Make Something Happen Happenings

I’ve been recording videos for the practical examples for “Begin to Code: Building Applications and Games with the Cloud”. The text contains “Make Something Happen” exercises and I thought it might be fun to make a video walkthrough of each. Way to increase your workload Rob.

Anyhoo, I’m up to number 28 which is about half way through the book. The video is walking through the process of taking a working node.js application and deploying it into the cloud. I’d just about finished recording it yesterday when the home phone rang. As I was reaching for the handset I brushed the music player and so if you watch through the screencast you can hear me grappling with the phone and get a very small snippet of music (big prizes if you can work out the track). I’ve a strict policy of doing everything in one take. After all, I never got to redo any of my lectures (although I often wanted to). I find that this makes them properly live.

Sometimes things go wrong (like they used to in lectures) and I leave those bits in too - the process of finding the problem and fixing it is often the most instructive part of the session. In number 28 I had a bit of this when my deployed application failed, but I was able to show how to debug it, find and fix the problem and then redeploy the application. I’m really enjoying making these. You can find the complete playlist here. You can find the book website with a draft copy of the text here.