180 websites is mostly Rails backed. The first 68 pages are served out of the public folder and almost everything else was done with Rails. The last week is all done with Node.js.
YumHacker uses Rails as an API on the backend, and Backbone,js for the front end.
Zube uses Node.js and Backbone.js.
Edit: Here's a blog post I wrote after finishing the 180 Websites project that talks more about that. - http://blog.jenniferdewalt.com/post/62998082815/after-180-we...
I love working on Zube now. It's awesome to be able to make a product that helps developers.
Determination, practice, and one-milestone-at-a-time are my main takeaways here. This benefits any field. Strange enough, it especially benefits high-assurance software because the stuff takes so much time and analysis companies might pull out financially or FOSS people loose focus/hope. INFOSEC guru Paul Karger promoted turning a big project into a series of intermediate, useful deliverables to maintain morale and provide short-term revenue from licensing/sales of intermediates. Seems same for learning, too.
What's your take on Jira? How is Zube different from others?
Zube is also deeply integrated with GitHub and everything is synced both ways in real time. So even if some of your developers want to stay in GitHub, everything is still up to date.
By the end of the trip I was really burnt out but I still needed to crank something out on the flight home. I had an idea for a site where you could enter a few hexadecimal color codes and the screen would transition between them. It seemed totally easy in my sleep deprived state but when I started working on it on the plane I totally floundered.
When I finally got back home to my apartment in SF, it was 9pm and I had virtually nothing to to show for my day's work. Also, I was now freaking out. I didn't know how I was going to be able to push up anything!
I took a look at what I originally wanted to do and what little I had done and realized if I reigned in my scope a bit, I could get a website out before I completely lost my mind. I pared it down to just two colors and cut out all the bells and whistles and just barely managed to get it out the door. And then I had a very, very nice sleep.
One more question, although I've already asked a lot of you. How did you make sure you conceptually understood what you were learning at every stage, not just simply taking code and just replacing bits of it here and there?
You can read more about it here - https://fellowship.ycombinator.com
