GDD Projects

Interactive and collaborative stories. I have recently started working on an idea I have been mulling over for a few years. The project is an app that will allow users to write and experience interactive stories collaboratively. Stories will be able to support textual and graphic formats. Authors will be able to select points in the story where the reader can make a choice about how the story will unfold. Authors will also be able to open up these forks to collaborators who can add their own branches to the story. I am currently working on the API in what spare time I can manage. https://github.com/wesdean/story-book-api I have decided to use Go for the API. I considered a Node/Express API, but I so much like using Go. I am however fond of Knex for managing database migrations. There are also some good Javascript deployment tools available. I may end up using Go for the actual API and Javascript for code management. I settled in on Postgres for the database. I have used MySQL

My first time with Ember.js on a production app. I have worked with Ember.js several years ago on a demo project just to check out the framework. I have frequently chosen other frameworks over Ember but not because I thought Ember was lacking. Years ago I started working with Angular over Ember because Angular integrated two-way data binding faster that Ember did. When I was selecting a framework, two-way data binding was a deal breaker so I chose Angular. Ember soon improved their data-binding, but I had already learned Angular and Ember still had a steep learning curve. Once mastered, Ember seems to be an excellent framework, but I'm not there yet. I'm still learning how Ember works and the patterns it favors. I am hoping to be on this project long enough to gain a very solid knowledge of Ember. I have enjoyed working on the project so far. It's a really neat product. It is a spatial location app designed to aid municipalities in governance. It has some pretty coo

The first iteration of my Blogger Tools is published! I had fun working on this project and there is still a lot that can be added to it, but version 0.1.0 is a good start. I ran into some challenges during the project that were both fun and frustrating to solve. Take a look and feel free to leave comments. If you notice any problems or have ideas for improvements you are welcome to submit pull requests or open issues in Github. The biggest challenge that I ran into was the OAuth requirement for Blogger. If the interaction with Blogger API requires authentication, then you must be authenticated with OAuth. For public blogs an API key works fine. The use case I was developing for is with a private blog. The OAuth requirement made it very difficult to run tests and use CI. I would need to frequently manually update my access token with OAuth to run tests. Since much of what I was concerned about with testing was whether I am successfully connecting to the blog and pulling the correct

Coding with a high fever is not something I generally recommend. That doesn't stop me from doing it. I had been running a high fever for a couple of days. Between kid pick ups, sick kids, preparing meals, cleaning the house, and coding projects I could not afford to slack too much, so I kept chugging as best I could. When it comes to coding, pushing through an illness that reduces brain function is not so good. The NotifyTool I am currently working on will send emails to users on various events. I needed to select a mailer for the application. I have explored this before and I typically select SendGrid, but due to reduced cognitive function I chose MailChimp. MailChimp is excellent for running campaigns, but this is not the use case I had in mind. I could also not find a MailChimp API for Go so I decided to write the pieces I needed myself. Building my MailChimp API started okay. I got everything connecting right fairly quickly. Then I started to write tests to make sure I wa

Tools for private blogs on Blogger. I have a private blog that is shared with only a few friends. I wanted the ability to automate sending emails to the blog subscribers when I post an update. The only tools I found to do this are available only for public blogs. I decided to solve my problem, learn new things, and try my skills by building a set of tools to use with private blogs on Blogger. I'm starting with an automated email but plan to develop other tools as I have need and time. Github https://github.com/wesdean/blogger-tools This project is by no means production ready, but you are welcome to take a look at what I have so far. Programming Language: Go User Interface: Command Line Challenges so far My first challenge, of course, was finding the API I needed to work with Blogger and learning how to use it.  There is a Go API for the Google API located  here .  I had some trouble figuring out how to use it and the documentation wasn't very helpful. I de

Initial art-boards for my new website are complete! I am redesigning my website from ground up. This time round I am doing the design work myself instead of using a template or any prefabricated designs. I am, however, starting with Bootstrap and building from there. After all, I am not completely nuts and I do want to actually finish this thing and do other projects. Without further ado. Here are the art-boards! Enjoy and comment! GDD Website Art-Boards