WhatCodeCraves

Talking the Startup Talk, Walking the Outspokes Walk: Founders

Jerry Cheung — 2009/10/30

It's been a month since I left my job at Coupa and co-founded Outspokes with my friend Arthur. I read a lot of blogs on entreprenuership and technology, but actually diving in and floundering around myself has been quite a rush. Many of my experiences match up with what the blogosphere says, but just as many have caught me off guard. Looking back, my first surprise was how big a difference my co-founder made.

The Software Maintenance Light

Jerry Cheung — 2009/06/09

My cute little box car, Chuck, came with an owners manual. Inside this little book, it lists all the mileage intervals when Chuck should be serviced. At 30,000 miles, you replace the spark plugs, rotate tires, inspect the brakes, etc. In addition to these checklists, every 5000 miles Chuck beeps at me and flashes a maintenance light to warn me that I should replace the engine oil. As my car nears 50,000 miles, it never ceases to amaze me that everytime I turn the key, Chuck starts up instantly and runs as well as he did when I first got him. I wish software could be as reliable as my car. Heck, if it's too much to ask for software to be as reliable as a Toyota, then I wish software could be as reliable as a mid-90's Chevy Cavalier. How could it be that an engine that explodes thousands of times per minute for multiple decades over hundreds of thousands of miles in all types of unpredictable weather conditions be more reliable than software? Then it hit me. Software applications lack regular maintenance.

Introspecting Rails Models and Controllers Callbacks

Jerry Cheung — 2009/06/04

Once models and controllers grow to a certain size and complexity, it gets tricky to figure out what callbacks act upon them. This is especially true for objects that are several inheritance layers deep, have multiple mixins, were written a long long time ago, or any combination of the above. I've picked up a few tools for crushing nasty little callback buggers that crop up every now and then. I hope you find them useful!

Ruby Postgresql Gem Cleanup

Jerry Cheung — 2009/04/14

I ran into some trouble with getting a good native postgresql driver installed. Here are some links and resources I found to be useful. I also wrote a checklist for bootstrapping a new Rails app with postgres as the adapter.

Fast Tracked iPhone Development

Jerry Cheung — 2009/04/10

Jumping into a new language, a new framework, and a new set of tools is overwhelming! But the best way to learn is to be utterly crushed by the technology, then have friends pick up the pieces. Once you've seen a good broad overview of what's available, you're more capable of finding resources on your own. Here is my chronological step by step guide to getting bootstrapped.

Adventures with ActiveRecord find

Jerry Cheung — 2009/04/08

Retrieving records from the database and mapping the results into ActiveRecord models are a big part of every Rails app. A large majority of your controllers will retrieve one or more ActiveRecord models. For something as important and fundamental as 'find', knowing more of it's options and idioms can help you write less, write it more elegantly, and do more.

Rails 2.2.2 Chicken and Egg Migrations Headache

Jerry Cheung — 2009/03/17

For this upcoming March release, we plan to upgrade from Rails 2.1 to Rails 2.2.2. When testing bootstrapping fresh instances of our app, we ran across an annoying migrations problem. Read on to see how we resolved it.

Rails and Gems Documentation Everywhere

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/28

A great thing about Coupa work is how I can hack it up without a network connection. The codebase is checked out and I run mysql locally. I fire up emacs and a script/server and I'm pretty much good to go. The only downside is not being able to access the rails and gems docs. Here's what I did to put together a productive local setup.

Another .irbrc Jewel

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/18

A while back, I discovered the magical .irbrc. If you scroll down to the comments, Arthur and I left a tip on how to view arbitrary script/console output in Textmate. It's really amazing for XML or big chunks of output. Other useful irb links after the fold.

Multiple Gmail Accounts on OSX Done Right

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/11

I learned this tip from Seggy and I've explained it to several people already. If you've fallen in love with Gmail's web interface, then you're going to love this solution.

Emacs Refactoring

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/06

While I waited for Coupa customers to be upgraded, I decided to clean up my .emacs config file. My .emacs was never a pretty thing to admire. Without any restraint, I often added whatever cool code snippet I came across online. The file became verbose, redundant, and a general mess. I set out to make it more modular and easier to follow.