Posts

About two month ago I did sign up for my first marathon and started to focus my training for that event. In my previous post I defined a simple way to measure my progress towards the goal, running the marathon distance. Another month has passed and here is my updated report. It was not a great month for training, as we did move to Berlin and a had a bad cold for almost 2 weeks. Both things did collide with my training schedule. But let’s have a closer look at the state of affairs: ...

Roughly one month ago I did sign up for my first marathon. At that time I also wrote a post about how I will prepare for that. So let’s have fun and create some additional pressure by publishing the results so far. How to measure progress The main goal is to be able to run the marathon distance. That’s why maximum run distance is of major importance. Secondly I want to finish in under 4 hours. This means a pace of under 5.7 min/km (btw. I really dislike using this unit, but it’s just so common for running). So I am having an eye on the average pace of the longest run. ...

AngularJS is an awesome javascript framework. With it’s $resource service it is super fast and easy to connect your javascript client to a RESTful API. It comes with some good defaults to create a CRUD interface. However if you are using an API, which needs authentication via an auth token, you might run into issues: The resource factory creates a singleton. If you do not already have an auth token when the factory is called, or if the auth token changes afterwards, you cannot put the auth token as a default request parameter in the factory. ...

Introduction For my latest project PomodoroEasy I wanted as much decoupling of the web client and the server as possible. So the server only provides a RESTful JSON API to feed the client. All the templating, views and business logic are done clientside. Furthermore I wanted them to be provided on different servers and domains. The client is a single page webapp, which resides as a static project on it’s own server. It is not sent from the Rails API server. ...

If you stumbled across my article series about how to build a webapp, you already know: I am working on an app to bring the awesome Pomodoro Technique to life on your machines. The Pomodoro Technique is a great, hassle free way to boost you productivity. The main goal is to focus on your tasks and to prevent interruptions. There is no app out there, which has everything you need to use the technique. So if you are interested in the Pomorodo Technique, checkout PomodoroEasy and sign up for pre-launch access. I am happy to get your feedback for this! ...

Running a marathon has been on my list for quite a while now. The past 1.5 years I did focus on learning Sambo (russian martial arts). But I just did sign up for the Frankfurt Marathon in October. What are the goals? The primary goal is to finish. In general this probably should be the only goal for a first marathon. However since I did very well in over fulfilling my self set goals recently, I will aim at a finish time below 4h. ...

Sometimes we have to write quite long shell commands, right? And from time to time you have an error in there or want to change a command from the history to do something else, right? If you are a vim user you probably hate to navigate with the cursor keys to the position in the command you would like to change. So why not use vim (commands) for that? Here are two ways to do it: ...

In the previous article we did define a vision and the key features for a MVP of our app. Now we will discover the domain of our app and get a model of it. Such a domain model is a conceptual model of the entities and their relationships relevant for you app. Why you should do it The reason to produce this is to clarify your understanding of the problem you are trying to solve with your app. It is just a structured way to think about your software. By doing so you often will change your view on the problem: You will discover things you did not consider beforehand. In other cases you may be able to simplify your initial ideas. ...

This is the second part of this Tutorial series. The first article can be found here: How to build a WebApp: Strategic Planning If you are familiar with agile methodologies you may want to avoid a lot of documentation. In general I think this is a good approach. But it does not mean, that you should never ever create any documentation. This first step aims at structuring your ideas and make you think about the product. ...

Intro Hi and welcome to the first article in this series. I will cover the whole process of building a modern Webapp. We will start with an initial planning (covered in this article) and finish with the public deployment of the app. I will rather focus on the development process than on implementation. There are a lot of great tutorials out there to learn how to code and implement stuff. This series has two goals: ...