Today marks one year exactly since switching my website from Perl to Javascript/Node.js! I posted back in March about having made the switch, but at that point my “production” website was still running on Perl. I switched over full-time to Node.js shortly after that post.
From the very first commit to the latest one:
$ git diff --stat 030430d 6b7c737
[...]
177 files changed, 11313 insertions(+), 2110 deletions(-)
Looking back on it, I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in that one single year! I have—
- Written a HipChat add-on that hooks into my Ninja Block data (note the temperature in the right-hand column as well as the slash-commands; the button in the right-hand column can be clicked on to view the indoor and outdoor temperatures and the extremes for the day)
- Refactored almost all of the code into a significantly more functional style, which has the bonus of making it a hell of a lot easier to read
- Moved from callbacks to Promises, which also massively simplified things (see the progression of part of my Flickr– and HipChat-related code)
- Completely overhauled my database schema to accomodate the day I eventually replace my Ninja Block with my Raspberry Pi (the Ninja Block is still running though, so I needed to have a “translation layer” to take the data in the format that the Ninja Block sends and converts it to what can be inserted in the new database structure)
- Added secure, signed, HTTP-only cookies when changing site settings
- Included functionality to replace my old Twitter image hosting script, and also added a nice front-end to it to browse through old images
Along with all that, I’ve been reading a lot of software engineering books, which have helped a great deal with the refactoring I mentioned above (there was a lot of “Oh god, this code is actually quite awful” after going through with a fresh eye having read some of these books)—Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher.
I have a nice backlog in JIRA of new things I want to do in future, so I’m very interested to revisit this in another year and see what’s changed!