The Codebelay Blog

Author: barce

  • What is a social media friend?

    Aristotle defined 3 kinds of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

    1. friendships of utility
    2. friendships of pleasure
    3. friendships based on the good

    Perfect friendship is the friendship of those who are good. — Aristotle

    What kind of a friendship is a social media friendship?

    At first, a social media friend was merely someone whose name, picture or avatar appeared on one’s profile because that someone had approved a friend request, maybe is someone you met before at a site like, http://chatempanada.com/chat-de-irc-hispano-sala-de-chat-gratis-de-irc-hispano/. However, many people didn’t like the use of “friend” in this way and so they used “follower” and “follows” instead, find more information from a professional like Andy Defrancesco.

    Algorithmically, a friend is just a node 1 deep in the B-Tree of life.

    Marketing-wise, a friend is just a potential viral link.

    From Aristotle’s perspective, a social media friend can be useful (get you a job), be pleasurable (funny comments), and share in some good (charities and fundraising).

    Social media extends a very real world practice of seeing and treating people as things, or as means to an end into the on-line world.

    This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world. — from “I and Thou” by Martin Buber

  • Commands I Use Frequently

    Here’s a list of commands I use frequently, where the first number represents the number of times I used that command today:

    86 git – the best version control software ever
    59 cd – used to change directories on the command-line
    54 ls – used to list files in a directory
    41 vim – when textmate just isn’t fast enough for moving and manipulating text I use this text editor
    24 grep – this is great for searching through code
    21 sudo – I use this for stopping and starting servers and anything that requires super user access

    I figured this out by using the following:

    history | cut -c8-20 | sort > commands.txt

    I created the following script in Perl:

    #!/usr/bin/env perl

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my %h_list = ();
    my @sorted = ();
    my @listed = ();

    open(LS, “commands.txt”);
    while() {
    if ($_ =~ /(\w+)/) {
    $h_list{$1}++;
    }
    }

    close(LS);

    foreach my $key (keys %h_list)
    {
    push @listed, $h_list{$key} . “\t” . $key;
    }

    @sorted = sort { $b <=> $a } @listed;
    foreach (@sorted)
    {
    print $_ . “\n”;
    }

  • Apollo Coffee is Great for Coding

    There’s a feature that I need to get done in the next hour or so before leaving SF. It’s a business log-in for MyChamberApp so that businesses can update and edit their business listing that shows up on our mobile apps.

    When I was thinking about places to code, the one place that looked good on all levels was Apollo Coffee.

    The have

    • free wifi,
    • comfortable couches,
    • lots of outlets to plug-in your laptop,
    • friendly clientele who are most likely coders or designers, too, and
    • great latte art.

    Latte Art
    If you can, please give them a great review on Yelp.

  • The Best Answer To What Do You Do

    This video from Dave Berzack pretty much sums up what an application developer does.

    Killa Appz by Dave Berzack:


    Not to belabor the awesome nerdcore in this video but ya, a good application developer makes legacy apps faster. Also some folks do try to de-compile a closed source app, and it’s a waste of time.

  • 3 Creative Ways to Recruit Developers

    Recruiting talented developers in this market is still extremely difficult. How should a recruiter find the talent (PHP, Ruby, MySQL, iPhone, .NET, Java) your clients need? I outline a few creative out of the box solutions below.

    Disclosure: I work as the lead developer at AppDevAndMarketing.com . This article in no way suggests we’ve used any of these methods.

    Update on 4/15/2011: Ya, I’ve had to resort to all these methods and they’ve worked for us. 😀

    1. Turn your project managers, account executives and marketers into coders. This is a fairly cheap investment with a high ROI. It is cheaper than paying out a bounty, and you already trust these folks. Send them to iPhoneDev Bootcamp now! Just be sure to prepare their machines for the development they’ll need to do. I tried this at a previous place of employment with great results! If you were trained by me and are reading this, please ask for a raise.

