What’s a bootstrapped startup Bootstrapped startups are a version of the lean startup with a 37-signals-esque twist, i.e a lean bootstrap. The goal of a lean bootstrap is to run in the black as early as possible, preferably from day 1. Boostrappers don’t need or want outside capital for the most part, and they are [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'
How to Sink Your Bootstrapped Startup #1: The Premature “Big Picture” Pivot
January 30th, 2012 · 6 Comments
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Six things I dislike about Scrum
January 26th, 2012 · 9 Comments
Scrum is a poor man’s agile I won’t lie. I’m in a fairly contrarian mood today, and that is likely to influence this post to be harsher than it would be if I’d written it on a day when all was well. But, nonetheless, even on a good day I think I would agree with [...]
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Investment – the ultimate Vanity Metric?
January 18th, 2012 · 2 Comments
The one thing about The Lean Startup by Eric Ries that makes me cringe The Lean Startup is a great book. It’s well written and convincing, and the more I read the more eager I am to put it to the test on TroopTrack, AuthorGate, and my client work. Part of the reason it appeals [...]
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Adding Drag and Drop File Uploads to Rails 3.1 with Filedrop and Paperclip
January 10th, 2012 · 2 Comments
One of the most common requests I get from TroopTrack users is to let them add photos more easily. For the upcoming 3.0 release I decided to give it a go, and it turned out to be pretty simple. Here’s a quick video of the end result: How I Did It I based my approach [...]
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How to create a token input field where the user can also add new items
December 26th, 2011 · 4 Comments
I have a form where a user can provide a list of brands they like. We’d like to avoid duplicates as much as possible, but we also want to let the user add brands to the list on the fly. Brands is really just a type of favorite, and the relationships are set up like [...]
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Full-text search with MySQL, Rails 3, and Sphinx – a Dive Journal
December 18th, 2011 · No Comments
I need to add full text search to an item class. The fields I need to search are :title and :description. After a bit of digging, I decided I would give sphinx a try, using the thinking-sphinx gem. I’m going with thinking-sphinx because it came up first on Ruby Toolbox. When I’m diving on something [...]
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Avoid Presumptive Tests
December 17th, 2011 · 2 Comments
Test Style #1 @custom_item.image.should == @custom_item.custom_photo_url @custom_item.images.should == [@custom_item.custom_photo_url] @custom_item.buy_now_url.should == @custom_item.custom_url @custom_item.description.should == @custom_item.custom_description @custom_item.title.should == @custom_item.custom_title @custom_item.real_price.should == @custom_item.custom_price * 100 @custom_item.price.should == “$#{@custom_item.custom_price.to_s}” Test Style #2 @custom_item.image.should == “http://www.techdarkside.com/davesmall.jpg” @custom_item.images.should == ["http://www.techdarkside.com/davesmall.jpg"] @custom_item.buy_now_url.should == “http://techdarkside.com” @custom_item.description.should == “Nutritious and delicious” @custom_item.title.should == “Toe Jam Juicer” @custom_item.real_price.should == 4900 @custom_item.price.should == “$49.00″ Which [...]
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A lazy man’s .bashrc file
December 15th, 2011 · No Comments
If you’re reading this, you are either as lazy as I am or perhaps aspiring to be as lazy as me. Here are some aliases I find very useful. There’s nothing technically amazing in here, but I resent keystrokes. Especially the ones I end up typing over and over and over and over. #heroku stuff [...]
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Multi-dimensional filtering with jquery
December 14th, 2011 · No Comments
See it in action New Filter from David Christiansen on Vimeo. How it works
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Puzzling About Conversion Rates
December 1st, 2011 · No Comments
From Anecdotal to Evidential I’ve been telling myself a story about TroopTrack for the past year or so – that the conversion rate is getting better. I wasn’t really sure that was the case, but that’s how it seemed based on my general sense of signups and conversions to paying customers. I don’t like telling [...]
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