To keep focus when I start new projects, I early on setup a few simple milestones. Sorted, so the first one is the first to strive for, the second the next aim, etc. Until a milestone has been reached, that milestone is the main focus to accomplish. For example, when I started to build Let’s Do , I wrote down 3 milestones: 1) 5 beta users 2) 5 active teams 3) 5 paying customers At the time, they…
TLDR: I am building an app to manage to-dos within Slack . It is called Let's Do . I have used loads of task management tools on various platforms over the years. Sometimes, more advanced systems like Jira, PivotalTracker, or Trello make sense. Other times you just want a list of tasks shared with other people. A simple list of tasks is excellent as there is very little time needed to understand…
At Oktavilla we are in the process of moving a RubyOnRails application from MySQL to PostgreSQL . For this appliction we use the excellent CircleCI to automatically run the test suit when new commits are pushed to GitHub. This application is in swedish so we want to setup the database with collation set to sv_SE.UTF-8 to make sorting work correctly. This didn’t work out of the box on CircleCI.…
If you have started any ambitious web site projects the last year a topic that might have surfaced is ”performance budgets”. The term means that you decide which performance metrics matter for a web site and set limits for each metric. It can be metrics like response time, PageSpeed score or the total file size of JavaScript and CSS files. This gives you a ”budget” for each metric. Every time…
In this blog post I list some of the applications I use to make my life easier and more productive. These are Mac applications that is constantly open on my laptop in the fall of 2014. I would definitely recommend all of them. Evernote Evernote is great. I use it for almost all of my writing - whether it is meeting notes, e-mail drafts, blog posts or just random scribble. It is so simple and does…
Code is all about communicating with your computer and telling it what you want it to do. To make it easy to pass this knowledge on to our fellow humans we use programming languages that are similar to our human languages. But, code is hard to read and understand. Even in a small application it is often very difficult to follow the different execution paths through out the code. That is why we…
At Oktavilla we regularly start new projects. Over the years we have therefore come up with a few best practices to ensure that it is easy to take part in our projects and reduce errors. We use these in the majority of our projects, both internally and for clients. In the end we deliver high quality web projects and this is one part of that process. In this blog post I focus on a few practices…
Most web apps have different highs and lows of traffic during the day. Maybe you get most of your traffic during daytime and not so much during the night and early morning. If you have this kind of situation it can be a good idea to adjust your number of dynos according to the changes in traffic in order to save a few bucks. When this is done automatic it is sometimes called auto-scaling or…
The other day I got into a discussion about storing AWS credentials in a project’s git repository. The credentials were used for deploying a static site to S3 and the argument was that ”it makes it much easier to get started if the credentials already exists in the project when cloned, and as the repo is a private GitHub repository we don’t have to worry about any unauthorised access” . Years of…
One thing I find my self doing a couple of times every week is browsing a Gemfile for a project and wanting to checkout the rubygems.org page for a gem. Sometimes I want to see what versions are available, the docs or checkout the project on GitHub. A couple of months back I decided to write a little Vim plugin to save myself a couple of key strokes the next time I want to open up a gems page.…