I wrote a little blog post over at the Sparkfun Blog about how our work on the Johnny-Five inventors kit was guided by our love of the NodeBots community.

I'm very very proud of our work on that project. =)

-Francis

A few weeks ago I started maintaining node serialport after a long hiatus. We hadn't had a release in about a year and we had some outstanding bugs that I wanted to tackle. I had also introduced some complexity around testing, years ago, that was never re…

I made a little presentation, a hack, a spike into the world of the unknown. I wanted to see if I could power a johnny-five robot with redux a powerful state manager for JavaScript commonly used with ReactJS. I could, I did, and I think you should too. Th…

Tonight I gave a talk at QueensJS. It was my first time speaking there and it completes my trifecta of "borojs" speaking events. (I've now spoken at BrooklynJS, ManhattanJS and QueensJS!) I would have done it sooner but Sara wouldn't let me until now.

The…

"Why is the light in the refrigerator purple? It looks like I'm making a breakfast for zombies!"

I grab the makings for a mushroom cheddar omelet. We're running low on butter.  I say "Ok refrigerator" and then wait.. its display shows it's thinking about …

I hung up my phone and started typing. "Jason just called me, ideas for dinner before the movie?" and sent it to Sara. My phone know's a lot about Sara and where she might be. It encrypted the message for her eyes only, indicated that the message will pro…

I was working on one of our projects when I happened to run across some code that set off my rubber ducky detector. It's a page that displays the days production quantities or displays an estimate if it's too early in the day to tell. Both cases have very…

FactoryGirl the oddly named testing tool for database models is something we use a lot at Wizard Development. If you're unfamiliar with how it works, I strongly suggest you check it out. Unlike fixtures which loads a bunch of data into your database, fact…

It's been around six months since I quit my job as a PSI Analyst. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, it's pretty much a glorified title for an Excel technician. I lasted a mere 3 months before the banal, repetitive tasks took their toll on…

We recently added an API to The Winnower to support our new Wordpress Plugin. It was a great experience in both product and software design. Wordpress support is the first of a few great features we're adding to The Winnower to aid our users in publishing…

Recently, I've had the opportunity to teach the Intro to HTML and CSS course with Girl Develop It, a non profit organization that welcomes all, but focuses on teaching women software and web development skills. They not only teach programming, but also t…

While working on my pet project for matching tennis partners I decided to make a match history page. It displays a player's recent matches and some information pertaining to them: who played when, who won, and how much that win affected their score on th…

My home has radiators that are 70ish years old. I'm going to guess the air vents are 10-30 years old. It's supposed to let the air out while the pipe fills with steam. Then and this is the important part, it stops letting anything out of the pipe and keep…

I was expressing frustration with moving money around the other day and was asked to share what I knew. This is an incomplete list of ways to move money, and their consequences. Moving money (and in turn getting paid or paying others) is one of the most i…

Lately most of my writing has been over at Wizard Development's blog. Some of it (about building the business) might be interesting to you. Some of it (about building technology) might not.

http://www.wizard.codes/

-Francis

PS I also have been posting abo…