Recently I’ve been getting into Stack Overflow, after dabbling with it once or twice over the last couple of years.
Now, I’ve been using SO almost constantly since it started. It’s probably the best general resource for answering programming questions on the internet. What I haven’t really been doing until recently is contributing. Continue reading
About a week before I published my last blogpost on Who Goes First the first version of the app was posted on Reddit by a friend of mine. His title was ‘App made by a colleague of mine‘.
I was surprised by the comments. Here are a couple of them:
Is this an app? It seems just like a website.
Well, the new cool thing is to call a page in “the cloud” that does one specific thing a “web app”…
Yeah, it’s annoying. I was expecting a link to iTunes or one of the Android markets.
I still consider myself to be a relative ruby/rails novice, so every now and again I build ‘toy’ projects to teach myself more about the framework. Usually these don’t end up going anywhere, but my latest attempt over about 3 evenings of coding turned out rather well.
Who Goes First is a super-simple web app that spits out a random rule to decide who takes the first turn in a board game. It supports user submissions and has a contact form. That’s it. Continue reading
Coming from a background in Computer Science and Software engineering, some of the tasks I have to do in my current role are daunting. I used to write code 100% of the time but now I’m more likely to be putting together a presentation or writing public documentation. Even worse, app developers look to me for advice on copywriting and content for their app’s promotional video. Nightmare!
Actually, it’s not that bad. One of the reasons I took my job was because I enjoy these ‘right brain’ problems. Applying flair and creativity to something as rigid and mathematical as software is incredibly rewarding.
Previously I wrote about creating a weather widget for Geckoboard. Here’s the current state of things:
Back at the start of January I promised a follow-up post on how my dogfooding experiment went. Sadly, the business model I went with (taking pre-orders to fund a print run) didn’t work out as well as I hoped. Even though I avoided the up-front cost of getting the shirts printed, I hadn’t factored in how much I would have to reasonably spend on publicity/advertising to make the project a success. Seeing as it was an all-or-nothing deal, spending hundreds on advertising that I might not see anything back from turned out to be too much of a risk. I did run one campaign though, and I think it’s worth talking about here.
Back in December, this happened:
#shopify Christmas party was a blast. As evidence, I am typing this on my new iPad 2
— David Underwood (@davefp) December 18, 2011
I’ve been wanting to do something ‘cool’ with it since then, but until now I hadn’t found the right project. Then earlier this week I came across Geckoboard, a neat app that allows you to create Panic-like status boards to monitor all sorts of interesting stats.
I decided I wanted to use it to create a living room dashboard that pulls in my calendar events, the current time, the weather, and maybe a todo/shopping list. I would then place my iPad somewhere prominent and have all the info available at a glance.
There’s a term in the software industry called ‘Dogfooding’, or “To eat one’s own Dogfood”. It refers to the practice of using the products you develop. The term was coined in 1988 when:
“Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood”, challenging him to increase internal usage of the company’s product.” – Wikipedia
I’ve been at Shopify for the better part of a year now, so I thought it was about time that I engaged in some dogfooding of my own. The result has just gone live: The Noble Pony
Part of my job is to interact with third-party developers and help them out when they have issues with the Shopify API. This used to be done on our forums and was, in no uncertain terms, terrible.
A little while back I wrote about Localtunnel, a tool I use to test webhooks. Today I’d like to talk about PostCatcher, which is a superb service for examining POST requests easily.
