I’ve been working on the Saltbox team for about four months now, and I’ve had the privilege both to work with some very talented people and work on interesting projects, both on the frontend and the backend. Here I’m going to summarize what Saltbox is, a little bit about our talented founders and development team, and the projects I’ve been working on over these last few months.

Saltbox, our sales and learning toolbox, is a web application that makes it easy to communicate in-house knowledge among peers; collect news and articles from the web via RSS or Atom feeds; and disseminate knowledge, news, and quizzes from managers. Central to the application are channels which act as continous streams of small, easily-digested, content for learners. Each company or team that sets up a Saltbox site can create groups to organize their employees or team members, and these groups can then be given access to channels suitable for that group. Learners can add RSS and Atom feeds as channels, and these feeds will automatically update as new content becomes available. Every user gets their own channel where they can post their own content, and anyone else in the same group will see this peer channel as available for subscription. Saltbox sites are mobile ready so that teams on the go can get the company news and product information they need when they need it.

John Delano and Ali Shahrazad have both been really great as non-technical founders. They have brought to the table a solid vision of what Saltbox should give to its users. It’s clear that they both have real insight into what sales teams out there are dealing with in terms of existing learning management tools and the lack of good tooling for continuous, mobile, and social learning in companies’ sales forces today.

John and Ali put together our development team, Russell Duhon; Brian Gershon; and myself, and it does them credit. Russell has brought some great ideas and a strong academic background to the team. He rewrote almost all of our database queries, ferreting out the original requirements and reimplementing to reduce the number of queries and code duplication while also improving our database performance. More recently, he has been leading our efforts in adding caching to the backend to reduce database trips. Brian rebuilt the entire Saltbox mobile web app using jQuery mobile (it’s quite nice) and has been a key part in the creation of unit tests and then refactoring of our Javascript code (which is the majority of our codebase).

Both Russell and Brian have made working on this team a great experience by both having strong opinions, identifying and communicating opportunities and pitfalls in code reviews, and being willing to listen and learn from critism and incorporate it in their work.

I’ve had a chance to work on several things at Saltbox that I am quite proud of and have learned some interesting things from. One key piece of functionality in Saltbox is the ability to add RSS or Atom feeds from the web.

Initially we fetched the feeds as needed, processed them, and sent them on to the user’s browser as needed - essentially proxying the RSS feed into our app. This had a few serious downsides given our architecture: entries in the feeds weren’t favoritable or searchable, we couldn’t easily keep track of read entries, and proxying the data would, as the number of users on the app increased, cause major performance issues and likely get the IP addresses of our servers banned from major sites that were subscribed to frequently. A different approach was needed.

Our key requirements were that feed content would be stored locally for searchablity and favoriting, feed processing would occur in the background to keep our web servers from having being preoccupied with long running feed processing tasks, feeds would be refreshed depending on the frequency that new content is available so that we can keep our fetching to a minimum while also getting the latest content for our users, and Javascript and other undesirable markup would be removed from the feed entries before display to the user. The end result was an integration of our Python web backend determining which feeds should be reloaded at a given time; a cronjob that polls our web backend for the feeds and inserts tasks to fetch the feeds into Amazon’s Simple Queue Service (SQS); and a NodeJS/CoffeeScript service that polls SQS for feed tasks, processes their content, and posts the new content back to our web backend.

Another project that spun off from the feed processing service was our thumbnailing system. We find and extract a suitable image from each entry in the feed content and generate a thumbnail to display in our app. We ran into some difficulties performing thumbnailing reliably as part of the feed processing task on NodeJS. This was because thumbnailing took significantly more time than processing the feed itself and handling both tasks separately while making sure that thumbnails still got connected to the correct feed entry proved very difficult to implement. I built a scalable thumbnailing generation service in Java using Amazon’s Simple Workflow Service and Flow Framework (which is part of the Java SDK).

This service takes one or more URLs from the feed processing system via HTTP POST to a round-robin DNS entry, creates a loading placeholder for the thumbnail, fetches an image from each URL, filters these images based on a “thumbnail specification”, scales the selected image, and stores the final thumbnail in S3 (another amazon service). Amazon’s workflow service allows the system to scale to an extent that I doubt we’ll reach. The service is currently fetching, analyzing, resizing, and storing about 12,000 thumbnail images every 24 hours, on two servers that could likely handle several times that amount. It’s been pretty fun to build this system and see it actually work. Very exciting!

This post has gotten quite long, so I will have to dig into more depth about some of these things in future posts. I’ve had a great time as part of Saltbox team and I am really thankful of the opportunity its been so far.

I have found myself writing about my most recent projects (as of October 2011) and I thought I’d put all of this in one place. Here it goes:

I have about six years of experience doing web application development, and have been programming since 1996 (first as a hobbyist, then professionally), primarily in C++, Python, and Javascript.

I’ve been developing projects using Django since the 1.0 release (summer of 2008). My most recent Django projects:

• A phone number verification system using Twilio, which generates and speaks a PIN to the end user over the phone. It was developed with Django 1.3 using the django_twilio app.
• A data importing system, which matched existing records fetched via an external API, allowed the user to manually select the best match, edit the generated record, and review records to be imported. This project was also developed using Django 1.3 and jQuery for a simple auto-completed search function. I also used Celery (and the django-celery app) to deal with the task of processing the uploaded data in the background.
• I am currently between iterations on http://mathisasport.com/, which is also developed with Django and jQuery. Most recently, I have developed several statistics gathering methods for the model managers in the app, using custom SQL (this site is using MySQL) as needed to allow the records returned in QuerySets to be sortable by the results.
• A series of HTTP-based web services for an unreleased web service API. The API calls return results in JSON and were developed using Django’s class-based views.
• My most recent personal Django project is at http://fanonic.net/. It’s still in development, but somewhat usable at this stage, although there isn’t much of any content there yet.

I also have lots of examples of my work open sourced at http://github.com/saebyn/. I’ve recently pushed out some updates for the one Django project I have there, django-classifieds, in the django-1.3 branch.

The largest example of my HTML, CSS, and Javascript skills is at http://familysnap.saebyn.info (the original site was taken offline several years ago). I was responsible for about 60% of the front-end for that site, and a considerable amount of the backend as well (which is PHP, so I won’t go into more detail about that).

You can find more about me on my About page and in my online resume.

Update (July 27th, 2012): My mirror of FamilySnap is no longer online.

I have set up a new domain for my canvas-based Javascript game, which I’m currently calling “Rain”. It can now be found at http://rain- dev.saebyn.info/]

I’m using this library called gamejs to abstract over the HTML5 canvas API. It’s an incomplete reimplementation of pygame, which is a very popular 2d graphics (among other things) package for Python, in Javascript.

Here’s where I’m hosting a simple demo of my game code in action: http ://rain-game-dev.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/.

I finally realized I could simply track when the player hit a horizontal surface and set a ‘onGround’ flag, and then turn that off when you jump. then each jump attempt checks the flag, if it’s not set it won’t let you jump. Obviously, I tried a much more complicated method first. So no more flying players in my new game! (at least unless I add jet pack or something)