Exercism F# Track Now Available

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Wait....F#?

Yep. After attending an interesting talk by James Dixon on data in F# I got a bit interested in the language. Of course, that's followed by reading articles, watching videos, and playing with it a bit on my own. The past month or so I've been messing around with it and plan on sticking to it for a while.

I can see F# going places in terms of functional programming and it's uses within .NET. Be prepared for more F# posts in the future, as well.

What is Exercism?

In short, Exercism is another site where people can learn a new programming language by doing different exercises. The difference with this one than the others, however, is that it's crowd-sourced. Meaning that, once you finish an exercise, you can send it off to be code reviewed by others.

It's definitely the best of both worlds where you practice the language and get peer reviews to help you learn that much quicker.

F# Track

And so, since I got interested  a bit more in F# and no one started messing with it in the Exercism F# repository, I figured I'd give it a shot. After a little while I was able to get it to meet the requirements to be launched!

Hopefully, I did decently in my own examples for the exercises (and if not, I'm not scared of some helpful tips), and that some people can get a bit of use out of it.

So feel free to give it a try and let me know or submit an issue if there are any problems!

JavaScript Garbage Collector Presentation

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Last time I mentioned that I would be giving a talk at a local event - the Carolina Code Camp. Well, today was that day and I'm happy to report that the presentation and the event as a whole went very well! I hope to refine the presentation even further to present again at future events.

For anyone interested the GitHub repository that holds the actual presentation with all links used is available to view.

For a working version of the presentation (latest version), it can be found here.

My First Speaking Engagement is Official

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I've often thought about being the one in front of the room during a code camp or some other speaking event. Though, like most of us, I've always been reluctant to put myself up there, scared that someone will call me out on not knowing what I was talking about or, worse yet, they all walk out on me.

However, with the fine coworkers at Wintellect and other friends, I decided to bite the bullet and sign up as a speaker for the Carolina Code Camp this year. After a couple of days of debating with myself on what to talk about, I decided that a talk on the JavaScript garbage collector would be interesting. I've always enjoyed learning about performance and this should be practical for others to learn as well.

So if you're near the Charlotte, NC area on Saturday, May 3, I encourage you to attend what has always been a great event since I've been going three years ago. Hope to see you there! If you end up going and even go to my session, try to refrain from throwing things.

The JavaScript Garbage Collector Demystified

Consuming the Jamendo API with AngularJS: Services

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It took a little while to get back to this little project. After watching some nice stuff from NgConf the other week, it helped get me excited again for AngularJs. Plus, I was stuck on a problem for quite a while that I'll explain in more detail below that really slowed me down. After a bit of a break I got back to it and was able to figure it out.

Services

Before we looked at how to use the $http get method from AngularJS, but all of that was within the Angular controller itself. To separate things out and to help us test easier I moved the $http calls into an Angular service.

To recap, let's take a look at our controller currently:

As mentioned earlier, we have our $http call right inside of our controller. While that definitely works, it's better to separate that out into it's own service. Let's refactor this down a bit...

Now this looks a bit cleaner. We're first passing in the albumsService as a dependency into the controller. Of course, if Angular can't find that the albumsService is defined, it'll throw an error.

Next, we have the function definition of our getAlbums method. In here we extract out the artist from the scope and then call the getAlbums method on our service. In our call to the service we give it a function as a callback if the $http get was a success that we'll see later when we look at our service. This basically just gets the results and puts them into the scope.

Now let's take a look at our service.

Pretty straight forward as it's basically the same as what we had in our controller earlier. We inject in the $http Angular object and we create our getAlbums method while prepending it with this. 

When we call our success promise from the get method, I just pass in the callback method that we defined in our controller earlier. This makes it a bit easier on our service since the callback method was updating our $scope object and we don't have to worry about that here in our service.

I mentioned earlier that I had a bit of an issue that kept me from finishing this up. I kept getting an $inject error on my service that indicated that it wasn't defined, but I couldn't figure out why that was. After some fiddling around with it, it turns out that I was trying to inject the $scope object into the service and Angular doesn't like that. That's also a reason to use the callback.

Conclusion

Moving the $http get call to an Angular service is mostly just a small refactoring, but it's a good one to do. We will see later when we start to do testing how much easier it is to have that separated out.

Of course, this was just an introduction to Angular services so there's tons more to learn about them. I'll recommend Dan Wahlin's AngularJS in 60ish Minutes to anyone. In fact, I've referenced it a few times to remind myself about services. There's also the WintellectNow video from Jeremy Likness on AngularJS Services that goes into much greater detail of services.

You can play with the demo and, as always, you can play around with the code itself.

First Wintellect Blog Post + A New Series On Design Patterns

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Just recently, I published my first blog post to the Wintellect (my awesome new employer) site. May not seem like much, but it's pretty exciting for me.

One of the things to keep yourself learning, I feel, is to tackle the stuff you feel you understand the least. For me, one of those things was the concept and implementation of different design patterns. I'm probably already too late in the game for this, but better than not learning it at all, right?

Head First Design Patterns - Part 1: Observer Pattern

As An ng-conf Virtual Attendee...

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This past Thursday and Friday, Google held a public conference for all things AngularJS. I'm sure you've noticed lately that I've been a bit of a fan of it, especially the more I play around with what it all has to offer. 

Luckily, the fine folks who put on the conference decided to stream it as it was going on. Awesome! I got to catch a few of the sessions. Though, it's not the same as actually attending as I couldn't meet all the great people and speakers there, watching the live stream is the next best thing.

I didn't get to see all of the sessions yet (they have all been uploaded), but here are the ones I have seen that seemed to stand out:

In total, I'm glad I was able to catch what I could of the live stream and hope that next time I can be able to join in person. I hope at some point I can be able to contribute something to help make everyone's life easier with AngularJS.