Beer and Tell – February 2016

Once a month, web developers from across the Mozilla Project get together to talk about our side projects and drink, an occurrence we like to call "Beer and Tell".

There's a wiki page available with a list of the presenters, as well as links to their presentation materials. There's also a recording available courtesy of Air Mozilla.

Bruce Banner: Web Developer

shobson was up first with Bruce Banner: Web Developer, a small webcomic generator. It provides sweet relief from those workplace stressors via the violent justice of The Incredible Hulk. The idea came from willkg, the code from shobson, and the art from craigcook. Excelsior!

Dokku + Let's Encrypt

Next up was pmac, who showed off dokku, a small PaaS implementation similar to Heroku, that uses Docker containers. Not only is it convenient for running several apps on a single server, but there is also a plugin called dokku-letsencrypt that lets you automatically retrieve and install TLS certificates from letsencrypt.org. Easy peasy!

RPG Maker MV

Next was Osmose (that's me!) who talked about RPG Maker MV, the latest entry in the RPG Maker series of game-making tools. Interestingly, RPGMV uses HTML and JavaScript to implement the engine used to run games made with it. The application itself edits JSON files that are loaded by the web-based engine. The engine itself uses pixi.js for rendering, and can be extended via plugins written in JavaScript.

Battleshits

peterbe stopped by to share Battleshits, a mobile-friendly web app and a fairly gross version of the popular boardgame Battleship. The game connects you with other players via WebSockets and Fanout, and most of the interface is implemented using React.

Chava

Last up was jpetto with a small personal project memorializing his local coffeeshop, Chava, which closed earlier this year. The page uses Hammer.js for touch events and LazyLoad to lazily load the images, but the lightbox implementation is custom-made from scratch. Neato!


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!