I think there's value in writing code for yourself at times. Every other time in life engineers are told by their managers, professors, and anyone else who's overseeing them what to make and do. Doing a hackathon in this format minimizes that pressure and gives people a time and place to gather and just be creative for themselves.
I've worked over the last two years on a library called Falcon.js (http://stoodder.github.io/falconjs/). It's your typically MVC/MVVM structure with similar concepts as Backbone (Models, Collections, Views). But utilizes the awesome data-binding architecture of Knockout. Falcon's core belief is that front-end developers shouldn't explicitly have javascript mixed with html (or vice versa). This is made possible only because of how Knockout handles data binding and templating. Falcon adds common sense architecture around that belief. Take a look! I'm always excited for feedback. I've use Falcon in many production level apps both for desktop web and mobile hybrid apps.
This is my favorite 'feature' of knockout. It's as simple as knowing a single attribute 'data-bind' or comment pattern '<!-- ko ... -->'. The only down side that I've seen is not having an 'else' statement :/. That's just a by-product of how knockout's bindings work though and hasn't stopped me once from keeping it my preferred library.
I'd like to invite you to take a look at a library that I've been working on over the past few years called Falcon (http://stoodder.github.io/falconjs/). Falcon is an MVC structure around Knockout that is useful for small-large scale single page applications. I'll be releasing v0.10.0 which includes support for Knockout 3.1 and some other large changes within the next week or so. Always looking for feedback especially from those who've used similar libraries (Durandal). Regardless, I really dig Knockout, glad to see the continued work on it :)
This is especially huge for mobile web where the scroll event isn't fired until after scroll finishes and utilizing touch events leads to a pretty hacky and choppy solution. Bravo.
I've got a library called Falcon.js (https://github.com/stoodder/falconjs) that essentially provides a Model, Collection, View framework on top of Knockout that I've been using for over a year now on internal and client projects. It works really well for single page and mobile web hybrid apps, it's completely unit tested, and I'm currently in the works of getting the documentation finished up. It's only dependency is jQuery and it comes bundled with Knockout 2.2.1 built in. Feel free to take a look at what I have so far, I'd love your feedback. Again, I apologize for the incomplete state of documentation at the moment but I promise everything'll be wrapped up sooner than later!
Thanks for the quick feedback! As a quick update, I threw together a todo app that also describes some of the basic functionality of Falcon. Check it out: http://jsfiddle.net/stoodder/2ZX52/20/
We're a small team of dev. entrepreneurs who do engineering and consulting for other local startups and businesses with new product development. Our mission is to help the area out by providing startup-minded tech talent to an area that's lacking in that resource. Our team consists of recent college graduates who all had day jobs but quite in order to pursue a career in entrepreneurship. We enjoy working with startups, deving for startups, having fun on the job, and most importantly pursuing our own ideas.
What we're expecting from an intern:
- Local to the Milwaukee area
- Current college student
- Works on side projects
- Willing to work on software for startups and learn about startup culture
- Learn to create mobile and web apps
- Basic understanding of version control
- Deploy production-ready code to Heroku
What you can expect as an intern:
- Learn new technologies
- Time to work on side projects
- Learn about startups, startup culture, and best practices
- Receive top-of-the-line hardware
- Competitive salary
- Ability to have fun and be a proficient iron miner in Minecraft
If you're interested please send resume and/or example work plus witty commentary to:
I've never left a company because of my managers, in fact my managers were almost always one of the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. The true reasons, at least in my case, for leaving was always the lack of freedom to make my own decisions and the companies' support for "non project related" work. In fact, my manager did as much as he could to support my endeavors, everything within his realm of power at least.
