Technovangelist

Working hard, trying to fit in @tapjoy at Tapjoy – View on Path.

MattW — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:48:53 +0000

Hangin with Tapjoy. Mumm, Startup Walkabout at Tapjoy – View on Path.

MattW — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:19:49 +0000

Got a table lamp and chairs. What else is needed? at Church Park – View on Path.

MattW — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:33:25 +0000

I guess this makes it more official. The gf gets some of my outdoor furniture. She has a deck after all. at Church Park – View on Path.

MattW — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:33:25 +0000

I, Sublime - A Look at My Favorite Sublime Text Plugins

MattW — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:15:12 +0000

I have been using Sublime Text 2 since pretty close to the beginning. I purchased it early because I could see the value easily and prefer to support the developers who support my efforts.

One of the aspects of Sublime that I love the most are the plugins. But when you get started with Sublime Text 2, it can be difficult to know which plugins to use. This article will go through the ones I think you need to install first.

Sublime Package Control - Will Bond’s Package Control is the first thing everyone needs to install. Installing packages without this is a PITA. Even if you only install one other plugin, this is totally worth it! Install it now using the instructions found here.
Advanced New File - Easily create new files from the root of your project rather than from the default directory for the app.
Alternative Autocompletion - Install this then press escape to cycle through the various autocomplete possibilities.
Bracket Highlighter - Quickly seeing the other side of the set of brackets is very useful
Emmet - This used to be called ZenCoding. Not sure why it changed, but Zen was breaking down for me and Emmet makes everything better. If you are writing ANY html, install this and get it done quicker!
ERB Insert and Toggle Commands - If you are doing any Rails dev, then you are writing ERB files. If you are writing ERB files, you have to keep typing <% %>. Everytime I do that, my finger searches for the % key. Now I press a simple shortcut and cycle between <% %>, <%= %>. <%- %>
ERB Snippets - More ERB goodness. Some overlap with the Insert/Toggle plugin, but thats still easier for me.
Find Key Conflicts - As soon as you install a few plugins, there will be key conflicts. This helps you find them and more importantly, fix them.
GitGutter - I don’t really use the Git plugin since going from the command line is easier when you get used to it, but seeing what lines changed in the gutter is way cool!
LiveReload - Save a file and see your browser auto-refresh. When doing Rails, this seems to work better for me than CodeKit, though I still use that occasionally for regular web dev. Follow the instructions here if it crashes on save every now and then.
Sidebar Enhancements - This makes the sidebar infinitely more usable!
Synced Sidebar - I am fairly new to Rails so still getting a feel for where files are. I tend to open files pressing Command-P then type the file name. When I do, this plugin shows me where in the sidebar the file came from.

If you are doing anything with Rails, I suggest you also look at MHartl’s SublimeText Setup Instructions for some good pointers. I took the RailsCasts Theme from this online theme editor and made the keywords, constants, and library functions a bit lighter because I couldn’t see that shade of red very well.

Do you have any favorite plugins I should be using? Share them in the comments, or send me a tweet @technovangelist

New trucks in town. Woohoo! at Food Trucks at Milk and Kilby – View on Path.

MattW — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:18:51 +0000

Workin hard at ctct at Constant Contact – View on Path.

MattW — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:34:08 +0000

Beautiful day at Independence Wharf at Independence Wharf – View on Path.

MattW — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:40:03 +0000

Graphing With R

MattW — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 16:28:26 +0000

I took a few days off for Christmas in San Antonio with my parents and my sister. While there, I had the usual tasks for a geek with non-geek relatives: fix computers, fix wifi, fix printers, explain the Internet, explain how stuff works. But in between time spent doing that, and doing family stuff, I learned a bit about R. R is programming language mostly intended to do statistical programming. I don't know much about that, but I wanted a way to make some graphs that are sometimes difficult to make in Excel.

I think it would be easier to just learn more about Excel, but now I am invested so I am trying to use it as much as possible. Recently at work I added a post to our blog on the impact of JavaScript and concatenating/minifying the code on your website. You can read the about it here At the end of that post, I added an chart describing the final results.

JavaScript tests chart built with R

Creating a chart like this would probably take me 20-30 minutes in Excel. Building it in R would probably take less time if I knew R like I know Excel. Instead it took me a lot longer. But in getting there I discovered a lot of ways I didn't like the image. I think Excel is great when you know exactly how you want the final image to appear in the post. I thought I did, but this looks vastly different from that initial version. Tweaking and then having a very repeatable chart within seconds for any dataset is one of R's biggest strengths for me.

So how did I get here? Well, R is complicated. Luckily a course on Coursera came up at exactly the right time for me. There is a second course that takes this further that starts next week too.

