flockmeister

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Have you ever heard the phrase "pecking order"? It's a real thing! Chickens are extremely sensitive to their social order, and now you can make heads and tails of their sassy attitudes with flockmeister, the only app of its kind, guaranteed!

Basically, this app takes as input some observational data about which chickens have pecked other chickens, and then builds you a directed graph of their social hierarchy. In other words, it will help you inductively identify the social order of your flock. See this demo:

Poor Feathers! :(

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Code

Ok, so you didn't really come here to uncover the mysteries of the poultry world---you probably came here to learn about the code. This app is a little fun project to keep the outer edges of my full-stack toolset honest; namely, the latest and greatest in front-end technology, and some more academic stuff written in haskell.

I don't get enough use of these skills during an average work day since I spend most of my time in server-side ruby/rails. For the same reason, this app also stops just short of the database, since databases are only really fun when you are dealing with hundreds of millions of rows (and even then they are not that much fun).

From top to bottom, it features:

• Web and graphics design (incidentally, I do wear the main designer hat at my current job)
• A front-end written in React and Flux (via marty.js); also a chance to practice ES6 since I've spent most of my time in coffeescript
• Twitter bootstrap (sass-flavored, since we're dealing with chickens that have attitude!)
• Webpack, node, and friends (many thanks to Justin Gordon's tutorial for helping me transition from browserify and make sense of webpack in short order. I ended up enjoying the React Hot Loading, but passed on getting CSS to go through webpack as well---the sass ecosystem on node doesn't really feel like a first-class citizen)
• Ruby on Rails used as web server "glue"
• Haskell for fgl and graphviz integration (see the flockcharter/ dir for more info)

Setup

This project is essentially a rails application with a front-end (client/) and a command-line program (flockcharter/). Before you start, make sure you have all the dependencies:

1. Graphviz: brew install graphviz
2. Haskell Platform

To get running, do the usual package-manager incantations:

bundle install

npm install

This will let you get the rails server up and running via rails s. If you are doing development, you may be interested in the react hot loader. foreman start -f Procfile.dev may be of use to you in that case. It will put the react hot loader on localhost:4000 for rapid iteration (pretty bare bones since it doesn't load CSS) and then you can see it come together at the usual localhost:3000 rails server.

To build the flockcharter binary, you need to compile from source. This should be pretty straightforward if you know a bit of cabal. I usually work in a sandbox, so it looks like,

1. cabal sandbox init
2. cabal install --only-dependencies (this may take a while)
3. cabal build (this will put a compiled binary inside dist/)
4. cat your favorite json file (see sample_input.json for the format)