Automate Your Development Environment With Vagrant

Vagrant leverages virtualization and automated system configuration to deliver you customized virtual environments for your development projects. With VirtualBox and its comprehensive API under the hood, Vagrant creates and manages custom virtual environments to your exact specification. But wait, we’ve been able to create virtual machines for years. What’s new here? The problem is configuration of a brand new virtual macine for each project is a massive chore, reinstalling all of your dev tools each time sounds like torture, and developers will still each want VMs of different operating systems…what are we solving? Vagrant does it differently. By giving you the option to leverage powerful, proven automated configuration technologies such as Chef or Puppet (as well as your own custom shell scripts, if you like), Vagrant takes the time and tedium out of configuring a virtual environment

Node.js Tutorial: Hello, World!

This is the introductory screencast from my online course, Learn Node.js by Example! In this screencast, I present the basics of Node.js, and develop a small “Hello, World!” app. Enjoy!

Screencast: Node.js and MongoDB Using MongoJS

Here is a free screencast from my online course, Learn Node.js by Example! In this screencast, I present the basics of using the MongoJS module to add MongoDB to your Node.js applications. Enjoy!

Using Socket.io With Express 3.x

Excited about version 3.x of Express, the Node.js web framework? It has some great new features, and is certainly worth migrating to. Many of my apps make use of Socket.io, one of my favorite Node modules, and in this case, and as of now (Socket.io v9.1) the migration isn’t as smooth as it could be. Until socket.io catches up with the changes to Express, here’s how you can use it with Express 3.x.