Nearby Now has been using SideKiq for 120 days now in production. That’s odd, we are a .NET shop… SQL Queuing Up until around 120 days ago, we were using SQL Server Message Broker. SSMB is appealing because it enables you to send asynchronous messages directly from your database code. You can target your own database, another db on the same server, or a remote server. There’s a ton of features…
Over the past two weeks I’ve been working with a data-driven visualization library called D3.js . My primary goal was to get familiar with SVG, and to discover new ways to visually represent data in a useful way. While I was building visualizations for Less Neglect I remembered reading that the Stripe graphs, while custom made by Stripe, were built on top of the Raphaël Javascript library because…
It’s official, I’m now part of the Less Neglect team. This marks the first job I got over a tweet. I’ve actually been part of the Less Neglect team for a while but Monday starts my official first “full-time” day. I really like they way we came together. A conversation over Twitter, a couple of small contracts, and drinks with Cory (one of the two co-founders) while on vacation with my family in…
I’ve built many applications that require a server, a database, and deployments, just to pass a few bits of data around. Also, when I want to integrate with API’s like Twilio and Stripe , I have to pull down gems, and nugets, and libraries, and their dependencies, oh my. It’s completely overkill if you ask me; there has to be an easier way… Turn that API into a cross-platform endpoint I’m going to…
If you haven’t heard of webscript.io yet, it’s an interesting new service that lets you write Lua scripts that respond web requests, and you gives you a URL endpoint to execute the script. I recently launched iOS push notifications for Pay Pad for Stripe . To do that, I had to spin up a new rails on app Heroku that processes Stripe Webhooks. Not that big of a deal because Heroku deployment is…
UPDATE 2 I spoke with Apple by phone this morning. The person I spoke with was very kind and sympathetic to what happened. He had seen my blog post last night and immediately escalated action on their end. He acknowledged that it was a mistake for Apple to have rejected the app and apologized for the unfortunate app review experience I had. They took a look at the app again and confirmed that it…
Building a fluid communication channel between your app, and your customers, is difficult and time consuming. That’s why I really like what Less Neglect has done with their new Customer Analytics & Support API. ##How I Typically do Support In the past, I’ve hooked up apps like Desk.com & Get Satisfaction for customer support, in combination with TestFlight Live , to provide a way for customers to…
I’ve been following Jin Yang’s work for years. He’s an amazing designer and I was excited when he went to lead design over at Stack Exchange. In this post he talks about the design process he takes for each site in the Stack Exchange network. I’m not a designer at all so it’s interesting to get into the brain of one of the best. Check it out!
I was following along with John Sheehan’s thoughts on password-less authentication and two-factor authentication came up today with a post by TechCrunch about Authy . Two-Factor authentication is a great security model. There are various flavors of two-factor authentication but the Authy concept specifically relates to sending a short token to you via an Authy app, or SMS. I use a two-factor…
A great talk from Scott Hanselman about keys to being more productive. I really appreciate the conversation about inbox processing. Not just your email inbox, but your life inbox. My favorite part of the talk is around 22:30 into the video where Scott quotes David Allen : “Don’t put energy into things you don’t want more of”. I always find it interesting to get insight from the minds of people who…
For the past few months I’ve been working all over town. A friends office some days, a coffee-shop on other days, pubs, bookstores, collaborative workspaces, or anywhere with decent wifi. This has caused a little neglect with the home office. It’s easy to throw things on your desk when you aren’t using it and living out of a laptop bag. Some things have changed recently that has me working from…
Today TechCrunch posted an article about CrossFit . When I first saw the headline I was upset. The trendy tech news media is now blogging about my beloved Crossfit. Or as my friend said today “Crossfit has jumped the shark”. Oh No! The truth is this is probably a good thing for Crossfit. There are some good an bad things about it becoming main-stream. The bad that I see is that the more popular it…
I recently re-built Nearby Now from the ground up. I made the decision to not only re-write a lot of the code base, but to also add new features and an entirley new look-and-feel to the application. It’s my first attempt at designing an iPhone app and not just building one. My end-goal was simple; create a new version with more features but make it easier to use for our customers. Now, don’t let…
I read a couple tech blogs today talk about the new feature of mobile Safari that allows for off-line reading and how it’s an Instapaper killer. The comments are usually funny and range from “iOS sucks”, to “you should never develop a popular app because Apple will steal your idea”, to “that’s why I’m on Android”. Here’s the deal. You can’t kill Instapaper just by adding off-line reading support.…
It’s great that Google is building tools for the small business, but enough sales and marketing tools already. How about tools to help small businesses run themselves. I know getting new business/customers is priority one, but if you don’t have the right tools to manage that awesome business, then…
I’m a big fan of Hubot . If you have been interested in learning CoffeeScript , or Node.js , I recommend getting your own Hubot and tinkering with the source code. Hubut does a few fun and interesting things. For example, you can ask Hubot to mustache someone and, assuming that person has an online presence, you’ll usually something good back like this: (Note, hubot is not magically mustaching…
Tekfolio was built on bootstrap. What does that mean? Bootstrap is a highly polished set of UI templates, CSS, and components that help developers rapidly build great looking websites without having to spend a ton of time on UI design. This does not mean you should skip the UI part of web design. While bootstrap is great for prototyping ideas and mocking up living pages, UI design is not something…
I feel like this sometimes developing for iOS, Android, and .NET.