But assuming that you know the basics of R and just want to see what I did, here is my R Script for this chart (the csv files I am using are the standard ones you can download after running a test on Yottaa):

setwd("~/Downloads/")
library(ggplot2)
library(plyr)
js1 <- read.csv("Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test1.csv")
js2 <- read.csv("Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test2.csv")
js3 <- read.csv("Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test3.csv")
js4 <- read.csv("Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test4.csv")
js5 <- read.csv("Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test5.csv")
alljs <- rbind(js1,js2,js3,js4,js5)
regions <- data.frame(Location=c("New York (NYC)", 
                                 "Chicago (ORD)",
                                 "Dallas (DFW)",
                                 "Washington DC (DCA)",
                                 "San Francisco (SFO)", 
                                 "Oregon (PDX)",
                                 "Amsterdam (AMS)",
                                 "Berlin (BER)",
                                 "Dublin (DUB)",
                                 "London (LDN)",
                                 "Tokyo (NRT)",
                                 "Hong Kong (HK)",
                                 "Sydney (SYD)"),
                      Region=c(rep("US",6),rep("Europe",4),rep("AsiaPac",3)))
alljsr <- merge(alljs,regions,by.x="Location")
mt <- ddply(alljsr,
            "Monitor.name", 
            summarise, 
            mt2i=median(time.to.interact),
            sd=sd(time.to.interact),
            se=sd(time.to.interact)/sqrt(length(time.to.interact))
            )

p <- ggplot(mt,aes(x=factor(Monitor.name),y=mt2i,fill=Monitor.name))
p.plot <- geom_bar(stat="identity")
p.error <- geom_errorbar(aes(ymin=mt2i-se,ymax=mt2i+se),width=0.10)
#p.error <- geom_errorbar(width=0.25)
p.coord <- coord_cartesian(ylim=c(1000,6000))
p.labs <- labs(color="black", title="Javascript Tests", y="Time to Interact", y="" )
p.theme <- theme(legend.position="none",
                 panel.grid.major=element_line(color="black",size=.3,linetype="dotted"),
                 #panel.grid.major.x=element_line(size=.6),
                 panel.grid.minor=element_line(color="black",size=.1,linetype="dotted"),
                 panel.grid.major.x=element_blank(),
                 panel.border=element_rect(color="black", fill=NA, size=.2),
                 panel.background=element_rect(fill="white")

)
p.sfill <- scale_x_discrete(name="Tests",
                               breaks=c("Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test1",
                                        "Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test2",
                                        "Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test3",
                                        "Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test4a",
                                        "Lat-JSTest-Jan14-Test5"),
                               labels=c("1) Initial Test",
                                        "2) Added JS",
                                        "3) Optimized\nexcept JS",
                                        "4) Optimized\nwith Reduce\nJavaScript Requests",
                                        "5) Optimized\nwith Reduce\nJS Requests\n& JS Minify"))
p.text <- geom_text(size=8,aes(x=Monitor.name, y=mt2i-500, label=mt2i), color="white")


p + p.plot + p.labs + p.theme + p.coord + p.sfill+p.error +p.text

I am having a lot of fun with R so far and I look forward to seeing what I come up with over the next few weeks. I have a series of posts coming up on the Yottaa Blog and plenty of opportunity to post more charts made with R.

The Mac and The Watch

MattW — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:33:47 +0000

I used to wear my watch all the time. It's a Seiko Sportura I picked up on one of my first trips to Dubai. It was the first watch I paid over 50 bucks for and at closer to 400-500 dollars, it was a fairly big investment. It stayed on my wrist all the time. I wore it everywhere for at least 6 years and when it was off, the lack of weight on my wrist just felt wierd.

But if you look at my arm today, you might notice that the watch isn't there. I don't wear it anymore. It's not that I don't like the watch anymore, leaving it in a drawer for the last year. What changed it for me was the Mac. So at this point you are probably wondering what the Mac offers that caused me to stop wearing the watch. And the answer is nothing. The reason is because Mac made it painful.

The Sportura is a big watch. I have the black titanium wrist band which makes it feel even bigger. Everything was fine until I went to the Macbook Pro and its poorly designed wrist rest area. That hard, razor-sharp 90 degree angle at the front of the laptop would always catch the bottom of the watch wrist band. I would have to lift my arm and then rest it on the laptop. Every movement would then make a scratching sound on the aluminum.

