Nicolas Alpi | Blog of a freelance web developer.

Launch GVIM MacVim With the Correct PATH Variable

2011-02-08T07:02:23+00:00

I had the problem sitting there for a long time, and I finally found the solution this morning.

When I was launching Vim from the terminal, my $PATH variable was setup properly.
Idem when I was launching Gvim from the terminal, all good.
But when I launching Gvim from the launcher, the $PATH always ended up to the default $PATH (usual /usr/bin … but no trace of my rvm installation). Causing rails.vim and some other commands, Ruby related, to fail.

One of the solution is to edit the Gvim launcher with the command:

bash -lc Gvim

I’m happy I found it, that will give the opportunity to have a proper look at Gvim as a terminal alternative. I found that having menu can be useful time to time for plugins that you don’t use often.

Weekly Roundup 4

2011-02-07T06:07:40+00:00

Quite a busy week, so not that much links.

What can I do to make Capistrano deploy faster: Simple snippet to make your deploy time even faster when using Capistrano.

Clever algorithms, Nature inpired programming recipes looks like an awesome book, and all the examples are in Ruby. I’ll give it a go as soon as I find the time.

Ruby on Rails best practices: Usally I’m not a big Sitepoint fan, but this blog post, very well written, gives a good intro about Rails best practices.

That’s all for this week, you now can close your browser and return to a normal activity.

Weekly Roundup 3

2011-01-25T09:36:49+00:00

Startup Quote, inspirational quotes from successful start-up founders.

Why Ruby?, if you still need some help choosing between Ruby and another language.

A week off the grid, I read this advice in the [“Do More Faster”:http://amzn.to/gyJuDb] book, and I’m waiting for my first experimentation. I found Barry write up on his experience very informative.

Your blog is a project, something I tend for forgot on the past.

Gmail gem, A Rubyesque interface to Gmail, with all the tools you’ll need. No need to say more, fantastic gem.

Hero Scale, Automatically scales your Heroku apps. Sounds fantastic on the paper. I’ll give it a go on my next project.

Time-Saving and Educational Resources for Web Designers, a compilation of very useful resources, even if, like me, you’re not a designer you should find some valuable apps.

Ruby There, all 2011 majors Ruby conferences in one page.

Agile in flash, interesting concept off Agile reference cards instead of a book.

That’s all for this week, you now can close your browser and return to a normal activity.

5am wake up. Is it so crazy to wake up early?

2011-01-24T06:17:05+00:00

I don’t remember the exact date I started, but around a year ago I started a “new experimentation”: Being an early bird.

My sleeping/working background pattern

As a lot of developers, I used to be a night owl. Coding/hacking/writing on personal projects during the night, then struggling to wake up every single morning.

I always had a strange sleep pattern, coding lately for 2 or 3 nights in a row, and then going to bed at 9pm on the fourth day, then again 3 days of late code and 9pm sleep.

I would wake up around 7am or 8am. When I say I would wake up, it was more Nathalie waking me up, pushing me out of bed every single morning.

When I was single it was even worst, I was living with my roommate, and he had the same waking up issues, so we had 4 alarm clock in our tiny apartment. One in every room, so we could be sure of getting up. Not quite effective.

I knew this sleep pattern could not stay for long now for multiple reason:

First, my brain didn’t like the non scheduled type of things. Sometimes staying up late, sometimes going to bed early, caffeine all night, it’s not the best way to treat your brain and body.

Secondly, I was now in a couple. Being in a couple means doing concessions, you can’t continue to hack all night long every night. So at first we tried to agree on a hack day schedule, hacking X days + Saturday and the rest is unwired. It was working on the first weeks, then all fall apart one day or another. Then I came across some blogs talking about this “waking up early” idea. I decided to give it a go.

At the time, I didn’t know how long I was going to keep it, neither than there was going to be 3 stages on this new habit.

First stage, making it a habit

I’m not sure it would be acceptable for your body to go from 8am to 5am in one morning.

I had to make it a habit. I decided to go for 1 month at first, but 1 month where I would wake up early every single morning, even on the weekend. The idea was to make it a habit.

I was going to wake up earlier each week. I started waking up at 6.30am for one week, then 6am for another week, then 5.30am and 5.15am on the last week. Obviously I would go to bed early, and I found it easier to fall asleep. Strangely I found it also easier to wake up at those early hours.

I started around spring here, and I was rising up with the sun. I would wake up, power on the computer and go to make a cup of coffee, all listening to the silence and feel the light entering the place. It’s a nice feeling.

So it took me around one month to make it a habit, but it took no time to start feeling the positive effect on my life.

