Tech Notes From The Trenches

“It’s just a…”

2010-03-09T14:55:37Z

“It’s just a web page. ”

“It’s just a text box.”

“It’s just an email notification.”

I have heard and read so many of these. “It’s just a… ” you name it!

This usually comes from someone who wants you to be 10 times more optimistic about the task at hand than you would be. Programmers are inherently optimistic. So there is no need for more optimism.

We, as software engineers, need to explain to clients why it’s not “just a web page” or “a text box” or an “email notification.” For example, web pages need to be cross-browser compatible (ie. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and now.. Chrome on both Mac and Windows)

There are a lot of aspects that we consider and clients don’t. That’s why they pay us to do it. It’s always positive to explain these aspects when presenting an estimate.

Always be realistic about your estimate. Don’t let the “It’s just a…” influence your estimate. Follow a process. Separate the task in sub-tasks. Estimate effort for each sub-task. Add up your estimate.

And most importantly, support your estimate with your expertise. You will always get the “12 hours?!? I thought it would take 2 hours.” from a client or boss. Stand behind your estimate and defend it with facts and your expertise.

broken pipe error with aptana

2010-03-08T14:08:01Z

I work on a Mac with Aptana. Sometimes Aptana crashes and then, after restarting it, it shows this error when I try to access my application:

Errno::EPIPE in Site#home

Showing layouts/_banner_headers.html.erb where line #11 raised:

Broken pipe

The line doesn’t matter. The problem is that Webrick continues to run even after restarting Aptana. So, when you go to http://localhost:3038/ it is actually accessing a ‘zombie‘ Webrick. Not the one you last launched.

Here is the solution:

1. Fire up a Terminal

2. [etagwerker@gesell trunk]$ ps aux | grep ruby

etagwerker 22930 0.2 2.0 165156 84312 ?? S 2:53PM 0:48.88 /usr/local/bin/ruby -e p(Process.pid.to_s) -e load(ARGV.shift) -I … etc…

The first number is the PID

3. Kill the zombie process

[etagwerker@gesell trunk]$ kill -9 22930

4. Restart your Aptana.

That’s it. You should be able to continue using Aptana.

software development expectations

2010-03-04T13:34:25Z

I expect programmers to be perfectionists but also pragmatic. I expect them to love Chess, Go or any other strategic game. I expect them to be nerds. I expect them to love to build cool things.

I expect project managers to be well versed in software engineering, project management and motivation. I expect them to have some technical knowledge. I expect them to be people persons.

I expect technical team leaders to be programmers with strong communication skills. I expect them to coach other programmers and encourage them to write great code. I expect team leaders to always look for the best answer to hard questions.

I expect my team members to be respectful of other team members’ time. I expect anyone in the team to interrupt me, only when they really need my help. (Because interruptions kill productivity)

That’s what I expect from my team to build great software.

how to set up a custom subdomain for tumblr

2010-02-28T16:09:30Z

Assuming you already have a tumblr account, like http://ellens.tumblr.com/

1. Go to your DNS manager (eg. http://GoDaddy.com)

2. Login and go to the DNS total control panel

3. Add an ‘A’ record that points your subdomain

(eg. ‘your-cool-subdomain-name’ or ‘tumblr’) to 72.32.231.8 – if you want to have your-cool-subdomain-name.ellens.com or tumblr.ellens.com

4. Save that configuration

5. Go to your tumblr page (eg. http://ellens.tumblr.com/)

6. Click on ‘Customize’

7. Check ‘User a custom domain’

8. Add your custom subdomain (eg. http://tumblr.ellens.com/)

9. Click ‘Save’

This is pretty simple.

Very important note: Please give it time, 1 to 24 hours. I forgot about this and I freaked out because I was getting the “We couldn’t find the page you were looking for.” error message. I gave it 15 minutes and then it started working.

Also, keep in mind that http://etagwerker.tumblr.com will redirect to http://tumblr.etagwerker.com after you do this. You can change it back at any time.

The Whuffiebank API Ruby Gem

2010-02-08T16:48:24Z

The other day I released the Whuffiebank gem. It is a library that implements the Whuffiebank API in Ruby.

Even though I have tested it and written tests to go with it, I haven’t used it yet. I plan to implement it on Hopsy, but I haven’t had time yet.

I am not a hardcore user of the Whuffiebank, meaning that I haven’t given any whuffies yet and no one has ever given me any whuffies. I have yet to contribute to the Whuffie economy.

But I like the idea of Twitter handles having a certain monthly ‘karma number‘. That’s why I built this open source gem. Hopefully it will be useful for many developers.

