The practical part of the course depended on GNU Octave (open source math toolkit), but installing it on a Mac was a huge pain. I did manage to do it,

A side project story: octave.im (2013-2016)

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2021-06-27 06:00:04

The practical part of the course depended on GNU Octave (open source math toolkit), but installing it on a Mac was a huge pain. I did manage to do it, but noticed that many people on forums complanied about the same thing.

So I had a brilliant idea — wouldn’t it be great if Octave was available via SaaS model? With fancy features like built in code editor, command line and plots?

I built the first prototype in one night on June 8, 2013. I used NodeJS 0.10-ish with socket.io on the server side and CodeMirror with some plugins on the frontend.

In October that year I rewrote the frontend in React — the experience of doing so was amazing! React was young (createClass/autobind/mixins) but its programming model “clicked” with me. I remember hanging out in their IRC channel looking for help with autoscrolling. I was really impressed at how quick and friendly the response was (thanks @sophiebits!).

The initial version of the backend would just run octave in a dedicated folder. My second iteration ued Docker, which at the time was very new and unproven. It all ran on a Digital Ocean 2GB RAM droplet.