Category: TechBiz

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ruby Social Media TechBiz

Yahoo’s BOSS API Example and Notes on Yahoo’s Hackday

For Yahoo’s hackday, I was able to finish up this script in Ruby that returns back search results from yelp and chowhound from Yahoo’s BOSS API. The great thing about it is that you can hit the API an unlimited number of times!

Here are a few notes that should help anybody the next time they attend a hackday – Yahoo’s or anyone else’s:

  • The night before install libraries you think you won’t need. I really wish that I had prawnto installed. I got mired in prawnto idiosyncracies, and was out of the race pretty quick.
  • Good coders are fast. According to Eran Lahav-Hammer, one of the authors of OAuth, good coders can code an OAuth implementation in the language of their choice in less than one day. Are you a good coder?
  • Have fun! It’s a pretty rare opportunity to have so many folks in the industry in one spot.
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Announcements TechBiz WebApps

Gearing Up For HackDay At Yahoo on September 12th

picture of hackday at yahoo

I just signed up for HackDay at Yahoo, which will bring together a lot of cool people in the industry.

I’m hoping to just spend the day and talk to folks about what’s inspiring them lately.

Comment below if you’re going. Also share with me and the folks commenting what you’re hoping to solve or build.

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Announcements TechBiz

What I Learned at ROFLCon: Numa Numa and Too Many Wannabe PUAs

Bad News:

  • I’m pretty much done with tech events with too many dudes pretending to be Pick-up Artists. Tech Events with 80% dudes was cool in 2005 before the book, The Game, came out. But now that all these chumps have a license to be douche bags, I think it’s kinda silly that all these guys are AMOG’ing guys in their own industry. Douchebags being negative towards their industry peers just for the attention of a random 20 year old.


Pic of Mystery
If you act like this guy at a tech event I will kick your ass.

“Picking up” women is not some video game, or like Dungeons and Dragons. There are some real life consequences to being a player. One of them is me kicking your ass if you interrupt me with the intent of tooling me while I’m talking to someone.

WARNING: If you pull any of that game or player bullshit, when I am talking to someone; if you tool me, I will drop you to the floor and frog walk you out of the tech event we are at. You have been warned!

Good News:

  • Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger put on a pretty cool discussion on the types of jokes out there. I’m gonna try to find the slides for that.
  • Numa Numa is my favorite viral video. I still laugh when I watch it.

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Social Media TechBiz Uncategorized

ROFLCon Poised to Give LOLS

I’ll be heading off to ROFLCon this evening. It’s a geek event where Scoblian passionates will gather in a secret power cabal and plan the overthrow of the non-passionates.

pictures of rofl

LOL

I’m really there because the creators of ICanHasCheezBurger will be there talking about what it takes to harness the wisdom of crowds to make the funniest and cutest site on the Internets.

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Social Media TechBiz WebApps

Ubiquity puts the World at your Finger Tips

Ever wanted to edit, save, Twitter, Friend-feed, email, add to your calendar, and yelp a web page without doing much typing?

The Ubiquity plug-in does just that!

So far with Ubiquity, I’ve been able to automatically send emails of interesting webpages to friends without cutting and pasting, look up weather, Twitter, and Friend-feed. The last time I used a tool this cool was SocialBrowse.

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TechBiz WebApps

Google doesn’t like Word Press Pages

I put my hCard in my “About Codebelay Blog” pages, and noticed that doing a search on hcard-barce which is the DOM ID for my hCard returned 1 result. That one result was wrong.

I checked my logs for any signs that Google hit page_id=2 and to my surprise, Google didn’t crawl that page at all. In fact none of the major search engines except for PDF Bot hit it.

Is there a way to make my Word Press page with page_id in the URL more visible to search engines?

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ruby on rails TechBiz WebApps

Mephisto: Blogging Software on Rails

Blogging software should meet four important criteria:
1) Easy import from a pre-existing piece of blogging software we’re not happy with.
2) Spam filtering protection in comments
3) Make it easy to add web analytics javascript tracking without deleting it during each upgrade.
4) Should make it easy to not look like Mephisto blogging software or WordPress or like generic blogging software.

Mephisto screenshot

Mephisto meets all four criteria.

Plus it leverages the advantages of Rails in that out of the box you can deploy to development, test and production environments. Also it integrates with no mess into shopify or any other Rails project that you might be working.

Hats off to Rick Olson(Development) and Justin Palmer(UI/Design) for making Mephisto along with “a bunch of other cool people.”

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php TechBiz WebApps

Does Core Developer Think Symfony 1.1 Alienates PHP Developers?

Have you ever coded in a framework and then woke up one day to find that all your code broke when you upgraded? That’s exactly what happened when symfony 1.1 was released without backwards compatibility. A core symfony developer, François Zaninotto, shares his thoughts about the non-launch of symfony 1.1.

A couple key phrases, that he uses to describe the symfony core developers attitude to us mortals, are pretty disturbing:

  • If you just used symfony for one project, and left if afterwards because it lacked some feature that you needed, then you don’t deserve to be informed that this new release does have this feature.
  • Symfony 1.1 is so good, that it should not be left in everybody’s hands. Think of it as a forbidden manuscript of the middle ages, that only a few copyists ever read and got a fair picture of.
  • …there is no “First Project tutorial” at all for symfony 1.1.

Caveat: Do not use symfony 1.1 unless you want to pour through source code.

Problem: You’re working on symfony 1.1 and it doesn’t work as advertised.

Solution: You have to pad your estimates on symfony based projects by at least a hundredfold. A form that should have taken me no more than an hour at Dogster ended up taking 4 days! Read this blog for important symfony 1.1 updates.

