David Heinemeier Hansson is quite famous for what he’s accomplished with Ruby on Rails. But I also admire his business sense. Ever since his presentation at Startup School I’ve had a lot of respect for his thoughts on building software as a business. As I’m sitting here at a Starbucks, slogging away on developing our [...]
nginx Config for Caching Rails Assets
Add the following to your nginx.conf file in order to cache only the assets in your different Rails asset folders. location ~* ^/(images|javascripts|stylesheets)/.+\.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ { expires 1y; } Catching only the asset folder path makes it possible to accidentally cache other assets you might not expect. Caching for just the file ending could be a problem if you’re [...]
Bulk convert ERB files to HAML
Run this in your Rails app/views directory to recursively convert every file $ find . -name ‘*erb’ | xargs ruby -e ‘ARGV.each { |i| puts “html2haml -r #{i} #{i.sub(/erb$/,”haml”)}”}’ | bash Remove the “| bash” at the end to preview what the command will excecute.
Learning More about the Restaurant Industry
For our next project, we’ve been looking into developing software to help food caterers streamline their businesses. The first order of business, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, has been to go out and interview as many in the industry as possible. Today I was talking to Jack Lin, a chef of a sushi restaurant [...]
Customer Interview Process – A Mixture of Experiences
Steve and I have been combining what we’ve learned from a bunch of different sources to guide us during this phase where we’re discovering what problems our target demographic have, and what solutions we can build for them. The core of our strategy follows what we’ve learned from Rob Walling’s book “Start Small, Stay Small”. [...]
Project Update
These past two months I’ve written very little code. It’s probably the biggest code-drought I’ve had in over ten years. What I’ve learned in the past is that jumping straight into coding isn’t the right way to go. I’d have the mentality of “I can just quickly code this up, no use in researching it [...]
Tracking Google Analytics Goals with a Contact Form 7
In our latest project we wanted to hookup our WordPress Contact Form 7 to Google Analytics so that we could track goal completions. Since we were submitting our form through Ajax, there was no actual “goal page” that we could attach Google analytics to. The trick is to track a non-existent page and manually tell Google when [...]
Sending Emails to Mechanical Turk workers with the Ruby API
So lately we’ve been experimenting with using Mechanical Turk workers to build out some of our content. It’s been working out well so far. But every now and then we’d like to send some feedback to our workers to let them know how to do a better job. Amazon (probably purposefully) makes it difficult to [...]
So you’re using S3 to serve your assets, eh? You should rethink that.
One of the first optimizations I did when FriendCameo first started taking off was moving our static assets into S3. That took a huge load off our application servers at the time and really helped us scale. It was a no-brainer – there were even Rails plugins that made uploading into S3 a piece of [...]
Hello, Again, World
So I’ve been meaning to get into blogging for a while now, I’ve had a few blog topics I’ve sketched out that I’m interested in writting about. But I never really got around to it. That is until I came across the podcast TechZing. For those who don’t know, TechZing is a podcast run by [...]
