I've received several emails asking for instructions on how to set up a basic MEAN stack app. I'm going to take it one step further and give you guys a two-part post that will walk you through creating your first MEAN stack app- from installing the tools to actually writing the code. In Part One we'll go through the setup and installation process. Next in Part Two we'll walk through the steps for building a very simple to-do list. Part One consists of seven steps, although only the first two are are strictly necessary.

Software developers are not known for having the best nutrition. When it comes to development work, the stereotypical late night Red Bull-fueled coding binge is often not too far from the truth. It's hard to imagine a hackathon without a stack of pizza boxes and a mountain of empty soda bottles. In addition, no good tech firm lets their kitchen run out of chips or Vitamin Water. Proper nutrition is, however, about more than just being thin; it's about providing proper fuel for your brain so you can code smarter, faster, and better. In this post I'll give you some anecdotal evidence about why nutrition matters, some resources on how to eat and train properly, and finally give you a list of 8 concrete benefits I've enjoyed since I started eating properly.

If you're familiar with Ruby on Rails and are using MongoDB to build a NodeJS app, you might miss some slick ActiveRecord features, such as declarative validation. Diving into most of the basic tutorials out there, you'll find that many basic web development tasks are more work than you like. For example, if we borrow the style of http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb, a route that pulls a document by its ID will look something like this:

If you've ever tried to build any kind of website, odds are you've had to create some way of validating and saving input from a form. Back in the bad old days this used to be a huge pain, because there were no good frameworks to help get the job done right. The three primary pain points that you have to deal with when trying to validate a form without the aid of a framework are:

This post was featured as a guest blog post for MongoDB on April 30th 2013, which can be found here