Recently I’ve been exploring javascript and node.js land, and I gotta say, I like what I see so far. The experience of writing code in the same language in both server and client side is phenomenal; it avoids the mind shift when changing from back-end to front-end development, since it’s all Javascript-based. I strongly recommend trying out the framework Express, which in its 3rd version proves to be a mature and solid solution for software development. It borrows a lot from Sinatra, a ruby framework for DSLs, for its architecture. That said, it can be both good and bad at the same time. The Good: Freedom and Light-weight. The Bad: Lack of conventions and/or structure. I, myself, spent a lot of time trying to figure out how could I better organize my files, and have a folder structure that looked “Rails-ish”, and came up with this repo: Todo-Node Feel free to check it out, ask questions or maybe fork it.

With the bombastic release of Sass 3.2, I caught myself thinking why verbose languages such as Javascript, HTML, PHP etc… are in the mainstream of the web development scene. Sass itself offers 2 syntaxes: SCSS and SASS, the former being a super set of CSS and the latter a modern and elegant white-space aware language.

The language creators Chris Eppstein and Nathan Weizenbaum theirselves, define SCSS as the gateway drug to Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets, as a consequence SCSS is the most used syntax for SASS.

Stepping aside from SASS for a bit, we also have the same situation in other areas such as CoffeeScript which IMHO makes Javascript syntax look clunky, same applies to PHP -> Ruby, C -> Python etc…

But that’s not a common sense between developers! Most of them end up writing their code in more verbose languages because apparently they feel more comfortable with it.

In this post I’ll try to show you how to set up your Ubuntu 12.04 VPS with a LEPR (Linux, Nginx, PostgreSQL and Ruby) stack. I’ll assume that you’re comfortable with the command-line interface and also that you have used a Linux server in the past.

I’ve tried many hosting companies along the years, and the best I’ve found so far happens to be Linode, they have a great support and are always performing updates to their servers. (Attention: this is not a paid ad!)

To continue, I suggest you to get a Ubuntu 12.04 box at your favorite hosting company. Though this code might work for other versions or even other distros, I do not guarantee.

Let’s start!

Hi, Guys

I think I’m starting something off here… This’ll be my technical blog, also my playground.