Preamble

What is this?

This is my dev-diary to record my experience learning NodeJS and, hopefully, making an open source PWA for IT Support companies. I'd like to do blog post updates weekly, though, I'll be honest I'm not entirely sure I'll manage that.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Andrew Bone, I'm almost 30 and I work for a company that does IT Support for a few smaller companies. Honestly, this isn't where I saw myself ending up but that's life.

Background

As the sites, we administer want to do things on a budget we use Debian servers with samba rather than windows servers for our domains. This is all well and good but user creation is done in the command line which for some of our staff was a little challenging.

Birth of the vision

We already had some in-house software running on Apache with a Perl and MySQL backend, from our Development department, so I thought I'd make some simple software that can SSH to a site and make a user for you. This was simple enough, I had a little experience with making websites and having supported the in-house software for a number of years had picked up some Perl. The software was a hit but it always felt a little clunky so I started reading about the best practices for making web applications.

This brings us up to today, I've decided to remake my software but as a PWA with a NodeJS backend. I'm hoping to be able to make shell then let people that use it (if any ever do) add the modules they want such as asset lists, samba controls, etc.

Why are you telling us?

I thought it might be interesting to write up my experience as I go along, the plan is for the software to be open source too, so if anyone wanted to jump in and help me out with something I'm doing horribly or just show me what I'm doing wrong they can feel more than welcome.

How far along are you?

I'm basically not, the ideas have been bubbling along at the back of my head for a while but I've not got round to doing anything, putting pen to paper (well...) was step one.

I've come up with a name, "Ignis", I think it has a nice ring to it.
I've made a GitHub organisation called ignis-pwa
I've made a logo which, of course, is subject to change

Current thoughts

I think I'd like to use web components, I've had a little play with Polymer and found it quite convenient.

I've also had a look at PWA starter kit and thought that might be a good place to start.

What can we do?

Thanks for asking, currently, I'm at the ideas phase, for both features and UIX, so if you could submit an issue that would be amazing or even look over existing issues and add your two cents.

Any advice for me would be amazing too; resources you think would be helpful or things you've learnt on your own journeys.

Thank you so much for reading this far, honestly, I'm blown away that you did 🙂.

Feel free to leave comments on how future posts can be better, thank you again.