This year has been fantastic! We wish all our clients, friends, and family a Happy Holiday and a Fantastic New Year!

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.

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.

Last week I blogged in part I about how to build single page apps with no AJAX by using dnode, a remote method invokation library for the browser. This allows you to directly invoke server functions from your client side JavaScript without setting up any HTTP routes. This week we want to look more closely about how to overwrite Backbone.sync to make this work smoothly. But first you need to make sure that you connect to dnode successfully and get the db object from the backend exposed correctly off your root namespace object.

Our most recent Hack Fest centered around writing chat bots and one of the outcomes was that Quick Left gained an in-house bot to occupy our common Campfire room. Here's what it does and how we did it.