Pulse
Pulse was my entry in the Node Knockout 2012 48-hour Node.js development competition. It was my first Node.js project developed on a PaaS (Nodejitsu). The idea behind Pulse was to read the latest Twitter posts from the stream API, extract YouTube links, and use the YouTube API to rank the extracted videos by popularity and category. The result was a streaming video dashboard that allowed users to see in near real time what videos the global Twitter community was posting about. The processing pipeline for Pulse was built to scale, with tweets being queued in a Redis instance, and processed videos stored in a MongoDB collection. The front end was built using Socket.IO and jQuery to allow for real time, Web Socket-based updates across virtually all browsers.