Got the ingredients, lets cook this thing

This post is likely going to be a bit of a mixture. It started out as an account of what I am doing today, but I think it might turn into an account of why a 3 day project can take 80 days and why that isn't always a bad thing.

So I have had this goal for 80 days to create a website. Now this hasn't been my only goal in this period. Actually, I have had a lot of other stuff going on. Oh, and there was Christmas and New Year and of course the annual flu/cold/sore throat fun to deal with. Also, this is supposed to be a fun project and I have other fun things I have been doing at the same time.

I have also been using it to learn some new stuff. Now this is always a dilemma with IT: learn to do things the proper way, learn about the latest tools or just use what you already know?

I could have built this thing with pure django and simple html templates in 2-3 days I am sure. Well not quite that because I need all these things too:

• authentication, user registration, preferably supporting third party openID management. That is where django-allauth comes in.
• database migrations
• deployment to cloud. I think I will use koding.com
• code generation. I wrote some simple code generators. I should be able to include these in a cookiecutter so my next project will be much quicker
• I am learning angular.js. I already see the promise in this and it should strengthen my javascript skills which will help with the next phases of the project.

So I have the ingredients together. I think I know most of the problems I will have, just have to put this thing together.

First thing: angular dates are in milliseconds.

Now with this knowledge I have the angular showing today's date, 80 days from now and 80 days ago.

Next stop is to get a form to register a team. There is quite a bit to learn here. I will need to figure out how angular calls REST api's and of course deal with the form stuff too.

OK, so thanks to codeschool I now have a good idea of how most of this angular stuff hangs together.

The next task is to see if I can get data from the django rest services. Before I do that I think it is time to re-organise the code so that it can all be served by the django server. I suspect this might get tricky.

Tomorrow I should be in town in the morning, so I decided this would be a good time to see if I can get this thing running on Gonzalo, otherwise known as the laptop without an escape key. This thing also has a battery with a life of about 5 minutes. But I like it in a weird sort of way. It needs more memory too, but that should be an easy fix. I think it might turn into that broom with 20 new heads and five new handles.

Will be a good test of whether I can run everything on another machine without too much pain. With the screensaver doing the, "all work and no play", I think it is time to take a break.