20 years ago

It was twenty years ago on this day (October 5, 1995) that my college roommate Jeff Gammel drowned while swimming in Lake Cortez in Hot Springs Village. He was was swimming with a few other guys from Louisiana Tech but got separated from them at one point. When the Tech kids reached the shore and didn't find Jeff, they called the police. Divers found his body the next morning. No one is sure what caused him to drown, but my guess is that he cramped up or something and wasn't able to get to shore in time.

Jeff was in Hot Springs Village for the weekend along with his best friend Brandon Procell to be with the Hot Springs Village church youth group for an area-wide get together. Jeff and Brandon regularly traveled to Hot Springs Village to work as youth ministers for the youth group. In other words, Jeff lost his life while serving others. Although Jeff's death hit us all like a ton of bricks, we knew that he was just doing what his Savior did. And we knew that he had received his reward.

"For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it." - Matthew 16:25

Below is the article from the Harding University Bison that talked about Jeff's accident and the chapel program the following Monday.

Finishing up my first summer with HUB-CAPS

This summer I had the opportunity to work with HUB-CAPS (Harding University Branch of the Center for Advanced Public Safety), run by my colleague Dana Steil. We employed seven Harding students to help us on various software projects for the Arkansas and Mississippi highway patrols.

What occupied most of time this summer was developing a system that allows Mississippi patrol officers to enter paper tickets into a web-based SPA application. We used AngularJS on the front-end and an ASP.NET MVC app that exposed web APIs on the back-end. Mallory Eaton did a lot of the client-side development work and built some nice e2e tests. I'm proud of the app we developed which is currently in beta testing.

I'm also thankful to Dana Steil for giving me the opportunity to work with his group.

Our students are starting to arrive for the beginning of the fall semester. Time to start redirecting my energies into my courses.

The MEAN stack

I've developed some notes/outlines for my Web Development 2 course on the MEAN stack (MonogoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node) that I thought I'd share here. They introduce each MEAN component and contain code snippets that build a web app that uses a RESTful web service. Enjoy!

1. MEAN Stack
2. Node.js
3. Express
4. MongoDB
5. Mongoose
6. RESTful Web Services
7. Creating RESTful Web Services with MEAN
8. AngularJS
9. Controllers and Services
10. Routing
11. Using RESTful Web APIs with AngularJS
12. Token-Based Authentication