Compare that with the more beveled front of the Thinkpad I had used before: my wrist could slide on to the laptop without it catching. Rubbing the watch on the Thinkpad caused no scratching sound. And all of that makes sense based on what I have seen about how design is done by Apple vs the Thinkpad group at Lenovo. Apple makes something beautiful regardless of it's users or it's history. While the Thinkpads are an evolution of design with each generation building on the greatness of the earlier models. I can still see some aspects of that original butterfly keyboard in the latest Thinkpads and its incredible.

I am 100% an Apple guy today but that doesn't mean I think everything they do is perfect. I spend all of my time on a Macbook Pro but that doesn't mean I can't see the genius in the Thinkpad. In my perfect world, the Apple designers would find a way to integrate a more beveled front edge into the Macbook (and a thousand bonus points for implementing the Thinkpad keyboard with the Trackstick). Until then, the watch will stay off, sitting in a drawer somewhere.

AutoStitch on iPhone

MattW — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:16:25 +0000

I have had AutoStitch on the iPhone for quite a while. It's an oldie, but definitely a goodie. Panorama apps are all over the place, but this one continues to be the best I have seen.

Crystal Springs near my parents' place on Bainbridge Island, Washington

The process is simple. Open the app, and start taking pictures. As you rotate the camera, you see a blue outline around what you previously took and a green box around the full frame when you have enough overlap of the next frame. It says you only need about 20% overlap, but I tend to go with 50-75% overlap.

Last day in the old apartment before leaving Amsterdam forever.

When you have taken the last image, the app will stitch them all together. You can choose to crop the photo automatically, or leave the black portions in place. Sometimes it feels appropriate to keep the borders straight, other times the curvature and uneven edges feels right.

My wall of images in the Amsterdam apartment

The Boston skyline

Somewhere along the Boston Waterfront

First night with the Boston Pops.

Learning R With Coursera

MattW — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 23:36:12 +0000

Last week I started taking a new course on Coursera.org. It's called Computing for Data Analysis and its all about using the R programming language to get a better understanding of large datasets. I work for Yottaa and large datasets are something we deal a lot with. I want to find an interesting way to work with and understand the data collected from all sorts of sites on the internet and I am hoping R is the perfect solution. Unfortunately, its a bit wierd and not all that well documented, so this training course could be just what I need.

The programming assignment from last week already taught me a few commands I hadn't used before. We are working with a table of numbers describing ozone, temperature and more and we needed to find the mean of the Solar.R value where Ozone was greater than 31 and temperature was greater than 90. At first it took me about 7 lines of code to get this done, but after some searching, managed to get it down to a single beautiful line (which I am sure I would forget if I did not document it here):

mean((subset(x,Ozone>31 & Temp>90))$Solar.R)

Wow, that is cool!

I am looking forward to the second section of the course which starts on Wednesday!

Looking East

MattW — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 22:41:44 +0000

Decent view from Independence Wharf – View on Path.

MattW — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:04:39 +0000

Whats Up With The Cases?

MattW — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:01:33 +0000

Now that the temperature has dropped to the 20's and 30's I tend not to walk to the office. Its a beautiful walk, but the T (the friendlier name for the underground portion of the MBTA, aka the Boston public transportation system) is just so much warmer. I have a short walk past Berklee University to get to the Hynes Convention Center stop of the Green line, then a few stops to my office.

One thing I have noticed is that the iPhone, and to a much lesser degree other brand phones, is a major part of everyone's commute. I see everyone zone out and get absorbed by whatever is on their personal screen: a game, a video, a book, or the album cover to the current track. That's ok, I am doing it myself. It's not like I was going to strike up a conversation with one of these folks anyway. What I find interesting are the cases.

Everyone has a case on their phone. I don't get it. One of the changes that comes with each generation of iPhone is a decrease in size. The 5 is the smallest of them so far, and yet everyone feels the need to bulk it up with an ugly chunk of plastic and rubber.

Of course the argument I would imagine most of these people have in favor of the case is that its to protect their investment. I guess I understand part of that: this is an expensive device. I paid $399 USD for my iPhone 5 and that's with a 2 year commitment with Verizon. And if I break it, I will have to pay closer to $600 USD to replace it. The problem with that argument is that these phones are pretty damned strong on their own.

My previous phone was an iPhone 4 (not the 4s, just the 4). I bought it while living in Amsterdam. My employer paid my phone bill, and they wouldn't cover a switch from the Blackberry to the iDevice (they started allowing it 3 months later). So I bought it outright. At about 800 Euros (about $1050 USD) for a standard iPhone 4 bought outside of a contract for everyone outside of the US, that's an even bigger investment! But even then a case simply wasn't necessary.

There is a dent on this corner somewhere...

