Not too long ago we came up with an idea to shake things up with our hackfests: The One Night Stand. We held the infamous event last Wednesday by matching people that needed help on a project with people willing to share their skills for a couple of hours. It was a great time all around and there was even some actual code written!

Not bad, especially when you consider that nobody had to suffer the humiliation of a walk of shame.

Our friends at TechStars inspired us with Founder Dating, a mixer created to match people who may someday get married in the form of co-founding a startup. Good stuff, but what if you're a developer or UI designer who's not ready to make that kind of commitment? Enter Quick Left's next Hackfest, The One Night Stand. No serious relationships, just one night of project oriented hacking.

How it works:

If you've got a project that needs some Ruby on Rails, Javascript, or user interface design expertise, tell us a little bit about it and describe the help you want.

If you're a developer or UI designer who's willing to help somebody else move their side project forward, tell us a little bit about your expertise.

Don't worry, if you're cheating on your co-founder or employer for the night, mum's the word.

When you arrive at QLHQ, I'll play matchmaker to help break the ice. We'll try to get as many people matched as we can to help move people's projects forward. Don't forget to bring your laptop. We'll provide the beer and pizza.

When: Wednesday 3/28 6:00pm - 9pm
Where: QLHQ
Register: Use our fancy form to register here

This Tuesday (3/20) we’ll be hosting the Boulder JS meetup from 7 - 9 pm. Sam is giving a talk on organizing your code with CommonJS and AMD. You can register for the event here.

We recently worked on a mapping application that lets users monitor their driving habits using real time data from their cars. The data came in the form of latitude/longitude points, from which we would build a trip and calculate statistics for that trip (speeding, distance, etc).

Because the car sends lat/long data every second, a Trip object can contain thousands of points. Each of these points in turn stores the standard rails timestamps, the latitude and longitude themselves, and some relational keys.

A little known fact about Heroku's cedar platform is that it's capable of even more than advertised (and that's already a long list: Ruby, Node.js 0.4.7, Scala, Java, Clojure, Python/Django, etc). Here's how to customize a cedar "buildpack" to compile the latest version of Node.

Classes are among the murkier programming concepts in JavaScript, but they're as useful here as they are in other languages like Ruby. It's true that JS lacks a native class implementation, but there are easy ways to mimic the functionality of a solid class hierarchy system.

But first off, what the heck is a class? Put simply, classes describe the ingredients of your application. If you're writing a program for a library, you might have a book class, a customer class, and an event class.

Most Backbone apps require some sort of bootstrapping process to initialize themselves with data, here's how we've been using Deferred objects to make this easier.

Now that Rails 3.1.0 has been officially released, its time to get serious about leveraging some of its new features. We spend a lot of time writing rich web clients in Javascript and the amount of test coverage we have for that code has drastically increased in 2011. Here's how we're using the new features in 3.1 to make testing Javascript easier.

One of the easiest ways to use CoffeeScript is as a Node.js package. Here are 5 quick steps to get Node and compile your first .coffee file.

If you're like us, Javascript templates are just about your favorite
front end technique that's come into fashion over the past few years.
Templates let you keep markup out of your code and takes all of the
trouble out of building against JSON APIs. There are lots of template
libraries to choose from, but we've most often found ourselves choosing
to work with the offical jQuery templating plugin, jquery-tmpl. Here's
how we optimized it.