Pow, Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline, CoffeeScript and More (Interview)

Adam and Wynn caught up with Sam Stephenson from 37Signals to talk about his his many open source projects and developing Basecamp Mobile.

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Show Notes:

• Nathan Smith, friend of the show, creator of 960.gs, Adapt, Formalize, and featured in Episode 0.3.2
• Sam Stephenson, programmer at 37signals, creator of massive amounts of open source.
• Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X.
• Pow supports multiple rubies via RVM.
• Powder is a CLI for Pow.
• Prototype.js is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.
• Sprockets is a Ruby library that preprocesses and concatenates JavaScript source files.
• Stitch stitches your CommonJS modules together for the browser
• ExecJS runs JavaScript code from Ruby.
• Josh Peek, Rubyist and GitHubber.
• Nack - Node.js adapter for Rack
• Sam loves CoffeeScript and hopes to never write JavaScript again.
• Sam debunks the FUD of debugging CoffeeScript. “Command-F is your friend.”
• Jeremy Ashkenas, creator of CoffeeScript ported his Underscore library as a demonstration.
• Sam weighs in on the micro framework movement and loves Zepto, Underscore, and Backbone.
• “We’re living in a WebKit world on mobile.”
• The goal of the Basecamp Mobile app was to “feel like a web app.”
• Basecamp Mobile was a team effort by Sam, Josh, and Jason Zimdars.
• “Responsive Web Design”, a term coined by Ethan Marcotte.
• Less Framework is an adaptive grid CSS framework for desktop and mobile.
• Cinco is the yet-to-be-released framework behind Basecamp Mobile built on Stitch, Backbone, CoffeeScript, and Zepto.
• Sprockets powers the new Rails 3.1 Asset Pipeline
• Jammit is an alternative to Sprockets.
• The Ruby Racer from Charles Lowell embeds the V8 Javascript Interpreter into Ruby
• The Git commit heard round the world.
• Baren generates images from Processing source.
• Jamie Dihiansan is the design talent behind the great Pow web site
• Pow uses docco for documentation.
• Rack-legacy allows you to serve up PHP from Pow.
• Be sure and snag Trevor Burnham’s excellent CoffeeScript book
• Josh and DHH are Sam’s programming heroes.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!