home grown slack bots and we currently have a rails app hosted on heroku. Managing and keeping track of the different apps was getting unwieldy so in an effort to consolidate our apps and reduce costs I evaluated a few different options. I ended up going with rancher and after working with it a bit I'm pretty happy.
I have github hooked up to travis. When a new PR (or commit) is pushed travis shoves the app into its container, and runs the test suite inside the container.
If that passes AND the branch is master we push the image to docker hub. As of now we manually update the app inside of rancher but I think automating that will be a simple API call. Once we get more stable I'll be investigating that.
I still haven't quite figured out secret management but outside of that and a tiny learning curve it's been pretty smooth sailing.
Operation Code is an open source project that helps military, guard & reserve troops, veterans and their families get coding and building software to change the world.
We're overhauling the signup flow to make it easier for software mentors, new signups and contributors to get started.
Operation Code is an open source project that helps military, guard & reserve troops, veterans and their families get coding and building software to change the world.
We're overhauling the signup flow to make it easier for software mentors, new signups and contributors to get started.
Using Firefox/Chrome on a linux box doesn't really compare to getting a dev environment setup.
For a rails app it's not a stretch to have to install postgres, rvm, ruby, some compiled gems, and redis. Then you need to make sure postgres and your rails server are running.
These aren't insurmountable and we can write documentation around it but compare that to 'Log into c9.io, copy this workspace and work on a ticket'.
I work with people that want to learn how to program and I hear feedback that getting an environment setup is overwhelming somewhat regularly. These online IDEs look like they can really combat that.
As long as they didn't state you can't use external libs it IS a good solution.
Their response lets their team dynamic and environment shine through. They came across an unexpected but valid solution and instead of accepting their question was beaten within the rules they rejected it. I'd wager they didn't fix the wording of the question afterwords either.
RasPI with a PID loop turning a fan on (increase heat)/off (decrease heat). The RasPI fed this into a backend server via websocket. We through a front end on to graph the temp, humidity etc. We could even set the temp and turn the fans on/off via the site.
Learning a functional language (and way of thinking) was pretty enlightening to me.
I've also been looking into learning a bit about machine learning and data science via https://www.kaggle.com/. They run contests with some very interesting problems.
I don't know if these are the next 'big things' but i certainly don't regret learning them.
If you've got a basic prototype and something you can show people you should be out talking to potential customers seeing if they'll buy it. In talking to a bunch of potential customers you'll find out a ton of actionable info. What your competition doesn't do, why they're not interested in your competition, other closely related services they would pay for.
I've been using bootstrap for a while now too and lately I've been trying out new libraries just to see if anything is better yet. On feel alone I didn't love foundation.
For a project that required pretty heavy customization I ended up using skeleton/react (http://getskeleton.com/) and enjoyed it.
I saw Semantic UI on here the other day and I may end up trying that out on my next project: http://semantic-ui.com
It'll run you through building a twitter clone and introduce you to git, heroku, a bit of CSS/HTML, and even goes into AJAX a bit.
I can't recommend it enough to people looking to get into rails.