So does François think that PHP developers are being alienated? It’s strongly suggested through his use of irony, and analogy of symfony to a medieval text, but does he say abandon symfony?

Not at all. Rather his frustration noted in a follow up blog post has to do with the fact that he cares a great deal about symfony. If you were thinking about leaving symfony, François is enough reason to stay.

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TechBiz

Matt Knox Rocks The San Francisco Ruby Meetup

Ya, I’ve read Zed’s rant against Rails. I’ve felt the anger and alienation he’s felt, but in the San Francisco PHP Meetup community. After a core team PHP member used a racial epithet to describe something I wanted to do in PHP, the idea of coding web apps using Ruby on Rails began to have more and more appeal.

I went to the San Francisco Ruby Meetup today at Marakana, and although I was late, I quickly got Rails running and caught up. By the end of 4 hours of lecture and coding I had a working blog on my laptop, and learned a lot about coding in a totally fun way from Matt Knox. He teaches Ruby on Rails at Sermo in Boston.

Here are a few notes:

  1. To evaluate a technology Matt asks, “How fast can I set up a ‘Hello World!’ app?” and “How fast can I iterate through the development process?”
  2. Validation should happen in the model. The moment you put it in the controller bad things happen.
  3. To be an Internet Rockstar, you should do WRDD (pronounced word), which is Web Request Driven Development. Put the site up with zero features but a page that gives the users an idea of what the site will be. Code functionality as users ask for it.
  4. “Databases are a giant persistent hash in the sky.” (Matt Knox) What this means is that DBAs are constrained by tradition when it comes to scalable web apps. A database should be used as one big hashtable if it is to be scalable.
  5. Do not work for equity.
  6. Subversion cannot git-stash or git-unstash so use git

I was so happy just getting a blog working so quickly that I registered HipsterHookups today and want to see if I can get a site working by this weekend.

Categories
TechBiz

Coder Dudes, For Your Sanity Date Starbucks Barristas!

Since I’ve moved back from Italy, career has gone from unemployed, stacking candles at Planet Weavers in the Castro never believing there would be another tech boom, re-starting a Web 1.0 company, hacking password protected files from the hard drives of former Enron Employees for an Enron trial, and now having once again a successful tech career.

Since moving back from Italy 6 years ago I haven’t had a girlfriend. This sort of thing makes me shrug. This blog post is my meditation on being single. I asked around. I’m not the only guy in Silicon Valley who has been single for this long, and it’s not that I haven’t been dating or not putting myself out there.

As a coder, I make more than the median salary in San Francisco. There are men who are poorer than me and less intelligent than me that have girlfriends. There are some coders who make twice that which along with exercised stock options make them millionaires. Attraction (at least the kind worth having) should have nothing to do with money.

The kind of woman that has so graciously, kindly and flirtingly said yes to a date with me works in tech, knows a lot of the people that I work with, and is absolutely cute. I think what initially draws such a woman to me is how I handle myself in a lot of situations: calm, cool, collected. She also likes the fact that I have a reputation for discretion.

Yet, I have had a lot of frustrations in dating women in the tech industry. Something is not working out. I would really like to date someone with a lot of similar work interests because I am passionate about my work. But for one reason or another it just doesn’t work out. This has forced me outside of the box. My ideal date now is with a Starbucks Barrista with a degree in either philosophy or literature – definitely something humanities oriented.

Starbucks Barrista
WTF? Why?

  1. Unlike other women higher in the social strata your ambitions are not enough for a woman in the industry. Most women in tech see you as a lottery ticket and expect you to daytrade your way up to 7 figures and beyond. Your Starbucks barrista would be more than happy with your 5 figures and ecstatic about 6.
  2. Your Starbucks barrista with her liberal education gives her – duh? – liberal sensibilities. A lot of women in tech that are recruiters, marketers and designers read Cosmo and its ilk. These are magazines dedicated to the manipulation of straight men by women. This is not to say men aren’t guilty of this, too. They are, and the book, “The Game,” is the choicest example of this. My point is that I haven’t run into folks with degrees in liberal arts that are great manipulators like say the Enron folks or GW & company.
  3. You probably won’t have a chance with a cutie coder. Cutie coders get hit on all the time and are totally smarter than you and smarter than you think. Unless you’ve got the skills of Cal Henderson, forget it. Cutie coders are the buyer; you’re just the seller.
  4. Still not giving up? If you go to any tech party, the guys who really have a shot are the CEOs. It’s as if women divide men into 1st class and 2nd class citizens. Guess which class citizen a CEO is.
  5. The hard earned money of your Starbucks barrista is “worth more” because when she buys you a present it means more to her, it’s a bigger deal.
  6. A Starbucks barrista is trying to figure out her way out of her job. She has her own ambitions, and these are probably more modest than your cutie techie’s ambitions. You might even be able to bankroll one of her projects.
  7. Most Web 2.0 kids met on-line. You can tell your grandkids, how you manned-up and asked her out using this technology called face-to-face IRL. You certainly won’t be penciling yourself in her pbwiki page.
  8. She’ll be grateful that you fixed her computer.
  9. The techie cutie has some idea of your lived experience, including the occasional drudgerie of it. For the Starbucks barrista everything you do is awesome and new.
  10. She’ll round you out. Her liberal education gives her a mind that sees there’s more to life than just money, materialism and its shallow pleasures, that there’s a higher world of ideas and delights.
  11. If things do end, she will leave you better than she found you.
  12. After the break up, you won’t have to read about who she’s hooking up with now in Vallywag.