A Trial by Fire - Initial Exposure to Bower, NPM, and require.js Modules

Starting the first week in any place of work tends to be chaotic to say the least - settling into the expected workflow and output, setting up your environment, and getting to know your team members, if any. The first week's project was designed to expose and introduce the popular and emerging web technologies used to test, build, and publish web apps in the front and backend of systems.

Node.js functions and objects were used to import and export a simple module that parses through incoming data in markdown file format and return the URL addresses of the links found in the strings. Initially, the data was placed in a static variable in order to focus on the pure logic of the function that parses through the data. Unit testing was created with mochaTest and automated with a Grunt task, alongside JShinting and linting for any syntactic concerns. Travis was used in conjunction with the Github repository currently being worked on in order to invoke all of the testing tools anytime a change is pushed, and the results would be emailed to the developer shortly thereafter. After those dependencies were properly implemented and tied together, the module was published to the npm and bower registries in order to be useable by the public. Bonus tasks were to implement logic to read data from incoming file arguments on the command line as well as parse data from a front-end web app using require.js to import the module and its dependencies.

Managing to accomplish all the aforementioned goals save for the front-end medium concluded a work-intensive and very intriguing week. Almost all of the technologies used in this project were brand new and my exposure to them will hopefully prove to be invaluable when tackling the coming work ahead with the Mozilla Webmaker team to release a functional version of the nimble to the Webmaker toolkit by the end of the summer. Any of the expected blockers that I've come across were efficiently quelled by the readily available amount of help from the rest of the team and the documentation of the APIs. I enter this week ready to tackle whatever challenges that cross my path next with cautious optimism and palpable excitement.