How Making it Work Means Using Defaults

I found a cool project that effortlessly sets up Google Hangouts in your app, Instant Hangouts. You can create a custom room and topic title and invite your users to talk to each other. The only problem was a persistent 400 error, preventing me from knowing whether the repo was a work in progress or whether it really worked!

Luckily, John Cox the project’s author graciously included his contact details and replied to my emails. Eventually, he suggested the obvious: use node.js ( what the repo was written in ) rather than Rails, the context where it would be useful to me.

In just 5 minutes, I got the repo working in node, and from there, I copy-and-pasted my way to wild success.

The moral of the story: look before you leap! In order to make it work, make it right, and make it fast, sometimes you need to step outside of your comfort zone (using node) to properly stand on the shoulders of giants.