Intro for Matt McKegg

[Matt McKegg]

Hey everyone, I'm a Node.js developer based in Wellington. 

My day job is developer at Audit Assistant - a web-based compliance tool that we built specifically for NZ financial auditors. We have around 150 accounting firms using our product around the country and are currently investigating its international potential. At the moment I'm wearing most of the technical hats on this project, front-end/back-end/server ops/a bit of tech support - and Clive handles training/sales/content/support - but it's very much a collaborative project between the two of us. We started the web-based version in 2009 in Ruby on Rails - it was the hip and cool thing at the time :) But over time we have moved more and more of the code base into Node.js and Javascript.

Based on my experiencing building a realtime/collaborative standards based online web app, I've started working on my own html/dom templating system which you can find on NPM and Github. Very creatively named realtime-templates. The idea is the server renders the initial html page, but sends everything the browser needs to pick up where the server left off - no need to double code your views - or care about any refreshing code at all. Another module called json-context manages the querying, data-binding, and change events.

I've also hacked on a wee experimental CSS preprocessor called micro-css which basically just gets rid of all the stuff that kept screwing me over in CSS and adds a sort of more object oriented approach. You'll probably hate it :D but it works for me and is being used in all the new stuff I'm doing on Audit Assistant.

In my other life, I'm a music producer/DJ/whatever ... I've released 3 albums over the years gone by and got a tiny bit internet famous. I've been a bit busy to focus on the music stuff for the past couple of years, but recently decided to get back into it and work on new stuff. I've been building my own live music instrument (using Node.js NI Maschine, and a couple of Launchpads) which I'm wanting to use for both composition and performing. The idea is that it's written to be performed, rather than having to figure that out later (as seems to be the way far too often with electronic artists). I'm planning on releasing a bunch of modules related to this under the brand Loop.js.

Recently started hacking around with Voxel.js to use as a visual component for the live show. It will be fully driven from the music (my first experiment is on YouTube). Who says you can't use the web browser for that??!

Keen to get to know more Noders around NZ - find my on twitter @MattMcKegg and Github. I'm attending Nodeconf later this year in California so let me know if you'll be there!

[Andrew Chilton]

Hey Matt,

Welcome to the group and good to have another Wellingtonian here. (Am
finding more and more of you as time goes on.) :)

Great to meet you last week and I was well impressed with your
Launchpad and VoxelJS combination.

There seem to be quite a few sites doing that whole "send a skeleton
page, then update afterwards" so that seems to be a nice way to go.
I've tried this myself by compiling Jade templates into JavaScript
then sending them all to the browser ... and the best thing I found
with this was that I could cache the hell out of the JS templates file
and then the browser no longer needs to get it (of course, you'd have
to do with with something like connect-cachify or something else so
that if your assets change, your URLs change too). :) The other good
thing is, Jade renders in both the server and the client.

Anyway, good to have you in the group and keep us updated with your
mad science experiements.

Cheers,
Andy

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--
contact: Andrew Chilton
website: http://www.chilts.org/blog/