Tech Soup "to go", a mobile transformation of techsoup.org (Moovweb RUNNER UP)
Technologies: scss, Moovweb, Tritium, Uranium.js. People: Me (Stephen Nguyen)
Assisted by: Moovweb Engineers/Team, Stephane Thomas ( dbc grad)
Link: http://mstephenitis8304.techsoup.org.moovapp.com/
Short Link: www.ubu.pw/Ngjw
Github: https://github.com/Stephenitis/tech_soup_to_go
Story: This weekend I got to go to the #Hack4Good by Geeklist @gklist hosted by Pivotal Labs @pivotallabs. I didn't have any ideas so I let the theme of innovating and building something for a existing nonprofit with a mobile concept and run with it. I thought of a few nonprofits and my experience with MAUVSA and UNAVSA and ended up thinking about a nonprofit that seeks to help other nonprofits. I know... Meta. I chose to try to make a mobile site for Tech Soup's website and make their catalog more accessible. I decided to use the Moovweb framwork after being shown a demo/tutorial of how the platform worked to transform hackernews, a very nonmobile site, into a mobile site. It was interesting to me to see the Tritium language in use because it very much looked like a mix of jquery and css selectors with scopes and methods. The following lines of code creates a div within the header element.
$("/html/body/header") {
insert("div", id: "navMenu") {
attributes(data-ur-set: "tabs")
}
}
It's interesting how the language was created by the sass/haml guy(s?). I'm a huge fan of haml and sass so I was interested in exploring down the tritium path.
Note on Learning on the Job
Learning a new framework and language during a hackathon is a dangerous proposition, you develop like a snail and need consistent support or great documentation. Luckily I had the resources of Moovweb's many engineers onsite and on hipchat to help answer all my questions. due to the slowdown in what I would be able to accomplish while learning on the job I decided to narrow the scope of what I wanted to achieve to barebones.
Barebones of Tech Soup
The biggest barebones functionality of the techsoup website I wanted to bring mobile was the ability to browse and discover the different software products that techsoup had to offer.
My presentation was well received by everyone all around thanks to a very tight goal and narrow use case. The following are my slides (live demo not included in the presentation but the links are up above).
Tech Soup To Go Presentation 06/30/13 from Stephen Nguyen
http://www.slideshare.net/stephenitis/tech-soup-to-go-presentation-063013
Post Dev Bootcamp I promised myself that I would keep building tight complete projects weekly if not daily. To ad lib a bit from a famous keynote from a man I admire "stay hungry, or be foolish". Hackathons give me the opportunity to take risk in a very short period of time and be possibly rewarded. #yolo. HAH! neways I ended up tweeting @techsoup on a whim and got notice from the heads over @techsoup and got the best validation you can get on twitter... a favorite and a retweet. (see image above)
I was rewarded with being the runner up for the 1st Place Moovweb Prize. (sweet loots were had in the form of prizes).
//tritium
$$("#binaryskipper"){remove()}