I’m currently doing front end development with the awesome team at Big Bad Goose to create the Goodies food discovery app for Walmart Labs.
It’s the first time I’ve had the privilege of working on a production web application running Ruby on Rails, backbone.js and using GitHub for source control. I’ve learned a ton, so here’s a little digest of each technology.
CoffeeScript
The javascript portion of the app is written entirely in CoffeeScript, which is a dialect of javascript that gets rid of a lot of ugly syntax and only uses the “good parts” of the language.
I’ve really taken a liking to CoffeeScript because it lets you focus on the logic of the behavior or interaction you’re attempting to define instead of forcing you to nitpick the syntax of javascript.
Since I’m working on the front end, I’m mostly just using a lot of jQuery to write functions for event handlers to make things interactive. The CoffeeScript for each page is contained within a custom backbone.js view class which has a module for binding and triggering custom named events. This combination using backbone to organize the code and writing the functions in jQuery and CoffeeScript makes for really expressive code.