jordandenison

Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.

We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.

I have always been interested in building a real-time multiplayer game engine that could be massively scalable, and recently I decided to start working on a MMO version of the classic "snake" game. I wanted the entire #Stack to be based on ES6 JavaScript so for the #Backend I chose to use FeathersJS with MongoDB for game/user data storage, Redis for distributed mutex and pub/sub, and Socket.IO for real-time communication. For the #Frontend I used React with Redux.js, the FeathersJS client as well as HTML5 canvas to render the view.

I have long sought after the perfect local development environment for developing JavaScript applications, and after having tried several different complete setups, I finally ended up choosing to develop on a Windows host with a Ubuntu virtual machine running with VirtualBox. When the VM comes up, it automatically brings up Cloud9 IDE, which provides a great JavaScript editor, terminal access from your browser, as well as the ability to work remotely by choice and still have the exact same development environment, all served up in a browser. This helps keep the host system clean, and using Docker in the virtual machine helps keep the VM clean as well as it is the only dependency that is required to be installed to run applications.