If a particular Github account is cluttering up a pull request you’re trying to review (a robot perhaps), you can mute their comments out with a quick bookmarklet. Note: this is hacky and will probably break at any momment.

https://www.google.com/settings/activity

Easy solution is Applescript:

When building a product with a small team, there are two overriding “gut feel” metrics that crop into my head. “Is the team flying in formation?” and “What’s our average velocity?”

I’m running another tech mentorship program this summer.

Just posted on the Fondu blog a full rundown of the tech we use. Check it out!

Hey you! Ya, you! I want you to help me build Fondu’s new web-app.

At Fondu, location-based services, specifically foursquare, are incredibly important to us. Location with a social context is at the core of just about everything in our product.

One specific use case for MongoDB is as a user activity store. It’s simple, scalable, and can be done asynchronously (as long as occasional failure is tolerable).

Newegg,

This gets PIL working with JPEG/ZLIB support within a virtualenv (with –no-site-packages). This has specifically been tested with Python 2.7 on Ubuntu 11.04 & 11.10.

[][1]

[][1][][2]So, over the past few weeks, I’ve been putting together a tech mentorship program for aspiring developers. The mentors helping out are amazing. If you know any smart developers, feel free to pass this info along.

[][1]Apologies. This is a longer, personal one.

Over the past month, I’ve had nightmare customer service with Motorola, regarding my dying Droid. Being blatantly lied to and misled by several representatives (including an L2 supervisor) put a sour taste in my mouth.

Behind the scenes at eventLo, we’re working on a phenomenal new V2 of the product. Back-end and front-end.

Once again this blog has gone dark for over a month. That seems to happen whenever I get extremely busy. No apologies for it however, as it’s been a productive month.

I’ll start this post by saying that any productivity improvements you get from EC2 probably won’t be immediate. There are a lot of features that are very powerful once you know how to use them. The time spent migrating to EC2 will probably even put you in the negative at first.

Brad Hargreaves had a [phenomenal post][1] on his blog yesterday. The core of it was a warning that succumbing to the groupthink of tech circles will hamper innovation, and lead you to develop your products for the wrong customers.

I’m a single founder, working full-time on EventLo. This post is a candid account of my experience so far.

Wow. I can’t believe it’s a month since I last posted to the blog.

Neither is necessarily better than the other, and the best people can do both. Doing both at the same time, however is like trying to play ping-pong and philosophize. It’s just not going to work.

Old stuff in the tech world, but profound nonetheless. Set aside 30 minutes to absorb these. It is time that will be repaid in the future.

This is just astoundingly beautiful. Also a nice source for a few Wikipedia pages I should go read up on…

To be honest, I think checking in is obnoxious and un-natural. That’s not to say I don’t do it, but it’s disruptive to the social flow, and so getting it to be habit with a critical mass will be incredibly difficult. Some my friends don’t know where their phone even is at any given point in time.

Integrating Mongoengine into Pylons is really quick and painless if you know where to put stuff.

Nothing too insightful in this post, just leaving a pulse on what I’ve been up to.

[][1]Market collapse, better competitors, lack of interest, failure to bridge the gap, lack of talent, out of runway, your product sucks, blah blah blah.

[][1]This sounds so dead obvious that most people will probably think about not even reading this.

[][1]Well, I’m certainly glad I made myself establish a business case before I got busy coding. Turns out I showed up a bit late to the party, and the competition is pretty nasty.

I’m on a bus. This ain’t a trolley, it’s as real as it gets.
I’m on a bus. Mother F’er, don’t you ever forget.

[][1]Starting a business means that my roles just got very generalized. It’s all on me now, so I’m going to call myself a Developer. I’ll be tackling a combination of Software Development and Business Development, so it seems apt. Toss some Market Development in there and we really got ourselves a party.

This is a post I’ve wanted to write for a while now, but there were a bunch of things up in the air. That’s all been figured out now.[][1]

In a nutshell, the Twitter ecosystem resembles a pyramid. Where you are on the pyramid roughly depends upon the number of followers you have, and your following-to-followers ratio.

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to create a virtual data center, right on your computer. The virtual servers will be able to communicate with each other in a private network. I’ll also be able to communicate with them from the outside as well. Honestly, I hope you have a lot of RAM.

[][1]Here’s a hint. It isn’t because it’s better than (insert-your-brand-here)SQL. I’m not even going to address that debate right now. It simply has to do with product iteration.

Wow. Just spent wayyyy to much time chasing down an issue getting a MongoDB Upstart daemon up and running using mongodb-stable on Ubuntu 10.4. The short answer is that the DB daemon was uncleanly shut down at some point, and a lock file was lingering. That lock file prevented MongoDB from starting. The solution to this is relatively simple. The database needs to have a repair run on it, which will remove the lock file.

Business 2 Everybody is the current hot trend in the technology world, though no company will tell you that or use that term.

A visual map of the VC landscape. Currently representing SanFran, NYC, and Boston.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with [Piwik][1]. It’s an open-source replacement to [Google Analytics][2].

Over the last 5 months, I’ve had the opportunity to develop web-apps using 5 different Python web frameworks. Those frameworks are Django, Pylons, Turbogears, Plone/Zope and web.py. Each has their own flavor, and could be useful for different projects. If you’re thinking about starting a web project, and you already know the virtues of Python*, then it’s good to know the pros and cons of some of the major frameworks.

I had a mean streak of motivation in me this weekend, and cranked out a quick web-app, start-to-finish.

Excuse my nerd freak-out, but this is really cool.

Be honest with yourself and others. Stand by your commitments, execute swiftly, and always follow through.

First of all, I need to give props to [J][1][ohn Britton][1] on an absolutely killer [Twilio][2] demonstration. Smooth and well-practiced, he took a grand total of 5 minutes to write a Twilio app that allowed everybody in a 850 person auditorium to dial into conference calls with each other. He then took all the phone numbers of everyone who called, and gave them ring-backs with an automated message. 5 minutes. Amazing.

Excellent ad for Google Chrome.

Socialgraph is an open-source project I just launched over the weekend that aims to be a server-to-client relationship visualization platform.

I think that I finally “get” Foursquare. I’ve been using it since I moved to NYC, and it’s been useful to me in that time, but it always seemed like fun with a little bit of utility. I no longer think that’s the case, and as it grows, it is going to be incredibly useful, with the fun being a great way to get people onboard and engaged.