Heading to Boston MA this Monday, leaving my house at about 5am for an early flight. There will be a 2 hour layover and I’m not looking forward to it! Flying is very exciting, I do enjoy flying across country. The downside is ending up in a strange place with to many unknowns, such as public transportation.

Next week I’m heading to the Boston headquarters of Mendix to do Advance Training for the Mendix app platform. My employer is looking to build an internal app for the corporation. Since I’m dedicating more time towards keeping an up-to-date blog with github pages, I’ll try to take notes from the Advance Training and post them here.

The Mendix Advanced Training course curriculum is listed below.

Advanced Domain Modeling

• Inheritance
• Indexes
• Virtual attributes
• Performance

XPath

• XPath essentials
• XPath practice
• XPath best practices

Security

• Advanced security
• Anonymous users
• Security & performance

Advanced Page Modeling

• Page performance
• Best practices

Advanced Microflow Modeling

• Microflow expressions
• Error handling
• Memory management & batches
• Logging
• Scheduled events
• Document generation

March 20th’s season opener was epic at Evergreen Speedway. I went take photos of the ProAm guys practicing for Round 1. Below are a few of my favorite photos.

This week I’ve taken on the major role of working on UI/UX for an in-house app my company has been building for the past month. First release is set to be later this month. The majority of the foundation has been laid in terms of database and business logic, however the UI/UX work was put off until we had a functioning application. I’ve been working on styling page templates and setting a layout standard for the whole team to follow. The past couple of days, I’ve been putting time into styling the login, testing the responsive behaviors with Android Studio as well as my personal Android devices (Galaxy S4 and LG V10). There’s a few minor details that needs to be addressed for the login but right now my colleague is working on building the functionality into the mock-up I’ve designed and styled. The major hurdle we had to undertake was building the modules that allowed for our apis to talk to a third party and sync all the data into the new platform. For now, we’ve focused on building an HRM with an employee directory. We also have an additional Equity module that is in final testing stages. Expanding on the current application, we hope to have this internally used for various level of HRM/CRM and build out forms to help audit business processes such as marketing and syndication of data to other third party services.

This week I’ve been taking on more UI/UX work by my employer for an internal app we’re developing. The new platform we’re working with uses Twitter Bootstrap, an interest topic I’ve tinkered around with on several WordPress projects. I’m currently using Scout as my SASS compiler, so far all the custom work has been easy going. Most of the heavy lifting is being done by the back end developers and I’ve been stepping in to improve any inconsistencies and clutter.

Trying out Hexo Admin on localhost. Since I have my _config.yml stored in my github repo, I don’t think placing hexo-admin onto github pages will be smart… heh. I really like this UI for editing in browser.

Update: Issue with Hexo Deployer Git

I just realized that the deploy feature on hexo-admin made my localhost admin panel explode. It’s not properly configured and the dev hasn’t provided any information on how to set that up. I think since I’m using hexo-deployer-git that it’s a little bit more complicated that editing a file and clicking a button. I guess for now if I want to get pretty I can just use $ hexo server -d and make edits while seeing the visual representation on the right. I might not actually use this after all… Atom.io is a fun editor…

The past 2 months I’ve been working on and off with a team to work on an internal enterprise application. While we’ve been working on the project, I’ve been schooled on how Agile Development works from the developers perspective. I am glad that our team has taken on a few Senior Developers and a strong scrum master. There’s more structure to keep the development marching forward.

One thing I’ve really relied on for retrospective meetings is pulling up my commit history from the project. I’ve also keep a notebook at my workstation to jot down notes on tasks I’m working on, which is great to reference during stand up meetings and retrospectives. Often times it’s hard to improvise off the top of your head when you have to think back to the day before or reflect on the entire week. Referencing my own commit history also helps for code reviews, especially if there’s a ton of intricate work that’s been worked on.

Working with Agile Development has also strengthened my understanding of Version Control and the need for it. In the past, my teams have always been 1-2 people and maybe a 3rd tossing in UI updates. It was never to complex in terms of team composition.

This is a basic overview on how to redeploy the Hexo environment from source placed on Github. Assuming you’ve backed up your Hexo source.

.gitignore

Before anything, remember packages.json should be added to your .gitignore - this can conflict with your other working environments. Example of my .gitignore is below.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

.DS_Store
Thumbs.db
db.json
*.log
node_modules/
public/
.deploy*/
package.json

Clone A Local Copy

1
2

$ cd ~/github/
$ git clone git@github.com:kaichi/kaichi.github.io-source.git

Backup .git and _config.yml to Desktop

Cut and paste both .git and _config.yml to a safe place, because hexo init will removing / overwriting these critical assets.

Initiate Hexo

Assuming that git, node.js, and hexo are installed on your new workstation, proceed.

1
2

$ cd kaichi.github.io-source
$ hexo init

Install Dependencies / Plugins

Below is examples of my setup.

1
2

$ npm install hexo-deployer-git --save
$ npm install hexo-soundcloud -- save

Copy .git and _config.yml to Hexo environment

Once the hexo environment is setup, copy the .git and _config.yml to your working enviroment. You can now use hexo generate and deploy, git add, commit, push, and pull.

Join the #Hexo IRC channel!

Find us on Freenode! Try a native client like Hexchat (Windows/OSX/Linux) or Textual (OSX) or register up for IRCCloud.com!

1
2

/server irc.freenode.net
/join #hexo

Today I was exploring other IRC clients for Windows because frankly IRC clients on Windows look like relics of ancient past. One of my all time favorite IRC clients hands down goes to Textual, an OSX based application. Unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of blowing 2 grand on a Macbook Bro. I can hardly fathom dropping $1200 on a peasant book air. All bashing aside, I actually love OSX it’s just the hardware that makes my wallet cringe…

While I was checking out IRC clients, I decided to scoup out how active Hexchat’s Github repository was. A very lively community, I thought damn I’m glad Hexchat was still alive and well. I happened to click into the Issue tracker and noticed a few people arguing about how the mIRC theme needs to actually look like the mIRC client. Hold the phone! Hexchat has THEMES?

Indeed it does, I jumped into the documentation and found Vertex. I fell in love with Vertex!

After setting Hexchat’s gtk2 theme, I had a white title bar across the top of the window (see above image) it was blinding me in my dark dingy den. I had to figure out a way to fix this. Thankfully, HowToGeek provides documentation on how to fix that!

Additional I noticed that unfocused windows default to the white title bars. This can be adjusted in regex, link to documentation here:http://www.ghacks.net/2015/11/29/change-the-color-of-inactive-windows-in-windows-10/

I noticed that Hexo is lacking an IRC channel. I’ve taken the liberty to park myself in the #Hexo IRC channel. In the past I’ve idled in the #OctoPress channel, but since that community seems to be dying down. I’m hoping that Hexo gains more momentum as this seems like a very fun practice to get your feet wet with version control and basic coding.

Methods of connecting to the IRC channel, simply register and use IRCCloud.com - if you want a native client, Hexchat is another great IRC client and is also available on Github!

I was wondering how Hexo handled embeds, I’d like to post an occasional Soundcloud tune and found hexo-soundcloud by Andrew Boni

Tunes to code too!