At Hopsy, I have used it to rank tweets. I have built a simple formula that takes the Topsy influence and the Whuffiebank reputation and returns a number.

The higher the number, the more important the result. Simple. That’s my attempt to reduce the ‘Twitter noise‘ out there. I know there is still a long way to go.

new york, a year in retrospect

2010-02-02T14:57:48Z

It has been quite an exciting year in New York for me and Aycron. There were highs and lows. The lows were mostly around the beginning of 2009. The highs, around the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010.

The economical crisis in 2009 did affect us, but not as much as you would have expected. The lows were mostly because I had just moved to New York and it took me a few months to get started on Aycron’s business development.

The fact is that Aycron had one client in New York when I first arrived. Now we have four clients in New York. In February, we might have six clients. I am happy about that. It took a lot of hard work from everyone at Aycron, but the future is bright for 2010.

The number of clients is not that important. What’s important is that our clients are happy with our work. They are happy to recommend us to prospective clients and honestly talk about their experience with Aycron.

It is hard work to keep our clients happy, but we go the extra mile. And it feels good to hear what they have to say about our efforts. I think we need to get even better at keeping our clients happy and that’s why we are hiring! (in Buenos Aires)

In 2009 we became partners of Engine Yard, worldwide leader in Ruby on Rails applications hosting and big supporter of the RoR community.

In 2010 we became partners of Fluid Intent, which will help Aycron’s business development in New York in the future.

We plan to continue rocking it for our clients. We want to keep them happy, as they are our best source of projects. We plan to build and release a few products/services this year, something that we started on 2009.

We plan to increase our development team as much as possible. But this will be a gradual process that will let us assure the quality of our work. All of this is possible thanks to our new clients in New York and the great engineers at Aycron.

the topsy ruby gem (rtopsy version 2.0)

2010-01-28T13:44:38Z

The other day I was browsing through open source projects on GitHub and I found the topsy gem. (A gem is a ruby library that can be used for a certain purpose)

Initially, I was upset. It was a new gem for something that I had built more than one month ago. I thought that the programmer behind it (Wynn Netherland) should have collaborated with my existing gem: rtopsy.

After reviewing his code, I realized that he had developed a better version of my gem. So I decided that it was an opportunity to learn more about Ruby, gems and APIs.

I reached out to Wynn (via Twitter) and we decided to collaborate on the topsy gem. I added some ‘business objects’ to the gem. He added some logic for the rate limit status info. I added more documentation and examples. We worked through tests together.

The end result: A more stable version of the Topsy API Ruby gem. In the process, I learned a lot about testing code with fakeweb.

permission marketing, book review

2010-01-14T18:06:26Z

I just finished reading Permission Marketing by Seth Godin. I enjoyed the book and his point of view on marketing strategies. There is a clear distinction between interruption marketing and permission marketing. However, permission marketing cannot succeed without interruption marketing.

Permission marketing sometimes uses interruption marketing. At Aycron, we have not worked with interruption marketing. But we have worked with some concepts of permission marketing, without even knowing it.

I like that the book doesn’t talk about marketing in general/in theory. I like that it gives real life examples and steps that companies can follow to work on their permission marketing strategies. I hope to apply these steps soon.

Two more things I like about the book:

It doesn’t talk about marketing as if it were an event. It talks about permission marketing as a process with different stages.
It talks about the different levels of permission you can have with a client.

If you are interested in business development, you should read this book.

hopsy, a better twittersphere

2009-12-30T21:06:51Z

Did you ever search for anything in Twitter? What did you get? Probably a lot of noise. Useful information is hard to find using Twitter search. Hopsy solves this.

Do a Hopsy search and find useful Twitter messages. How? Hopsy ranks the Twitter search results using an influence number. People on Twitter are influential according to the messages and links they tweet. Your followers endorse you (RT) or don’t. The links you share start trending or don’t. That is influence.

Basically, if you have a good reputation, your tweets will show up before than someone with no rep or a bad rep. Makes sense? If yes, please check out Hopsy. If not, I would like to hear your ideas about Twitter tweet rankings and search.

Here is a Hopsy search you can try out: Search for 2009. Here is a Twitter search to compare: Search for 2009.

simplicity and blogs

2009-12-22T22:32:06Z

I love simplicity. I love blogs that write simple and concrete posts. That is why I love:

Seth’s Blog – A great blog about business, marketing and ideas in general.

Signal vs. Noise – A design and usability blog. They also post interesting ideas about business, entrepreneurship and startups.

They are simple, concrete and straight-to-the-point posts. No unnecessary words or sentences.

I wish more of the blogs I like were like that. If you have so much to say, you should do it in many posts. Not a huge post.

I am slowly learning from them. You should read them and learn too.