Matthias Nehlsen

Software, Data, and Stuff

Weekly Update: AngularJS book, Geo-Lookup, Reading

I have mostly kept myself busy with AngularJS this week. Then, my geo-specific link shortener generated its first contribution to running this blog. I have also read some more this week: The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob).

I have been doing a lot of AngularJS work. I haven't really talked about it yet, but last year I started co-authoring a book about AngularUI Development. The book is scheduled to be out in November this year. Right now, I am putting the finishing touches on the chapters that I wrote. I added quite a few pages to the first chapter about bootstrapping an AngularJS environment, in particular about AngularJS integration tests using Protractor. I am quite happy with the testability of AngularJS application is progressing. Protractor is really powerful and I am looking forward to implementing a comprehensive testing strategy for my current work project. Protractor looks like it will be up to the job. It will be interesting to integrate this into the overall Scala / Play Framework / SBT build chain, though. Maybe that'll be an article for another day.

Then, earlier this week, I wrote about building an application for country-specific embedding of links for the Amazon Affiliate Program, with the idea of having purchases on Amazon contribute to the running costs of this blog. Besides the time that I invest, I also rent a server for serving my BirdWatch application at Hetzner Online AG, that costs €81 per month. Today I am happy to report that in the first week, clicks on Amazon links have generated roughly $37 in advertising fees aka revenue through orders in the U.S. store. Sweet - thanks a lot to the purchasers, much appreciated! If that became the weekly average, the running costs for my server would be covered. Feels great that my baby, the blog, may be well on the way to paying its own rent. I will have to make my geo-specific link shortener application more user-friendly though; it is already annoying me a lot to store created links in code. But that's on my list anyway; for this week the idea was to create a proof-of-concept and for that, storing the links in code was okay.

I was also able to read a little more in Uncle Bob's book, The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series). I enjoy this book a lot and I will make sure to share some thoughts on it soon. The main idea about sharing thoughts on what I read is that though I read a lot, I also forget too much too fast. I have been meaning to take notes by chapter for a while now, but I have never really got around to doing it. If I publish my notes, I will be able to force myself to actually take notes. First of all, I want to keep them for my future reference so that I can more easily recap what I learned. If anyone else finds my notes useful, so much the better. More on that soon.

Okay, that's it for today. Next week I'll be busy with the book chapters, but I also want to try to get back to my work-in-progress article about writing the BirdWatch client in ClojureScript.

Have a great week, Matthias

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