myDecembeard.com Project

In honor of the holidays the team at Simby decided to have some fun this year. Many people participate in Movember by growing a mustache each November. However we think Mustaches are creepy, and decided to show our support by growing beards in December. And as such myDecembeard.com was born.

The team at Simby often likes to explore new technologies. The hardest part about this is finding a good project to put things to the test on. Lately we have been doing a lot of reading about server-side javascript, specifically Node.js. We had been looking for a project to put Node.js to the test and it seemed like myDecembeard was a good fit.

The idea behind myDecembeard is that users can have a place to showcase their facial hair growing abilities, by taking a daily picture. However no one wants to setup yet another account on some random site, so we decided that the authentication would be done via OAuth, specifically through Twitter. Within the application we use a flash widget to allow you to make use of your computers webcam and upload to the site. Internally the application makes use of the Connect middleware for Node.js and the Express framework that is built on top of it.

Building the application was a lot of fun and we are looking forward to the next opportunity to use Node.js in an application. Currently we are reviewing the possibility of doing a presentation at 360 Flex on using Node.js as a backend to flash based applications. If you think that would be a good topic, or if you would like more information on utilizing Node.js please comment below or contact us.