As I mentioned, these phones are freaking strong. My phone is usually sitting in my left front pocket. Its usually accompanied by a sampling of change and of course my keys. They all jangle round in there and the phone always comes out unscathed. One day while preparing dinner, I dropped my phone...from 4 feet up...onto a concrete floor. There is a single dent which is maybe half a millimeter long on one corner. Usually I can't even find the dent its so small. I can't imagine what you would have to do to crack the screen.

The iPhone 5 has all the strength of the 4 and moreso. It's built like a tank. And with far less glass on the back, there is far less to crack if you manage to find a way to crack it. So I go commando with my phone all the time. But looking at my fellow subway riders, I am definitely the only one.

Bookshelves Are Up!

MattW — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:20:43 +0000

Yesterday I made a pilgrimage to Ikea to buy the standard Billy bookcases. Feels good to have them assembled and have the books out of the closet where they have been since the move. Now to clean up the excess cardboard and packing strewn across my floor.

Unfortunately, Ikea is not an easy trip for the car-less resident of Boston. Apparently Ikea was going to open a store closer to the city, but then bailed on their plans just a few months ago. I think that decision was insane! With students from Harvard, MIT, BU, BC, and more coming into town each semester, I am sure they could make a killing in the city. But for some reason, they think that Bostonians just like to pay way too much for furniture that isn't much better than the Ikea standard.

Thankfully a friend was able to give me a ride to and from the store along with all my purchases... Far better than alternative of paying $100 for delivery and waiting 2 weeks when buying online.

Finally made the switch to Squarespace 6

MattW — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:18:07 +0000

Not sure what took me so long, but finally made the switchover from Squarespace 5 to 6. Ahhhh....

Downside is that everyone still subscribed to the feed, just got a refresh of the last 20 posts...ugh

Selling in the Netherlands can be hard

MattW — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:19:29 +0000

In preparation for my move to Boston, I have been trying to get rid of extra stuff in my apartment. This has proven to be a tough process because of some of the whackos out there. Take this one exchange I have been having for the last couple days.

I placed an ad for a Nikon SB600 Flash on Marktplaats.nl. Marktplaats works on a bidding system so I started the bidding at 80 Euros. I saw other SB600s going for 125, so that seemed like a good place to start from. The idea here is that you bid and the highest bid after an undefined amount of time wins.

So rather than bid, I got three emails from Daniel, although sometimes he goes by DF. They all said:

I'm interested for 80 Euros.

Fair enough. I responded first thing next morning with this:

I see you have sent 3 messages that you are interested but haven't actually placed a bid. If you are interested, place the bid and we can proceed.

Several hours later he responds with this:

I do everything directly. No bidding. I pay in advance.

Sounds good at first, except there was already a bid in place and a direct offer higher than that. So I responded:

If you don't want to bid, then lets make it 100 and be done with it.

That would allow him to beat out the existing offers and get him the flash. The response I got was not quite what I expected:

Why not 10000,- ??

Puzzling. Sure, I would love more money. I should have stopped at this point because this guy is not quite all there. But I went along:

If you want to go that high I am fine with that. But 100 is enough.

But I was actually getting a bit tired so to end it I sent one more mail:

This is becoming a waste of time. If you want the flash then let me know and come up with a serious offer.

a few hours pass and I get:

I gave you your asked price!! So next time be more clear in the ad, you are waisting MY time

Again, the ad is set up as an auction where you bid the amount you want to pay. I was very clear with that. Not sure how it could have been done differently. I really should stop now….

I'm wasting your time? You won't bid. You won't go higher than an existing bid or offer. Why would I sell to you? If you ever were actually interested, the flash has been sold.

I knew he wouldn't be able to resist so I waited for his response:

So what? That's why I send only e-mail (no bidding). I want to know from who I buy. You are very hateful and agressive. I would have never bought anything from you. You are also comming on my BLACK LIST of MP-people.
This list goes to about 3000 MP people.

Ahhh, thats the kicker. He had no intention of ever paying. There are a few Marktplaats folks who seem to enjoy bidding or emailing offers with no intention of paying. Usually they want me to send the item to Nigeria or some other far away country. Really, I have to stop replying to these types of emails, but this is getting fun:

Hateful and aggressive? Really? That's a stretch. I placed an ad that had a starting bid. This is on a site for auctions. You refused to play by the rules and wanted special treatment. Ok so I gave you a price to avoid that process that has been in place for years. You refused wanting instead to have a special price lower than existing bids. Not really sure what I could have done differently. The fact that you have such a hard time dealing with people (3000 already) seems to indicate I made a good decision to sell to someone else. I'll wait for your reply since you seem to like to have the last word.