disclaimer: I’m a wordpress noob, which explains why what you are about to read below happened So I just updated a wordpress site that I created for the Nearby Now plugins. It's just a basic site we put together to feature some of the various plugins we've built for Wordpress and Facebook, and to show examples of those plugins in action. I made a change that screwed things up for about an hour.…
Here’s a quick rambling on my experience as a .net dev building Nearby Now for iOS and Android. I had a blast, learned a ton, and developed a love hate relationship for other platforms. I’m going to break this post down into three main sections that I feel are most important to talk about. Before I begin… Please note that while I am a .net developer, I’m an Apple fanboy, and never thought I’d…
It’s nice to see something so basic, so trivial, that doesn’t require batteries or wifi to be incredibly useful. So what the heck are these little things? ##Frame Hangers? Today I put up Crystal’s new double diploma frame in our office. Before I started I went to the garage and grabbed my supply of things men buy at the Home Depot but don’t really need. I started with my automatic stud finder,…
I love a challenge and stepping out of .NET land to tackle another programming language for a couple weeks was a blast! So what about Objective-C & Xcode from a .NET programmers perspective? There is a learning curve. That’s expected when moving to any new programming language. When I started learning Ruby on Rails, or PHP, or Java, or even moving from .NET Web Forms to MVC, same thing, a learning…
Here is how you set it up: Make sure you have the latest version of NuGet: [http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/27077b70-9dad-4c64-adcf-c7cf6bc9970c Install-Package MvcRazorThemeableViewEngine]http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/27077b70-9dad-4c64-adcf-c7cf6bc9970c Install-Package MvcRazorThemeableViewEngine Edit your Global.asax.cs file with the code in Global-temp.asax.cs…
If you’ve never participated in a hackathon (hack night, code jam, etc) then it might be difficult to understand the point. Typically a hackathon is when two or more programmers get together to work on something interesting. For most hackathons there is no more than a very high-level goal (build something useful for example) and a pre-determined period of time (might be an all-nighter, might be a…
I’m doing some screen casts next week and thought a new mic would be helpful. I tested it tonight on Skype and it works great. Not bad for less than $90. It’s bigger than I expected but it looks great. Wish me luck on my first ever screen cast. I’ll be showing off a killer new SideBox feature that we’ve been working on the past couple of days.
I just spent the weekend updating CoovTech and Tekfolio with {less} css . If you haven’t heard of LESS, it’s a dynamic style sheet language that allows you to write much better CSS that compiles down to regular CSS. ##Much Better? What does that really mean? Well, for as long as I’ve been doing web dev, I’ve hated CSS. When working with C# or RoR, we live in a world where things are dynamic and…
I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn and Stackoverflow Carrers but there has been something bugging me about both sites for a while. They are all talk… Before you drive by my house and throws eggs at me, please allow me to explain. Both of these sites have been huge for my IT career. I’ve made some great connections with people on both sites and have had great career opprotunities as a result of my…
Pair programming has been one of my favorite agile software development techniques for the last couple of years. We built SideBox this way and it’s been some of the most productive programming I have ever done. I spent the last two weeks on a sprint at Concord trying to help them launch a new web app. We did not do pair programming formally but I did something like pair programming a couple of…
layout: post title: “Misinformed Dangerous” excerpt: Someone insists that this is because of MVC 3, which cannot be indexed by main stream search engine… — I had a recent conversation with a friend about SEO and how the Google Bot crawls websites. There was a question from our conversation that remained unanswered so I fired off some queries to figure it out. I came across a question on…
I drove by an old Hollywood Video store this weekend I couldn’t help but reflect on the rise-and-fall of of both Hollywood Video and Blockbuster . If you Google these two companies you’ll likely read about these corporations as “casualty of the economy” or “casualty of NetFlix ”. While some of that may be true, I think it is very likely that something else caused both to crumble. ##A choice of two…
According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.” When I hear people throw around terms like “web scale”, or “acid”, I usually face-palm & think of that MongoDB vs SQL extra normal video. I can’t wait to see “newsql” but I would love…
I came across this article today and thought it was funny and worth sharing: Here’s the problem that ends up killing company after company. All successful software companies had, as their dominant personality, a leader who nurtured programmers. But no company can keep such a leader forever. Either he cashes out, or he brings in management types who end up driving him out, or he changes and becomes…
Just about every site I own has been moved to AppHarbor . SideBox , FHA Web Express , CoovTech , Tekfolio are some examples - It’s a must have not just for scale and flexibility, but also for automated deployment. I’m a big believer in simplifying every aspect of the software development process from “file new project” to deployment. Nothing should take more than a click-or-two, or a few…
I’m in the process of converting my blog over to GitHub… I’m half-done writing a new post about what. In the meantime, I’m writing a script that takes my old posts, converts any that aren’t already in markdown format, then uploads them to GutHub. Stay tuned.
