Jamsquad

bike team/non-profit. The best part of this project's the design so check the site below. This is about the development, the least-cool part of the project.

Origninally the tools were as trendy as the design; things shifted a bit. Here’s how it went.

Part of this is probably due to this being a side project. There are two sides to free-time projects. The awesome side for getting creative, and the not as awesome side that eschews proper planning in favor of "interesting".

Big plans

The design on the site’s great. So it’s easy to want an equally awesome structure behind it.

Should those huge, carefully colored panels flash white while the whole page reloads?
- of course not. make it a spa.
The underlying data’s simple. Pages and an index of team members?
- easy to wrap-your-own.
The design’s nice, and the data’s simple, why bring in an ugly admin interface?
- no need, there’s a ton of medium clones around, and the site’s team members just need a form

so many solutions!

the build

As things shook out, it turned into a flurry of all the trendy names on the internet. Angular, Rails, html5Mode, NgTokenAuth, UI-Router, Devise Token Auth, Sass, Medium editor, OAuth 2.0, you get the point. It was slick. The demo was even up on heroku — so many 2010 buzz-words.

deploy time

Then it was time to get stuff rolling “great, were using godaddy”, read a text “can you move it over there?”

I knew the domain name was there, but checking whether they were cool with hosting elsewhere, I had been too engrossed for. A login showed the “wordpress hosting made simple” account I had to work with. That wasn’t going to happen, but regardless it was now gonna be php.

With Ruby on the chopping block, the ngtokenauth/devise-token-auth combo were doomed along with it, plus the fancy admin.

With the admin/devise/token-auth gone, it was time to commit to a php framework and make it a json feeder for the spa. I went with BigTree; it’s simple, it has a pleasant admin interface, and it offers a clean break between the admin side and the “front” end.

After a bit of tinkering, things weren’t lining up perfectly, so the path changed again. An hour’s worth of sed shenanigans later, angular became php.

current state

The site's mostly BigTree now, with the exception of sass stylesheets instead of BigTree’s builtin less support, and the best part it looks as great as it did when it was all kinds of fancy!

I’ve still got the bells-and-whistles version, waiting to be re-fit to an appropriate project, but more useful than that, was getting a solid reality-check to make sure that I don’t throw caution too far into the wind on the next side-project.