Head in the Clouds

Although I'm not ready to make the project public yet, I've been working on something I'm calling CZR (Caesar), which is a script that you can include on your page that allows fellow developers, designers or other site stakeholders to up-vote, down-vote and comment on modules that you are adding to a site during a redesign. These stats are then saved as simple key value pairs for review by the design and development team as the site is iterated upon.

I have experimented with a new approach, which has increased my developer productivity a lot. I couldn't have imagined this workflow a year ago, and it is great to have discovered these tools. I am using Codio as my cloud based IDE, and I am using Parse to handle the database tasks.

Codio uses the Code Mirror project as the basis of its IDE, but there are a ton of other goodies, including their idea of "boxes", Codio's way of managing your backend with a wide variety of server side configurations. For example, although my CZR project is entirely Front End (with a simple key value store system managed by Parse), I have another personal project running a full Drupal stack, which is also hosted and edited through Codio. Codio integrates fully with my Github account. It is quickly becoming a go to tool for fast development in the cloud.

As for Parse, I have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible on this platform, but so far, their JavaScript SDK has been a seamless drop-in replacement for my Backbone JavaScript code, allowing me to store and sort through my user data with great ease.

It may be an impossible dream to follow this workflow end to end for more complicated projects, but for my work on this smaller sized personal project, it has been a treat. If anybody is using this or a similar set up on midsize to large projects, please let me know. I'd like to know what your experience has been like.