Now I’m waking up early, my schedule changed. I can hack on personal projects in the morning, then breakfast, and start working for my clients around 8.30am or 9am. I would probably put an extra hour to personal work around 5pm to 6pm. When Nathalie arrives at 6pm, I can close the computer, and enjoy the rest of the evening entirely dedicated to Nathalie or at least other activities than wired ones.

It took me around 2 months to move from 5.15am to 5am. Doing it by transitions. I’m now going to bed around 9pm, and fall asleep around 10pm probably. Sometimes a bit before.

I try to make sure I have every day at least 7 hours of sleep. It appears to be the time I need.

From silence to rush

After at least 6 or 7 month of this schedule, I was a happy bunny. My productivity was rocketing, waking up with the sun and the birds song was lovely. Evening with my fiancee were great, and it was a nice feeling not to feel guilty of not working in the evening.

Then Nathalie decided to take some courses at the Open University, and we took a gym membership. So that was more activities to add on our schedule.

We decided that we would go to the gym as soon as Nathalie would come back from work, in the evening, and Nathalie decided to give a go to the early rise.

It changed everything for me. The morning silence transformed itself into a morning rush for the first weeks. We would wake up, then take breakfast together, then Nathalie would go to the shower then myself, then, I would finally reach my computer. Even if my client work productivity didn’t change, my morning productive was in a deep down fall. It has been hard, for me, to adapt this new schedule.

Finally it’s just a new habit

So, after a few weeks, I realised it was just another habit. I needed to change my habit one more time. I had the same activities than before (personal work, breakfast, shower, personal work) but in a different order (breakfast, shower, personal work). Starting pomodoro helped me a lot to make it a habit, and to stick with my daily goals.

In a nutshell

So, if you want to start the 5am waking up call, here are my tips:

Make it a habit: Start for one month, no cheating, wake up early every single day. Even during the week end. That will help your body to make it a habit. Try to always have the same go to bed time as well, so your body can learn from it.

Do it progressively: If you want to wake up more than 1 hour earlier, doing it progressively will help your body make the transition. Go by 30 minutes steps.

Have a paper/list ready: I found it easier to have a list of 2 or 3 actions ready near the bed or the desk. So when I wake up, I know what I have to do.

As I said, it has been nearly a year now, and I can see pros and cons on the technique.

PRO

Makes you highly productive.

If you’re a freelance, it’s easier to manage the balance between personal and working life.

Gives a strict pattern to your body.

Even in the week end, your body is use to the pattern and you wake up earlier than usual.

Spring/Summer wake up is awesome! Sun rising, birds singing …

CONS

Evening events are harder to make. I now decided that, the morning after an evening event, I would not wake up at 5am, but use the sleep time + 7 hours pattern. But you’re still tired before everyone else at the event.

Autumn/Winter wake up is shit! Dark, rain and cold, makes it harder.

Edit: I think I missed the explanation on why I started the 5am thing. As said on Hacker News, you can achieve the same productivity if you dedicate yourself some time frame in the evening (say 10pm to 1am). But I found it hard to manage private life and work life when working in the evening. I prefer the early rise in the morning to hack and spend quality time with my fiancee every evening. Before that it was more an internal fight between “Well, I need to work/hack/write” and “Hum, I’m having a good time now, I don’t want call it off”.

That was my felling around my early wake up experiment. What about you, early birds or night owl? Do you have some tips to share?

Weekly Roundup 2

2011-01-17T06:52:18+00:00

Creating and distributing presentations on the web, a useful article on Smashing Magazine. Sure it’ll be useful to people attending the #brug.

Vim Recipes, nice ebook for Vim beginner or medium users of Vim. I found some useful tricks in it.

Google starts charging for prediction API, a must to try.

How to make your shopping cart suck less, once again The oatmeal has it all right.

Oh my zsh, super mega useful collection of templates and functions for starting with zsh.

Rush, Ruby unix shell, I’ve just moved to zsh, don’t make me change again :D.

Programming innocence, how can you regain your programming innocence once it has been lost?

Firebug compatible with Firefox 4b beta, if you’re running the last beta of Firefox 4, you’ll be please to learn the there is a compatible firebug branch!

That’s all for this week, you now can close your browser and return to a normal activity.

Weekly Roundup 1

2011-01-07T06:40:00+00:00

First week for the weekly roundup, a good mix between technical and business posts:

10 TED talks for entrepreneurs, I truly appreciated the talks selection on this list. To me, that was a good way to start the year!

Gary Vaynerchuk talks, well, talking about motivation, is anyone better than Gary Vaynerchuk to motivate you? I enjoyed watching Gary RailsConf 2010 Talk and his web 2.0 expo talk.

Why I feel like a fraud, this one I found it in my last Hacker Monthly. This is something I’ve been talking with friends for a few months now, and it has been a revelation to spot that I wasn’t alone. I’ll soon develop this point in a complete post, but this article is definitively a must read.

