Pumpink: a .NET "container"
July 30, 2016 12:38More or less 20 months ago (gosh, time flies!) I started a side-project for a very famous company (StackExchange).
StackExchange had just launched, a few months before, a new feature on the main site of their network (StackOverflow).
This feature is called "Code Snippets", and it allows you to embed some sample HTML + JS code in a Question, or an Answer, and let the visitors of the page run it.
Of course, being JS it would run inside the browser, and with few focused precautions it can be made safe for both servers and clients (you do not want to leave an attack vector open on your servers, but you also don't want your visitors to be attacked/exploited as well!)
More details on how they implemented and safeguarded it can be found on their meta.stackoverflow.com site.
The feature got a lot of attention, and of course there where requests to extend it to other languages.
I was one of those that wanted more languages added, but I understood that JS was a very particular case.
Snippets in any other language would have meant an entirely different approach and an entirely different scale of complexity.
In October 2014 I visited NYC; before my visit I got in touch with David Fullerton, the "big boss" of SO development team. We were in touch since my previous "adventure", a few years before, when I interviewed for a position on their Q&A team. We discussed briefly about my past interview, and then he asked me a very interesting question: what would I add to StackOverflow? C# snippets immediately come to my mind.
We discussed briefly about it, drafted up some ideas, added requirements in the process (discarding most of the ideas) and finally David asked if I would like to try it out, as an Open Source experiment sponsored buy StackExchange.
... well, of course! Fun and challenging software, exchanging ideas with some of the most brilliant devs in the .NET ecosystem, and I get paid too! :)
So "Pumpink" was born. If you are curious, you can find it on my GitHub. It already contains a rather in-depth analysis about the structure of the project, and how it works.
Or, if you want to know "why?" instead of simply "how?", you can wait for the upcoming blog posts, in which I will detail some of the choices, problems, headaches that shaped the problem.
StackExchange had just launched, a few months before, a new feature on the main site of their network (StackOverflow).
This feature is called "Code Snippets", and it allows you to embed some sample HTML + JS code in a Question, or an Answer, and let the visitors of the page run it.
Of course, being JS it would run inside the browser, and with few focused precautions it can be made safe for both servers and clients (you do not want to leave an attack vector open on your servers, but you also don't want your visitors to be attacked/exploited as well!)
More details on how they implemented and safeguarded it can be found on their meta.stackoverflow.com site.
The feature got a lot of attention, and of course there where requests to extend it to other languages.
I was one of those that wanted more languages added, but I understood that JS was a very particular case.
Snippets in any other language would have meant an entirely different approach and an entirely different scale of complexity.
In October 2014 I visited NYC; before my visit I got in touch with David Fullerton, the "big boss" of SO development team. We were in touch since my previous "adventure", a few years before, when I interviewed for a position on their Q&A team. We discussed briefly about my past interview, and then he asked me a very interesting question: what would I add to StackOverflow? C# snippets immediately come to my mind.
We discussed briefly about it, drafted up some ideas, added requirements in the process (discarding most of the ideas) and finally David asked if I would like to try it out, as an Open Source experiment sponsored buy StackExchange.
... well, of course! Fun and challenging software, exchanging ideas with some of the most brilliant devs in the .NET ecosystem, and I get paid too! :)
So "Pumpink" was born. If you are curious, you can find it on my GitHub. It already contains a rather in-depth analysis about the structure of the project, and how it works.
Or, if you want to know "why?" instead of simply "how?", you can wait for the upcoming blog posts, in which I will detail some of the choices, problems, headaches that shaped the problem.