Beer and Tell – September 2014

September’s Beer and Tell has come and gone.

A practical lesson in the ephemeral nature of networks interrupted the live feed and the recording, but fear not! A wiki page archives the meeting structure and this very post will lay plain the private ambitions of the Webdev cabal.

Mike Cooper: GMR.js

Mythmon is a Civilization V enthusiast, but multiplayer games are difficult — games can last a dozen hours or more. The somewhat archaic play-by-mail format removes the simultaneous, continuous time commitment, and the Giant Multiplayer Robot service abstracts away the other hassles of coordinating turns and save game files.

GMR provides a client for Windows only, so Mythmon created GMR.js to provide equivalent functionality cross platform with Node.js. It presents an interactive command line UI. This enables participation from a Steam Box and other non-windows platforms.

Bramwelt: pewpew

Trevor Bramwell, summer intern for the Web Engineering team, presenting a homebrew clone of space invaders he calls pewpew. He built is using PhaserJS as an exercise to better understand prototypal inheritance. You can follow along as he develops it by playing the live demo on gh-pages.

Cvan: honeyishrunktheurl

Chris Van shared two new takes on the classic url shortener. The first is written in go, with configuration stored in JSON on the server. It was used as an exercise for learning go. The second is an html page that handles the redirect on the server side.

He intends to put them into production on a side project, but hasn’t found a suitable domain name.

Cvan: honeyishrunktheurl

Chris Van held the stage for a second demo. He showed how the CSS order property can be used to cheaply rearrange DOM nodes without destroying and re-rendering new nodes. An accompanying blog post delves into the details. The post is worth a read, since it covers some limitations of the technique that came up in discussion during the demo.

Lonnen: Alonzo, pt II

Last time he joined us, Lonnen was showing off a scheme interpreter he was writing in Haskell called Alonzo. This month Alonzo had a number of new features, including variable assignment, functions, closures, and IO. Next he’ll pursue building a standard library and adding a test suite.


If you’re interested in attending the next Beer and Tell, sign up for the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list. An email is sent out a week beforehand with connection details. You could even add yourself to the wiki and show off your side-project!

See you next month!