Ruby on Rails 3 Cheat Sheets, certainly the most up-to-date and attractive Rails Cheat Sheets on the web.

Amazon developer app store is live. I feel like a new “app store” opens every 2 days.

S4.io, S4 is a distributed stream computing platform that was open-sourced by Yahoo! under the Apache 2.0 license. I haven’t played with it yet, but will soon!

Rip hashrocket, a seriously good looking comic blog post about the death of the well known ruby Hashrocket (=>) in favor of the wider used more standard colon in Ruby 1.9.

Heroky TOS changes, the hacker way, how can a company do everything right all the time! Those guys are so amazing that they can make a TOS change attractive!

Font In Use, good looking typography website showing fonts in real use.

Made By One, last but not least, I love the idea behind this blog. Interviewing solo developers, a bit on the same way as usethis target on the gears side of things. I hope Mubashar (creator of Made By One) will continue his post series soon.

That’s all for this week, you now can close your browser and return to a normal activity.

My Twelve Months Review

2011-01-03T10:04:29+00:00

As always, the 1st week of a new year is a good time to take on personal and professional review. I had a complete disconnection time during 2 weeks, back in France, enjoying family and friends. Now it is time to take serious action to make 2011 my best year ever.

2010 Review

2010 as been a remarkably good year. Intensive, with a lot of work, a wide board of projects, including freelancing for 2 differents startups and managing a complete project from A to Z. On the personal side, it has been great as well, I found a way to manage properly professional and personal life to, and I can fell the benefits on my couple.

On the downside, even if I’ve got no problems being productive for my clients, I struggled to stop working and start creating for myself. Luckily, working for OAHU helped me to discover some new technologies that I wanted to play with, minimasing some of the technical debt accumulating when you don’t take the time to produce for myself.

On the networking side of things, I meet some interesting people, but I completely neglected this blog (see as above, be productive for myself). I struggled finding time, or idea for articles.

I’ll soon expand those subjects, on a separate post, as I went to a very strong introspection during the last 3 month of 2010.

What do I want for 2011?

On the personal side of things, I’m going to get married in May this year. We are also going to rent a house with a buying option in the next years. As you can imagine, after the wedding will certainly come a new addition to the family. So this year might be the last year I can try different things and afford to get it wrong, afterwards if going to be a bit trickier as the responsibilities grow.

So this year, I’m going to be over productive, but to achieve something I need goals:

Develop and promote at least 1 personnal project. Last year I created howgoodismyfood.com in 24 hours, with the help of Theo. Unfortunately we never get our hands on make it evolve, and it stays as it for the moment. This year challenge will be creating a side business from a personal project. It is planned to happen on February.

Promote myself, even if I do not struggle to find work for the moment, tend do not promote myself properly, probably due to the fact that I did not know where to market me. Am I a Ruby/Rails developer? or am I a Freelance website developer? a Freelance web application developer? should I take on complete projects or look to integrate a team? … Hard to market yourself when you can’t even answer to those simple questions.

Organising a workshop/conference. Last year, with Jamie and Steve, we created the Bristol Ruby User Group (#brug). The group meet every month, and we organize talk and geek chat around food and beers. This year, we’ve got some interesting goals for the #brug, but organising a proper event is something I always wanted to do. And why not this year! Thankfully I’ll be helped by some friends and Nathalie on this adventure.

Improve my business skills. I like business side of things when you are freelancing. I like looking for new opportunities, I like closing deals, I truly like a lot of the business side of things. I’ll do my best to improve that a lot this year.

Regain this blog, this one, I said it at numerous occasions. Again, instead of letting the flow go, and use this blog as a personal blog, I felt into the trap of “I need to write a blog post to attract an audience”. But you never find something good enough and then another excuse later, your blog is a dead space on then web. So I took it that way. I’m running a web development business, everyday I solve coding problems, I read a lot, I experience a lot, so let just share it, is it not what a blog is for at the beginning?

Happy new year

So, Happy New Year to everyone, I hope you will work your way so 2011 will give you everything you wanted. As for me it is pretty clear that this is going to be an interesting and crazy year, certainly the best year ever!

GTD With Free Action List Behance Replica

2010-11-02T07:03:03+00:00

Yesterday I came accross Behance products and I specialy liked the action pad.

$8.00 per pad is not to bad, so I went to buy a pack of 2, but the shipping to UK was more than $30! No way I’d pay twice the product price just in shipping, for some paper pad.

So I just open Inkscape and created few SVG that would match my needs in terms of space and number of action per page.

