&yet

A big driver for And Bang was that it was all supposed to be "glowingly" realtime. Many apps that have some sort of "realtime" component have it sort of "tacked-on" to a more traditional request/response based infrastructure. We wanted the whole experience and the whole technology stack to be realtime.

When I first started tinkering around with building a team task tool a few years ago, I grabbed a set of what were my familiar tools at the time. Django, MySQL and a bit of jQuery.

As it turned out, if you want to build a highly interactive, multi-user, realtime application, Django or Rails and relational databases are not necessarily the right tools for the job.

When I joined &yet this last January, &! (And Bang) 1.0 was already launched. A lot of the work had been done by one or two members of the &yet team.

But, And Bang was a product of the company, not just a couple of people, so we had to find a way to better enable contributions from the rest of the team. Its core ideas were us—so very us—so why shouldn’t more of the team be enabled to contribute on a significant level?

Significantly increasing the number of contributors is more difficult than you might imagine. I pushed very hard to empower team members to contribute as much as possible. These efforts paid off, the team was energized to help but we also learned a few thing along the way.

At &yet, we’ve used a lot of different project management tools for our work building web software for human people.

If you’re like us, it’s always hard to find one collaboration tool that “fits” and really helps you get things done. One day we realized:

Project management tools are primarily great at managing things you’re going to do later. They’re planning tools, not doing tools. To manage the work you're doing, you need completely different tools.

The development of our favorite teamwork tool, And Bang, has had such a significant impact on our company’s trajectory that we wanted to take some time out during this holiday season to share some of what we've learned with our community and fellow And Bang users.

This December, we’re rolling out the first ever And Bang Advent.

We’ll highlight different perspectives and pieces of the puzzle that we’ve delightfully (and/or painfully) come across during our journey from And Bang 1.0+ to the mysterious 1.5 that we never shipped, to our present work pushing to ship And Bang 2.0.

Whenever there is discussion on this topic, there's always someone who asks, "What is realtime?"

The answer, as it turns out, has several layers.

On the surface, realtime is about websites which dynamically update from outside data sources without user intervention.

This sounds rather uninteresting to many, as this has been done since the days of Yahoo! Chat in 1994, but there is more to it than that.

We asked Portlandians about realtime technologies—and, um, they answered!

DISCLAIMER: No hipsters feelings were harmed in the making of this video.

Film by Miss Melanie Brown
Music by YACHT

Yeah, that’s correct. We’re changing the name of our conference on realtime technologies.

(Who does that? I dunno. Uhhh, I guess: “us”?) But—more importantly—why?

We got a few good chuckles from folks from the name "The Keeping it Realtime Conference" But, we've gotta be honest: it's a really long mouthful, and people who want to talk about it get confused with how to shorten it into an abbreviated mouthful—oh, and then!—people who read “krtconf” have no idea what the heck the conference is actually about.

Basically, it’s a fun name, but we’d rather have something that people just “get”.

These days, more and more HTML is rendered on the client instead of sent pre-rendered by the server. So If you're building a web app that uses a lot of client side javascript you'll doubtlessly want to create some HTML in the browser.

How we used to do it

First a bit of history. When I first wrote ICanHaz.js I was just trying to ease a pain point I was having: generating a bunch of HTML in a browser is a pain.

Why is it a pain? Primarily because JS doesn't cleanly support multi-line strings, but also because there isn't an awesome string interpolation system built into JS.

The joy of independent software is that some of the most successful people also happen to be some of the most generous, friendly, and fascinating.

We feel lucky to have been invited in to Panic's headquarters to interview founders Cabel Sasser and Steven Frank. We loved what they had to say about shipping, building a business, being a team, and leadership.

Just like their products, these two guys have immense character--in both senses of the word.

The single biggest challenge you'll have when building complex clientside application is keeping your code base from becoming a garbled pile of mess.

If it's a longer running project that you plan on maintaining and changing over time, it's even harder. Features come and go. You'll experiment with something only to find it's not the right call.

I write lots of single page apps and I absolutely despise messy code. Here are a few techniques, crutches, coping mechanisms, and semi-pro tips for staying sane.

Separating views and state