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.
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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?”
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Hey you! Ya, you! I want you to help me build Fondu’s new web-app.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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[
][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.
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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.
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Behind the scenes at eventLo, we’re working on a phenomenal new V2 of the product. Back-end and front-end.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I’m a single founder, working full-time on EventLo. This post is a candid account of my experience so far.
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Wow. I can’t believe it’s a month since I last posted to the blog.
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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.
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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.
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This is just astoundingly beautiful. Also a nice source for a few Wikipedia pages I should go read up on…
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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.
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Integrating Mongoengine into Pylons is really quick and painless if you know where to put stuff.
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Nothing too insightful in this post, just leaving a pulse on what I’ve been up to.
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[
][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.
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[
][1]This sounds so dead obvious that most people will probably think about not even reading this.
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[
][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.
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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.
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[
][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.
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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]
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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.
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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.
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[
][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.
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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.
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Business 2 Everybody is the current hot trend in the technology world, though no company will tell you that or use that term.
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A visual map of the VC landscape. Currently representing SanFran, NYC, and Boston.
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Recently, I’ve been experimenting with [Piwik][1]. It’s an open-source replacement to [Google Analytics][2].
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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.
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I had a mean streak of motivation in me this weekend, and cranked out a quick web-app, start-to-finish.
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Be honest with yourself and others. Stand by your commitments, execute swiftly, and always follow through.
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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.
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Socialgraph is an open-source project I just launched over the weekend that aims to be a server-to-client relationship visualization platform.
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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.
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