I am going to stay up waiting for his reply…I know he can't resist…

My commute

MattW — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 09:20:26 +0000

My commute these days is minimal. I wake up, cross the hall, sit down and get to work. I have had this commute for about a year on most days. Up until July 1, I had an office to go to in Hoofddorp, but that wasn't a place I enjoyed going to so I tended to stay away as much as possible. Obviously when I had a class, I would go in but interest in training was dropping. Working from home is something that many people would die for, but I hate it.

I want to go somewhere. I want to see people. I want to shuffle through the crowds. Thats one of the many key factors involved in my upcoming move. My commute starting in 2 weeks is going to be great. On a good day, I'll be able to wander up from my apartment near the Christian Science Center, through the Boston Common, to my office on Summer St in Boston. On a bad day I'll take the T from Symphony. And I'll be going to an office that I enjoy being in, with people I want to work around. I can't wait.

But until then, and for the last few months, I have inserted a bit of a commute that I have come to love. I wander the streets of Amsterdam. Recently that commute involves a walk from my place near Jan Pieter Heijestraat up to Marnixstraat, zig-zagging through the canals to get to Lungoccino for a Lungoccino. Then through the Begijnhof for those late mornings. Up along the Kalverstraat and keep going to Centraal Station. Then take whichever ferry is leaving next. Then stay on the boat for the return and take the 1 tram home. Its a wonderful way to start the day and I may actually miss it.

Finding A Job Isn't That Hard, Just Get The System To Work For YOU

MattW — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:12:22 +0000

A few months ago I decided it was time to switch things up a bit. I was eager to move back to the US and also eager to work for a startup where I had more control over my place in the company. I wanted an office I could walk to and one that I wanted to go to everyday. And I wanted the office to be in a vibrant, exciting city with an active startup scene.

Sure, I dabbled with a few companies over the last year, but it wasn't until mid-March of this year that I started to get a bit more serious about it. Getting cut after the 3rd round of several-hour interviews at Google a year ago was a bit painful, but I was glad I went through that because it forced me to think about what I really wanted to do. It was actually the first time I interviewed for a job that I did not get. There would be a few others after that, but each bad interview taught me more and more about what I wanted.

Google came up because of a conversation with a friend at a ski house in France last year. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but hey, it was Google. Another company came up because of a well timed LinkedIn email just as the Google opportunity died (turned out they wanted a well-experienced do-it-all trainer but wanted to pay a fresh-out-of-college salary). And then I stopped pursuing anything for a good 6-9 months. That happened to coincide with the work I was doing to create FaxDocs.tv: I was having too much fun in my job to think about changing things.

So in March I decided to start looking again and thats when I put the Internet to work for me. The key tool I used to get me my job was IFTTT. Don't try to pronounce it. Its "If This Then That", or http://ifttt.com. IFTTT basically waits for something to happen on the internet and then does something in response. What kinds of things? Well, I use it to check tomorrows weather, check web sites without RSS, archive my Instagram pictures, auto-respond to new Twitter followers, and more.

But for job searching, I had IFTTT start searching a few sites every day and send me an email when it found a match. Each This and That combo is called a Recipe, and I had about 10-15 recipes for different sites and searches. I had searches on Craigslists for Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, NYC, and Boston for jobs with the word "evangelist" in them. I had searches on the various VC company pages for jobs at the companies they were funding, again looking for the evangelist role.

Every day, 3-10 jobs came into my inbox. Some were repeats, and some were actually jobs for pastors and preachers. But some looked like amazingly cool opportunities that I had to investigate. In April, I sent in my resume to one of those companies. Later that month we were talking (while I was in Sydney and Bangkok and San Antonio) on the phone and for some in-person interviews in Boston. In May came the offer, and next week I start the job: Technical Evangelist at a very cool web startup in Boston, Massachusetts.

Looking back at the interviews that did not work out, none of them were jobs that I really wanted. Some were startups a little too new (and risky) or too established (and rigid), some were Dev Evangelists, some were trainers. None of those were what I really wanted. Maybe that showed in the interviews because I wasn't as excited as I should have been. One insisted on a Skype interview even though he had a terrible connection then had HR contact me to say I didn't have the skills. If that was really it, they could have figured it out from my blog and twitter. (HINT: if you are hiring, have a bad internet connection and want to do a good interview, pick up the damned phone!). Glad I didn't end up working for that guy.

Out of all the jobs I looked into there were many I was a perfect fit for, but there was only one that was a perfect fit for what I wanted to do right now. That was the one I was super excited about. That was the one I contacted several times mid-interview process and post-interview with ideas of what I would do in the role. I even made a video or two demonstrating my skills with their messaging. The one I was super excited about is exactly the one that I got. I can't wait to get started!