And I have to say, I quite like them, they looks really nice on my desk

The page is a list of 20 actions, with on the left a large pixel dotted freezone.
On the top you have some space for some text + reference and date of the page.
It’s available in 3 colors, just help yourself.

Ho, I would suggest that you save the svg file to your disk and open it with Inkscape or similar to print it. I’ve tried to print directly from the browser and the result is not that good.

Click on the image to access the svg or right click, save as …

Tutorhub

2010-10-29T13:48:37+01:00

Tutorhub is a web application I’ve been working on during a few month as part of the Jiva Technology team, when I was contracting with them.
The public version has been release a few weeks back, and is now gaining in popularity among tutors and children.

What is it?

Tutorhub position itself between the private face to face tutoring and the classic forum where you would go asking for questions when stuck during your homework.
Problem with private session is you’ll need to wait the tutor to be available for you, and you’ll have to pay a certain fee. Problem with forums is that your question can stay here without any answers for ages, or even worst beeing answer incorrectly.
So the Jiva guys came with this “in between” solution, where:

You ask your question online
Tutorhub presents to you a selection of online available tutors
You pick the one you want
It fires a one to one chat session with a experienced tutor, ready to answer.

The work that the Jiva Technology team did is amazing, the result is a really slick and user friendly app, easy to use, and I have no doubt that success is round the corner!

Some videos

If you want to have an introduction of what is tutorhub, they’ve realeased 2 videos for you:

The student version

The tutor version

Analyse of a Disaster

2010-10-18T09:17:26+01:00

Three days ago I was writting about my excitement for this year RailsRumble, so why did I decided on Sunday morning to just gave up.
I mean, it wasn’t just a temporary frustration due to lack of sleep and too much Redbull, that was really hitting the wall so hard that I could not stand up again.
Let me try to analyse this unexpected failure.

Launchanalytics

First let’s go back to my project idea. This is an idea I had few months back, having a API and a dashboard helping project developers to manage their invitation system.
You would be able to create invites, via the API or the dashboard, redeem invites and so track registered users, where they came from, enabling virality, having limited and unlimited invite code for your different invite streams, well a lot of things!
Ho and obviously, for me to be happy, the project would have a nice and appealing public design + a nice dashboard design.
And, a user could manage different projects
And … so on and so on.
I really like the idea, and those who knows me can testify that I’ve put a lot of preparation in this idea.

To big, to fast

I think my first mistake is that I was having a so clear idea of what I wanted to achieve, that I forgot about the 48 hours limit.

My expectations where way to high for this contest, and I could not imagine to deploy a half done project. Maybe I should have, after all you can’t do everything in 48 hours.

Also, when the competition started, I went directly to VIM and started writing all my tests and all my code for the models and a little bit for the controllers, so after 20 hours I was having all the application backbend ready. No views, no design but the backbend.
I didn’t step back when writing my code, I was on the urge of finishing my app as fast as possible, and I didn’t see the wall coming.

The wall

Despite all my preparation, mockups, db schema and so on, I’ve made a very strong mistake, something that after 24 hours would have requires me at least 5 hours code changes if I wanted to have everything working as expected.
At this point I tried to remove features that I knew would have been affected by this problem, but to be honest there was no so much left.
I tried to review my initial plan, moved to not having public website but only an admin section, with a demo application, but well, I was very angry at myself about this stupid mistake, and could not continue anything else but ranting.

Giving up, and after

So I decided to gave up, I shut down the webserver, and went to bed. I can tell you that, when your competing, it’s a really hard decision to give up. And you spend the rest of your day thinking if that was the right decision, and if you shouldn’t have continued instead.
In 3 years of rumbling it’s the first time I give up, and I hope I’ll never do fail again.

Learn from your mistakes they say …

I forgot what was the Rails Rumble

In addition, I think that I forgot very strong parameter: I forgot what was the Rails Rumble.
I forgot how (nicely) intense it was, I forgot that you can’t do everything in 48 hours.
But must of all, I forgot it was all about fun. It’s fun to code, it’s fun to give birth to an application in 48 hours, but I put too much pressure on myself for this one.
I wanted my application ready to use, nearly “perfect”, with this “whaou” effect for the guys who will go on the website and register.

So and now

Well, I still belive that Launchanalytics is a good idea, it was certainly to big to be created during the Rumble, but a beta version will be released soon. Maybe in the next 2 or 3 weeks.
Besides that, I’ll learn from my failure and will be back next year, for this awesome competition.
I’m sure that next year I’ll choose a much more manageable project, and why not, this time, try to do it with a team.
Thanks a lot to all the RailsRumble organisers, you make this competition as awesome as it can be!
Congratulation to everyone who participated, and good luck for the voting period now.

You can have a look to all the awesome applications that were created at http://railsrumble.com/teams.