Soocial blog

Things are evolving here at Soocial HQ. Stefan, Tijn and Dane are doing excellent work but Soocial needs more firepower!

Myself (Simon) and Daniel are slowly but surely getting to spend more time on Soocial. Our target is to get to where both of us can spend 20 hours a week on Soocial alongside the others.

Part of this plan is getting a dedicated room for Soocial – we’ve found one just across the street from the Eight office. It’s an amazing villa where we’ll be in the attic beating code into shape.

Having extra people to look at the code and the interaction of Soocial is already bringing benefits.

I’m a relative Rails newbie, having spent the past year and a half having a blast working with Django . To get into Soocial I’ve been primarily digging through the code to see how the thing works and getting to know Rails better. In the process a lot of the javascript has been cleaned, we started off using UJS but quickly switched to “traditional” Prototype.js because it was giving us a headache when using a large number of partials. The whole thing was becoming too complex for the UJS abstraction layer. On top of that sticking to regular Prototype.js code in combination with RJS removed a whole lot of magic. Coming from a Python background, magic is not something I’m fond of.

Anyone else ran into issues with UJS when making extensive use of Javascript and AJAX calls?

In one of our last elaborate discussions we reduced the number of screens for the OTA configuration from 3 to 1. Moving stuff that wasn’t really part of the configuration to other areas of the webapp where it actually made sense. The result is a smoother OTA setup and a short and to the point interaction from a user perspective. The designs have been made and we’re implementing it into the webapp.

Any questions? If interested we can try & put up some pictures of our new office, team-members or webapp sketches.

Cheers, Simon