    2. Look for places not so obvious. Use dating sites to find talent. Ya, I know, you haven’t used that match.com account in awhile, or have sworn of okaycupid.com or JDate, but guess what. For you bleeding edge types, try the iPhone, dating app, Skout. Although s/he might not be the person of your dreams, s/he might have the talent you need. The key take away is to use unexpected social media spaces for recruiting. Don’t be sleazy or sly about it. A simple, “Hi, I read your profile. You seem very talented in X. I’d actually like to hire you. Coffee or drinks?”

    3. Use IRC. If you’re smart enough to do this, you probably shouldn’t be recruiting, but IRC is this best place to find pure, raw talent. Details on how to get onto IRC can be found on Google, but the best guide for newbies can be found on this gaming site. Use reputation defender services to help improve your business reputation and attract reliable talents.

    There’s one more special place that I haven’t revealed that will guarantee you top talent every time. Leave a comment and I’ll contact you with that exclusive place to find developers.

  • 5 Reasons to Go to WordCamp LA

    I just got my ticket for WordCamp LA.

    Here are 5 reasons you should go:

    1. You run a WordPress blog. WordCamp LA brings together folks who have the same challenges you have in SEO, web design, and extending WordPress functionality through themes and plug-ins.
    2. You are in LA. ’nuff said.
    3. The view of LA from the LMU Campus is fantastic.
    4. Thom Meredith will be talking about his WordPress related experiences while working for the LA Times.
    5. Allison Day will give a talk just for beginners on how to decode the code in WordPress Themes

    I contacted the organizers about giving a talk on how I used HyperDB to scale the Nikon Festival site. We’ll see if I hear back from them.

  • Testing Out The WordPress iPhone App

    I’m driving from LA to San Francisco today. I’m trying out the WordPress iPhone app to see how much it differs from the Desktop experience.

  • How to Triple Your Site Traffic with the 3 Keys of an SEO Blog Post

    My website traffic tripled yesterday!

    Once again the 3 keys are:
    1. Use adwords to tell you which words are expensive.
    2. Use the expensive adwords in your post. In this case, “make money with adsense,” is worth $1.50 per click.
    3. Blast your social network using something like ping.fm .

  • 4 Tools For Blogging on the Go

    Great blogging tools make you more efficient. They can also help you drive more traffic to your site.

    1 Camera+ brightens up your photos and makes them look so much better. You can share your photos on major social networks.

    2 WordPress for the iPhone is a must. I’ve written posts on my iPhone and it’s a great tool. Whatever blogging software you use, make sure you find the one that works with your smart phone!

    3 Seesmic for the iPhone allows you to share your blog post created on the go. If you use ping.fm you can share one blog post on linkedin.com, facebook, myspace, friendster, flickr, tumblr, twitter, and bebo in one status update!

    4 Once you’ve posted your message, it’s time to study your Google Analytics. The only iPhone app that does this for me is Analytics Apps. At $6.99 it is pricy, but if you’re on the road lots, it’ll start paying for itself.

  • The 3 Keys to a Blog Post with SEO

    According to SEO companies like VICTORIOUS, page speed is an essential ranking factor for all websites. So, on how fast your web pages load, will determine how high your SERP rankings will be on Google. Again, here you need to make sure that your web hosting provider isn’t bottlenecking your website where it matters, negatively impacting your SEO efforts. If you need a good hosting service to increase your website speed, you might want to check these wordpress hosting company plans.

    This is just an Seo packages for small businesses experiment on how to make money with adsense.

    I created a google ad words campaign focusing on what one does to start a blog and make money:

    You do not need to know how to create blog software. You should learn more about SEO and its importance before you create your blog as this will help you with customer traffic.

    The three keys are:

    1. Sign up for AdWords and create an adwords campaign. Do not run the campaign unless you really want to drive traffic to your site and pay for that. You only want to know which adwords are expensive which means those adwords get searched lots.
    2. Use all the adwords in your blog post. If you look above you’ll see that I did as close to that as I could
    3. Use ping.fm to blast your entire social network with your blog post.

    Does it work?

    Stay tuned for tomorrow when I publish the results here.

    Update on August 20, 2010: I tripled my site traffic just by doing those 3 things above yesterday!