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Hanalei, Hawaii 2010-03-16

Kona Screencast 1: It’s Baaaaack!

This may be a really dumb thing I've just done - but bear with me because I think it makes sense. I knew this point was going to come when I first started the MVC Storefront - the point where I'm no longer building "an MVC sample app" and I change directions to build a flexible, pluggable Open Source community application.

Friday, March 27, 2009

So I decided to mark the occasion by changing the application name from MVC Storefront to Kona. This screencast is all about that change and what's become of the MVC Storefront. What's Kona? Aside from being one of the most beautiful places on the planet with one of the best brew fests EVAR, Kona is the name I chose one late night when thinking this whole thing over. Originally I wanted to go with "Hilo" (the 2nd largest city in Hawaii and also a hub of KONA_tilecommerce for many, many years in old Hawaii) but everyone I showed it to kept asking me what "Hi Low" was all about.  Indeed it did seem confusing - so I went with Kona. Resuming the Screencasts One thing I've really enjoyed was being able to screencast the "learning process" as I built out the MVC Storefront. I can easily say that I have learned more over the last year than I have *ever* in my career. In fact I'll say I learned 5 times more - it was a ton of fun and I don't want to stop now! There are so many areas to cover that I think would be interesting - such as:
  • Cloud Computing and Azure
  • Analytics and this F# Thing
  • Deep dives into javascript and jQuery
  • Deployment issues
  • Mono and what it means to us as developers (I have a message into Miguel De Icaza to see if he'd do a screencast with me)

Crazy Town

I'm trying out some different things with Kona, and these are:

  • Commitment to simplicity. I think that ASP.NET developers tend to fall into the rut of "producing software" instead of producing a compelling website. So much focus is given to the backend that the front end is "left for the turtlenecks" - and it shows in the popular apps that are out there these days. I'm really going to try to emphasize the user interaction as the driver - not my fear of the architecture police :).
  • Commitment to extensibility. This resolves down to plugins and theming - something that ASP.NET developers don't focus on very much. I want to enable a "Notepad/FTP" experience, where you can alter/fix/maintain your application easily. I know you have a life and your time is precious - you shouldn't have to dive deep into the application to figure out how tax is calculated :).
The ideas in the webcast are somewhat new and challenging and I'd like to say, once again, this isn't supposed to be "guidance". I tried to tackle those issues with the Storefront. This, instead, is my attempt at building something compelling, usable, and damn sexxy! Your feedback, as always, is a major motivator! The Code Is Here Download Here (40 Mb)