Happy New Year! It has been a few weeks since my last post. My sabbatical was refreshing and productive. I finished my first major AngularJS project, which I am excited to start writing about, and of course took some much-needed down time. I hope your end of year festivities were equally pleasant.

This year I have a diverse topic list in store for CompassInHand that I hope will be as interesting to you as it is educational to me. Technology is amazing. There is no end to what can be learned. My hope is that I can give back some of what others are teaching me.

AngularJS Project One, Released

As mentioned, I released my first application written purely in the “Angular way”: Our XBOX 360 Library (OX360L)! If you are interested in checking out the code, please visit the project git repo.

Plans for CompassInHand

Loyal readers will note: prior to my holiday sabbatical my posting interval was about once per week. Unfortunately I rarely had enough time to do the research, understand the technology, and write a quality post about it within the single week. Therefore my new posting interval will be about twice per month. The additional week will be a tremendous help and should make for tighter posts with more code examples.

While no release date exists yet, this year you can expect CompassInHand to undergo a big face lift. With the help of my good friend (and new father!) Trian Koutoufaris a new WordPress theme is slowly taking shape – including an actual site logo! Stay tuned.

Finally, I plan to begin supporting RSS feeds. This is not a big technical challenge, just an administrative oversight I never considered before. Whether this feature is useful will be up to you guys – please, comment and let me know!

What Is On The Agenda?

Lots of things!

Over the next several posts I will be discussing some of the many (many, many) lessons I learned while building OX360L. Some of these lesson topics may include:

• The Magic of Promises
• Implementation of JSONP based Promises
• JSONP vs CORS, a technical compare / contrast
• Using Directives for DOM manipulation
• Best practices regarding $scope
• When to use $apply / $watch / $broadcast
• Integrating jQuery plugins into an Angular application
• Populating the select element (ng-option v ng-repeat)
• What is ng-cloak?

Looking past Angular / OXB360L, other post topics coming in the next several months will include:

• Grunt “The JavaScript Task Runner” – sweet sweet process automation
• Bower – Dependency / package installer, like npm for those of you who use node.js
• Yeoman – Yo + Bower + Grunt equals this interesting workflow process
• RequireJS – Great for dynamic JS library loading
• Node.js – You can expect several posts on this topic, starting with building RESTful Web APIs
• Bootstrap – Once a bloated CSS “framework”, now practically indispensable (for me anyway!)
• GitHub – I use git nearly every day, but I admit I understand it poorly – let’s change that

Finally, I have another project getting ready to spin up. Look for hints and mentions as meaningful progress is made. Hopefully it can be useful for all of you who go to lunch with coworkers.

Thanks for reading!