Patrick Filler

Chosen

For most of my “web career”, I have been a definite taker of open source projects and not much of a giver. While I’ve always liked the idea of sharing work, I’ve always found an excuse to pass (not enough time, someone better than me should do that, baseball is on tv). Thankfully, Harvest asked me to spend some time working on a project we could share and no excuses were allowed.

Today, we officially released the first open source project I’ve been a significant contributor to. Chosen is a jQuery/Prototype plug-in for enhancing select boxes and I’m damn proud of it.

Chosen aims to solve a lot of the user experience issues presented by select boxes with way too many elements. It also aims to keep things easier for developers by relying on semantic markup and progressive enhancement. Double win.

After going through the experience of releasing an open source project, I’m disappointed it didn’t happen sooner. I used new tools and techniques (hello, CoffeeScript) through the process and the learning experience more than justified the time expenditure. I will definitely be going down this road again.

You can read more about Chosen on its project page or on the Harvest Blog.

Meet Gardener

Harvest just released an alpha version of a project I helped build, called Gardener:

In February, a few members of our team were asked to dedicate a week to R&D by building a new time-tracking app. While discussing scope, we agreed that we get more done on days that we take a a few minutes to set an agenda, and we sought to design an app around this thesis:

I believe planning/allocating time will make me more focused and productive.

The experimental nature of the project gave our team a chance to play with Backbone.js, a framework designed to bring MVC structure to the browser. I was completely impressed with how easy Backbone makes keeping track of loads of data. A lot of the complexity of building a javascript app gets reduced to almost-nothing right off the bat. Awesome!

Anywho, check out Gardener and let us know what you think.