I was asked by my good friends at the Java MUG to make a presentation. Slides are here. This was my first time using Reveal.js and once I figured out how to write all the slides in Markdown this is going to be my new presentation format instead of remarkjs.
I proposed the Vinli Cli as a way to make it easier to play around with our APIs. We had just developed this really cool Virtual Vinli service to allow developers to get test data into their Vinli apps without having to plug in a device and drive around the block with every build. We had the API ready and the idea of building another web portal didn’t bring me joy.
I wanted to steal the best parts of every command line tool I’ve ever used and make one cool tool for developers and internal testers. I remember fondly using the Nodejitsu CLI and being impressed with the ability to sign up for Nodejitsu right in the command line. Also nowadays every tool has a .rc or .yml or some sort of config file in the project. A typical project I work on has .eslintrc, .npmrc, circle.yml, docker-compose.yml, .editorconfig and perhaps even a .bowerrc for good measure. I had to get in on that action with .vinlirc
Anyways I wrote a blog post about it over at the Vinli dev blog.
I gave this presentation, “How to Node Chat”, at the 9/22 meetup of Dallas.Node. In it I cover a little bit of history and internals of Hubot chat bot open sourced by Github. Then I demonstrate how to make your own and connect it to Slack and Gitter and how to deploy it to Heroku.
A parenthetical on the article “What is Code” really made me smile:
The world of code is filled with acronyms. K is modeled on another language called APL, which stands for A Programming Language. Programmers are funny, like your uncle. They hold the self-referential and recursive in the highest regard. Another classic: GNU, which means GNU’s Not Unix. Programmer jokes make you laugh and sigh at once. Or just sigh.