Back in 2004 (about 23 internet years ago) I started working on a cool priority management project. We were trying to build a hybrid application that was part helpdesk, part bug tracking, and part priority management. We basically built an internal ZenDesk on steroids. We were using a HelpDesk tool at the time and we baked-in a lot of those standard helpdesk features that you see everywhere. One…
One of the features of being a contractor is freedom of movement. You can travel anywhere in the world, and as long as you have a laptop and a wifi connection, you can be productive. I’ve enjoyed the freedom of coding in a local starbucks, a local pub, even awesome co-locations sites like GangPlank . The Internet is truly a beautiful thing. Except when there is no Internet Today I’m traveling to…
Did anyone make any changes to [fill in the blank] code? This question makes my blood boil yet it’s a question that I’ve asked probably 100 times over for the last five years. If you are asking this question too then guess what, you don’t have source control and what you are using sucks. Source control is supposed to help you track changes. If you are asking the question above it means that…
I’m a big fan of Scott Hanselman’s Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows . It’s my go-to page whenever I get a new machine. But I’m no longer a Windows guy. I’m a Macdows guy. I still code C# .Net (with Mono) on the mac, but a lot of these tools are cross-platform. I just got a new setup to complete my indi-developer work station . I’m running the new iMac with a LED Cinema…
My trusty ASP.NET MVC book makes a great stand for my second display. It just happens to line up the monitor almost perfectly with my computer. I need to work on the lighting in the office. I like the office dark some of the time, but it is difficult to bring in natrual light when I want it.
This is a non-technical rant. You’ve been warned. I was injured in a softball game on Wednesday night. It’s kinda of embarrassing how it happened. The guy batting before me hit an opposite field laser that exposed a shitty right-fielder that the other team had. I tried the same and when I hit the ball, I immediately felt pain on my left side. It felt like I pulled something. I kept playing and in…
Quick back-story. I was trying to reserve a car with my Amex points for a trip I’m taking to Virginia. My wife and I are going on a short vacation and I had some Amex points so I wanted to splurge a little and rent us a convertible Mustang. During our trip, we are driving up to New York for a day and that calls for a Mustang drop-top, right? Turns out that most car rental agencies don’t make…
A few years back when social networking exploded, I was a little slow to catch on. I had a MySpace and Facebook account, but I thought social networking was sort of silly at the time. I was mostly posting pictures on Flickr, and blogging occasionally so my family could keep up with what I was doing. It was this post about my son that actually that kicked-off my desire to blog and and write as much…
When i first started building the SideBox iPhone app, I tried to parse Json using native .net api’s. I failed. Why? Well mostly because I did not know what I was doing, but also because I was under a pinch to bang it out quickly. Back then I decided to go with a port of the JSON.NET library called Newtonsoft.Json. It has worked well for me up until recently. I began processing some nested json…
My first ever hack-a-thon was a failure. Why? Because the battery on my laptop ran out after about 40 minutes… I suck. Here was the challenge… We were trying to come up with a way for customers to start using SideBox and feeding hyper-local search, even if our full-service product is not complete/polished, or customers weren’t ready to take the plunge. We needed check-in support from the web, and…
All men dream but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. - T.E. Lawrence After 10 years, 3 months, and 27 days (or 325,641,600 seconds for you geeks), today was my last day as a full-time developer for…
I needed a to generate a site map today for some cool things we are planning for SideBox . I turned to, you guessed it, Stackoverflow and found a question about parsing an Atom feed with Linq which is exactly what I was looking for. Here is the code. I’m scraping content from Stackoverflow as an example: Here are some important tips I learned about Google and how they process site maps: Sub…
I’ve been working on the iPhone app for SideBox for the last couple of weeks. It’s been fun, challenging, and engaging. I’m really beginning to understand Git, GitHub, and what social coding is all about. I’m using an open-source library called MonoTouch and MonoTouch.Dialog to write this app. I’ll write more about MonoTouch later. The quick-pitch on MonoTouch is that is allows us poor .NET…
I can’t think of a more efficient business than Quick Trip. From the gas pump, to buying a coffee, the entire experience is fast and hassle free. Consider some of the other convenience store chains (Mesa, AZ area) such as AmPm, or shell. It’s 20 questions at the gas pump and a slow as shit credit card interface. Nine times out of ten, the pump is slow as well. When you go to buy something, you…
This just in… I moved to gmail’s priority inbox. We haven’t officially moved to the Google app engine, but we were given some test accounts to work with. So I just moved everything over. It’s very simple to do and you won’t regret it. Here is how I moved over in what seems to be a very seamless transition so far: Create a redirect rule (not a forward rule). The difference is in how the email will…
A couple of weeks ago I talked about some of the changes I was making in my life so that I could become more effective both at work, and in my personal life. I’ve significantly reduce the number of meetings that I go to, I’ve been at inbox-zero for weeks, and I’ve been extremely productive. I had an endless list of priorities that I’ve put a significant dent into including an 80 hour project, a 50…