I’ve been looking for a way to sort out Angular, Backbone, Bower, Grunt, Node, NPM, Yeoman and all the other buzzwords that get thrown around for writing a Single Page App for the web. There are many Youtube videos around: these videos stand out as excellent resources.

• Intro to Angular.js in 50 Examples (Part 1) The evolution of a complete Angular.js application, starting from bare HTML, successively adding a slight improvement to each example to build a compelling result. This video goes through Example 36 – I anxiously await Part 2! Created by Curran Kelleher in March 2014 as a lecture for an undergraduate course at UMass Lowell. His code for these samples are on github.

• HTML5 Polygon Editor using Backbone, Require.js, and Canvas A minimal but complete graphical editor using Backbone.js, iterating through several steps to build up the final example. Also by Curran Kelleher, presented in April 2013.

• Yeoman Bower and Grunt – Building Modern Webapps With Ease This gives an overview to using the packaging tools that manage the various modules required by modern web apps. Shai Reznik presented this as part of Google Developers Group (GDG) Meetup in May 2013. His slides are at http://goo.gl/CtrHG

Leave a comment with a link to other resources, and I’ll add them to this list.

I was accepted to the Joslin Diabetes team at the MIT Healthcare Grand H@ckfest this weekend at MIT Media Lab.

It’s an all-weekend opportunity to work with a team on projects related to solving the problem of diabetes. Should be a blast!

Today was a two-fer: I found two interesting techniques for working with Python. I needed to test a web server, and wanted to send concurrent HTTP get requests. (The problem was that the web server was failing sporadically when hit by a browser, even though individual requests for pages always worked.) I found two libraries that allowed me to write the test code in well under an hour.

• requests library: I’ve tried urllib2, and it’s a royal pain to use. My general reaction to that library is, “All I want to do is send an HTTP query, and check the response, and I have to write all this code?” Kenneth Reitz has refactored the API so that simple things are simple, and (I suspect, although I didn’t test it), complex things are possible. Check it out at: http://requests.readthedocs.org
• multithreading.dummy library: Because I wanted to send multiple, overlapping HTTP requests, I figured I’d have to get into threading the Python program. Yuck… I found a great article on Medium https://medium.com/building-things-on-the-internet/40e9b2b36148 that showed how to use the (little known) multithreading.dummy API of Python’s standard multithreading module to trivially (as in, four lines of code) multi-thread the requests.