Rustic Retreat
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Live broadcasts and documentation from a remote tech outpost in rustic Portugal. Sharing off-grid life, the necessary research & development and the pursuit of life, without centralized infrastructure.
Apollo-NG is a mobile, self-sustainable, independent and highly-experimental Hackbase, focused on research, development and usage of next-generation open technology while visiting places without a resident, local Hackerspace and offering other Hackers the opportunity to work together on exciting projects and to share fun, food, tools & resources, knowledge, experience and inspiration.
After the fruitful session on the weekend, we used the opportunity of still being together in Munich to scheme up the new internal structure and models/views:
Changes in the develop branch to follow the new model are already underway and DSpace is now an official Apollo-NG R&D project, so everything will start moving into the dspace namespace from now on.
3 nights and two days of hacking have come to a very successful end. It was a great experience, none of us ever participated in a hackparty/hackathon so we really didn't know how to go about it. On Friday we tried to establish a common ground and basic guidelines where to go and what to do, on Saturday we were all over the place and we mostly refined the way we are going to handle the repos and from Sunday morning we really digged into it. At this point I really want to personally thank all people, who joined together and helped to make the hard bootstrapping of a system like this possible, by sharing their time, knowledge, resources and even food :)
All preliminary mockup code has been replaced by a beautiful model/view approach in backbone/ender.js. That should make further development much more straightforward, cleaner and faster.
A working example of the basic results of this hackparty can be viewed on:
The git repos are up and running, more information on the pad for now:
With more manpower and additional resources we've managed to finish refactoring the initial mockup client code to use the ender javascript “package manager” and decided to go with qwery, bean, bonzo, underscore, backbone, handlebars and domready instead of a fully bloated js framework like jquery or extjs.
For comparison, just jquery without any other needed jquery plugin weighs 32kb after minifying and compression. Our ender package comes down to 28kb including everything else we seem to need. Maps often seem to be perceived as “annoying” by users if the map responsiveness is less than optimal, so we should always keep in mind to make this as lean and lightweight as possible and use other trickery to “emulate” a fluid experience.
Additionally ruebezahl dedicated some of his available storage and computing resources for the cause and now we already have the first public tileserver and the first version of a couchdb based overlay-server running. Great stuff :)
The git repos are up and running, more information on the pad for now: