The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 2 (Implementation Details)

In this series I will document my approach to building a web business called Watchdoggie.com. It’s a product that continually monitors your website or blog and sends you a notice if your site ever goes down. I’m hoping this series will be helpful to web entrepreneurs. I also expect it will be helpful for me to document on my own experience and reflect on it later.

In this part I cover the implementation details involved in developing the site. If you missed the first part, you can catch it here The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 1.

This episode sets the foundation for the technologies used in delivering the site. The following pieces all play a role:

• Ruby on Rails for web framework
• TextMate for basic text editing
• Haml for HTML templating
• Ruby Twitter Gem to communicate with Twitter’s API
• heroku for hosting/deployment
• Git for version control
• Spree for e-commerce

Will this series be helpful to you? Do you have any ideas on how I can improve the product, or my development process? Comment and let me know.

The Making of Watchdoggie – Part 1 (Business Development)

In this series I will document my approach to building a web business called Watchdoggie.com. It’s a product that continually monitors your website or blog and sends you a notice if your site ever goes down. I’m hoping this series will be helpful to web entrepreneurs. I also expect it will be helpful for me to document on my own experience and reflect on it later.

In this part I show the very first steps in establishing an online presence and a brand for your product. In the even-numbered parts I will demonstrate the technical implementation details.

This episode covers selecting and registering your domain name, choosing a look and feel, and designing your brand and logo. The following services are used to do this:

• Jacknames for domain registration and email
• csstemplatesfree for page layout and CSS
• iStockphoto for logo design
• oDesk for hiring freelance contractors
• heroku for hosting/deployment

Will this series be helpful to you? Do you have any ideas on how I can improve the product, or my development process? Comment and let me know.

I ran into a small problem while trying to get the nanite gem working under JRuby. I just wanted to post a quick heads up with a solution. Hopefully google can somehow route people here that have the same problem.

First you need to install the dependencies amqp, eventmachine and jruby-openssl, which should install without a hitch (jgem install amqp eventmachine jruby-openssl).

But now a jgem install nanite will complain about building native extensions. This is because it’s trying to use the json gem. This is easily fixed by first installing the json-jruby gem, then modifying nanite’s Rakefile to point to this gem as a dependency instead of the regular json.

Now a jgem install nanite should work.

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 2

Reviewing Stuart Halloway’s Programming Clojure, introducing the delicious social bookmarking engine, sharing a cool slideshow presentation on The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs, demonstrating Node.js and MacRabbit’s CSSEdit.

How are you spending your time? What are you learning about? Leave a comment and let me know.

SoftwareBloat TV – Episode 1

Video review of Gary Vaynerchuck’s (@garyvee) Crush It!; Jerry P. King’s Mathematics in 10 Lessons: The Grand Tour; Joseph Mazur’s Euclid in the Rainforest; Woopra; and StaticMatic.

Trying something a little different with this post, I present to you my picks for the most influential developers of the August 2008-2009 season. I’d appreciate any feedback or suggestions on developers which I may have missed that deserve a mention.

Hacker of the Year Award

Doug Cutting (Hadoop)

Before Hadoop, Doug was known for his contributions with Lucene (a search indexing engine) and Nutch (a spider). Lucene had a tremendous impact on the way developers approach the search problem for their web applications and services. Hadoop raises the bar even further, it being an open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce technology. I believe 2009 is a breakaway year for Hadoop and its creator, most notably because of the implications of running a compute cluster on the cloud (like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Mosso). That’s why this year the Software Bloat Hacker of the Year Award goes to Doug Cutting for Hadoop. Doug recently announced his departure from Yahoo! while joining Cloudera, to continue his work on shaping the future of MapReduce on the cloud.

Runners Up

Yehuda Katz (Merb)

This guy is basically a ninja. Yehuda serves on the Ruby on Rails core team, and was lead developer on the Merb project (which is being rolled into rails 3.0 and stands to influence the rails philosophy in a big way). He is also a significant contributor to the jQuery (javascript framework) and DataMapper (ruby ORM) projects. When Fred Brooks wrote about great programmers out-coding lesser programmers by a factor of 10, Yehuda Katz is precisely the kind of code-slinger he was talking about.

