Welcome Home App and Meteor part 2

March 20, 2015 by Jorge Morales

A lightweight Meteor.js Phillips Hue lights control panel.

App Status

Alpha version: Alpha software can be unstable and could cause crashes.

Repo

https://github.com/magneticore/welcome-home

Quick App Install

If you have NodeJS and Meteor already installed, setup is as simple as running meteor from the app directory.

Otherwise:

Install Node: http://nodejs.org
Install Meteor: curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh
Open the control panel in your browser: http://your_local_ip:3000

Requirement – Hue Bridge

After lauch, the application will perform an initial test to connect to the Hue’s bridge. Touch the middle button on the bridge and within 30 seconds click on the test button on your browser. After these steps the App will have permission to use your Hue bridge.

Options for Deploying

Now that you’ve tested the app, you may want to set it up to run all the time. There are a couple of options for this.

First thing’s first. The app needs to live on the same LAN as the lights it will be controlling.

Next, you could do a proper production deployment.

Or (much easier) since it will only ever be accessed over the local network, just run it in the background, using the dev server: meteor &

Providers/source

Special thanks to Kelli Shaver for the initial implementation.

Welcome Home App and Meteor

March 20, 2015 by Jorge Morales

When I test some new technology or framework I usually try to find a mini related project to do in a way that I could practice what I learned in a Webinar, tutorial or similar.

About a week or two ago I heard about Meteor.

Meteor is a complete open source platform
for building web and mobile apps
in pure JavaScript.

My first thought was. Oh no! another JavaScript framework, but then I read a bit more about Meteor’s features. To highlight some:

Radically less code: Accomplish in 10 lines what would otherwise take 1000, thanks to a reactive programming model that extends all the way from the database to the user’s screen.
Browser and Mobile: A great experience both on the web and as a phone or tablet app.
Live updates: Data updates live on the screen as it changes. Users can collaborate seamlessly.
Ultra responsive: Changes made by a user are instantly visible, without the unprofessional laggy feeling that would result from waiting for a round trip to the server.

At this point I was curious enough to try it. A few online tutorials and videos and then I was thinking about what kind of project I would like to test the framework with.

Then I remembered how the Phillips Hue App is not particularly what I was looking for to control the lights in my home.

So a quick dive on the Hue’s API, a few sketches later, a bit of browsing in GitHub and then I was all set.

Changing the development culture at work

July 29, 2013 by Jorge Morales

I’m excited

I presented to all the CoralCEA’s team what I have been working on in my spare time for the last few weeks.

But first a little bit of background

On top of my development tasks I’m also in charge of deployments which includes Virtual Machines creation to support our architecture.

It is not a difficult task but it takes a good amount of time whenever something gets a considerable update.
For example: A Java update or a security bug.

The usual process is:

Download the ISO file of your favourite Linux Distribution
Use VMware Fusion to create a blank VM
Install the base OS
Install
- Packages
- Dependencies
Build
Pre-configure some key elements for the architecture

The down side, as discussed previously, takes a good chunk of time and it could be prone to errors.
It’s easy to forget a parameter or a specific piece of configuration or script.

Then the VM distribution propagates into all the pieces of our development cycle.

Some of the problems and some foreseeable consequences are:

A number of VM versions are used by Designers/QA
Are we all running the latest VM version?
What if something was missing? Re-iterate?
New requirements/configuration changes?
Slows
- development
- QA
- Response time for bugs/fixes
Did somebody say UPDATES?
Not agile enough

In an interesting note my team thought that my chat was about some tools but that was just a little bit of the whole equation. The end of my presentation was to change our development culture optimizing our development process.

As for the VM creation what I presented was:

Do all of these programmatically
In a secure and consistent way

The VM creation was just the beginning of the changes chain I had been working on. The next part was about provisioning and environments. Using tools like Chef and Vagrant. What I demoed to the team was how I bootstrap a whole piece of our stack from scratch and I chose the most tedious one which happens to be also the one where it was easy to forget pieces of configuration.

I also show them the code behind all this configuration magic. Some of the ideas I touched were:

We can abstract our architecture and store it in our code repository
Where the differences between development and production environments are minimal and known
Free some of the team’s time and allowing us to:
- Focus on new features/requirements
- Solve issues/bugs
- Focus more on Coral’s platform and less on all the hosting tasks
Optimizing human and computing resources

But it’s more than just the tools. Everyone in the organization has to get involved. It is not just about what the developers or the guys in operations do to find common ground. The idea is to help our organization to become more responsive to changes when they arise and streamline all the areas from development to production.

It was fun

It was fun to see the team attitude change from what they thought it was a meeting about tools to after the demos.
They look exited about what we could achieve in the following sprints. Even all our business wing was asking away about it.

The demos I covered were:

Veewee
- Create VM templates on demand
Configure VMs/Servers and our stack on demand
Chef
- Deploy desired Applications
- Configure Applications
- Grant dependencies
- Run required services
Deployment
- Deploy VMs on demand on ESXi/Fusion

About the end of the presentation we chatted about closing the gaps between Production/QA/Development.

I will try to post some tutorials on how we use these tools perhaps it will spark some ideas for your own process.

Startup Weekend Ottawa and Your Book Buddy

June 22, 2013 by Jorge Morales

Last May I participated in the Startup Weekend Ottawa. What a rush!

Picture this:

One venue (Thanks Shopify) full of Business minded people, Developers, Designers and Experienced Entrepreneurs with the purpose of starting something new. A company, an Idea or new friendships during the span of the weekend.

We started on Friday evening with some networking and ice breaker activities. Then it was pitching time!

Everyone who had an idea waited to take the stage and share it with the audience. After all the ideas were heard it was time to vote and choose the most popular ones.

The ideas with more votes assembled teams around them and then it was time to go prototype, design and validate the ideas.

Saturday passed very quickly for me. Coding and designing the interface for Your Book Buddy took most of my time while interacting with the business side and trying to gather product validation from wherever possible.

Also on Saturday mentors and sponsors were around providing advice and scope to the projects. It’s then when you get a good feeling if your idea has wheels or if its time for a spin off.

Sunday arrived so fast and with it all the teams were getting ready for their presentations. The competition was hard as most of the teams had very good ideas and a working prototype up and running. We showed ours during the five minutes presentation.

After all the teams presented it was up to the judges to choose the winners.

Your Book Buddy

We offer a service of connecting children with their distant loved ones. We allow the adult and child to select a book and the adult can then read it to them online via online video chat. Both the adult and the child will be able to see the book and each other! This allows the adult to share an experience with a child that would otherwise only have been possible in person.

All our effort paid off and we scored second place. The honours were for team Vidrack (A site used to solicit client video testimonials).

In a nutshell it was fun, it was worth it and yes I would do it again!

Startup Weekend 3

Stock trade notifications

January 31, 2012 by Jorge Morales

One of the things I enjoy doing at Coral CEA is that I get to work with Startups and other member companies to create new opportunities or initiate work among them.

Let’s take for example the Stock Tracker Application.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U5eW5fv8Ak

A collaboration between Cliniconex, Genband and Etrali.

[Read more…]