In my quest to do whatever I can to help out the Jewelbots team I was poking around their various github repositories and bumped into a problem I knew I could solve. There was an issue with their gulp build pipeline where it would error running one of the gulp tasks. I forked the project, recreated the error and spotted the problem almost immediately. A simple matter of pointing to a file in the wrong directory was the culprit. A quick path change fixed it, and we were good to go.

I replied to the issue about how to solve it and offered to make a PR. Apparently it had been fixed locally but never pushed so a PR was requested, which I made, and it was merged in right away.

This is how you open source!

Last year I helped my friend Shruti put together a small site for her new venture capital fund calledArray Ventures. The most challenging part of this work was not having shell access to the server and only being able to use FTPS/SCP to upload files. Even though there is no database or any other kind of backend, and no front-end framework.. I felt a little crippled without shell access.

I wanted to keep it simple, so it’s “just jQuery”. It’s been a while since I did a site without Angular or NodeJS, so it was a fun challenge to remember how we used to do things. We’ve definitely made web development more complicated! It was fun to go back to the “jQuery way” of doing things. I wouldn’t recommend it for a large site worked on by many people, but for this site, it is perfect.

I had considered static site generator like Octopress or Jekyll but I didn’t want Shruti to have to learn another syntax since she was already pretty comfortable with HTML. Also I wanted to avoid the “build” step. Though now, I’m reconsidering that decision. I’ve never done more than a “Hello World” with those tools, so it might be worth a try. I’m sure whoever needs to edit it can handle a grunt/gulp/npm/ruby install… maybe.

What do you think? Any thoughts or suggestions?

Anyway, check it out - http://array.vc