Damien Katz (CouchDB)

Personally I think Damien Katz is a little crazy, but you know what they say about the line between brilliance and insanity. Damien claims to have sold his house, moved his family and lived off of his life savings while he began working on CouchDB. Somehow before he went busto and had to take the fam to the soup kitchen, IBM picked up the project. CouchDB’s tagline is simply “Relax”, that’s a good expression for the feeling of shedding the stress and anguish of trying to shard, scale, and design a schema in a traditional RDBMS. CouchDB is a distributed document database which is gaining huge momentum from the nosql crowd. As the project started to show its maturity and pick up momentum with production deployments, 2009 is turning out to be a great year for CouchDB. It’s probably only fair to also give a tip of the hat to Jan Lenhardt for his contributions both to shaping the codebase and being an ambassador to the development community at large with his presentations and documentation.

Blaine Cook and Chris Messina (OAuth)

There’s been an underlying problem with the web service model for some time now, and that is — how do you authorize external applications to access the api? Blaine Cook and Chris Messina set out to solve this problem in 2006. After wide-scale deployment on Twitter, and a small hiccup in the form of a security vulnerability with the initial spec, OAuth seems to have finally come into its own. It’s been a good year for OAuth, and several applications across the web now use OAuth to open their applications to external developers For that I think we owe Blaine and Chris a debt of gratitude.

Hongli Lai (Passenger)

Ruby on Rails deployment used to be kind of a pain. Even the creator of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson has talked about having to regularly restart the application servers for the 37signals basecamp project. Passenger came along and changed all of that, making rails deployment a breeze and so its creator Hongli Lai deserves a very honorable mention.

My first real language was Pascal. My first few programs were written in Basic, but even then it felt like a toy language. Many of the techniques that I learned from Basic applied directly to Pascal though — control structures like loops, conditional statements, operator precedence and so on. Just like mathematics is built upon fundamental axioms like the Well-ordering principle, programming is built upon these fundamental techniques. They’re constant, they don’t vary from language to language.

Layered on top of the axioms you can find the more advanced techniques like list comprehensions, structures, functions, and objects. In one sense, we are forever indebted to these little ideas because they pave the way for abstraction — which is just a fancy word for solving a specific type of problem with some code, then bundling it up so that you can apply the same solution to that type of problem whenever it comes up again (e.g. sorting a list).

But in another sense, a very real sense, this all really sucks. On top of a fine and well-designed language, vendors and open source communities construct whole hosts of class libraries and SDKs each with their own naming conventions and usage patterns. Out of this comes an interesting incarnation of the 80/20 principle — while negotiating the learning curve, a programmer might spend only 20 percent of his time learning a new language syntax and how it applies the same axioms she uses in other languages, and I would guess somewhere near a whopping 80 percent of the time mapping out the new class libraries involved.

If you want to iterate over an array summing up all of the integers it contains, it’s pretty much the same whether you’re using C, C#, or Java. If you want to scale an image to half of its original size, the method of doing this varies greatly between Microsoft’s .NET family of languages, Adobe’s class library, and Apple’s Cocoa. Add to this the fact that these class libraries are in a state of constant evolution, such that knowledge of what was valid 2 years ago may be completely useless now, and you start to get my point.

It’s extremely frustrating. There has to be a better way. This is just one of things about our craft that absolutely needs to improve in the future.

The premise of the book is to develop what Ferriss calls a “muse” — a product or service which can be automated to generate a continual passive income and deliver you from the bondage of the rat race. The text is laced with funny anecdotes and insightful quotes but really delivers on information related to negotiation, marketing, outsourcing and product development. Once you tackle the chore of developing your muse, Tim guides you through building your “deferred-life plan” and joining the ranks of the New Rich through world travel and plotting amazing experiences.

One of the most important tips I’m taking away from the book is how to most effectively manage communication. Tim advises checking email only twice daily (at 11am and 4pm) when starting out. Already I’ve felt the effects of this and other tactics to eliminate interruptions.

Mr. Ferriss also drops several exercises at the end of chapters to help you develop personal skills and break out of your social conditioning. My favorite is the challenge to simply lay down in a public place. That sounds crazy, and I haven’t tried this yet admittedly, but the goal is to shake you out of your comfort zone and get yourself used to doing things that break the mold.

It’s just amazing how much information is packed into this little gem, but perhaps more amazing is how wise and accomplished the author is at such a young age. This is definitely one cat I need to meet.