Information Technology Dark Side

Struggles of a Self-Taught Coder

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Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'

Re-imagining TroopTrack in a Use-Case-Centric Architecture

May 16th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Please read this first if you are a TroopTrack user My blog is read, not only by coders like me, but also by a pretty decent number of TroopTrack users. I just put them through a fairly horrible major release, after which I swore I would never do an X.0 release again, so I need [...]

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Dear Uncle Bob: Please, please show me the code

May 15th, 2012 · 4 Comments

Focusing on the Use Case Appeals to Me I really liked your recent post about use-case-centric architectures. It’s not the first time I’ve witnessed you rant about your frustration with database-centric architectures, but for lots of reasons this time it resonated with me more than in the past. In my view, this was the best [...]

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Kick Sprint Reviews to the Curb

May 11th, 2012 · No Comments

User Stories Suck for the Last Mile Yeah, that’s right. I said it. User stories suck for the last mile. What’s the last mile you say? It’s a term borrowed from my telco days, when Sprint had a U-verse-like offering that was way ahead of its time and you could only get in Kansas City. [...]

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Predicting who will convert from a trial customer to a paying one

April 19th, 2012 · No Comments

Like a lot of Software-as-a-Service products, TroopTrack gives potential users a chance to try it out for free for thirty days. After 30 days, if the customer likes, they buy a subscription. TroopTrack conversion rates vary from month to month, but at a minimum, 10% of my trial customers convert to paying customers. I’ve been [...]

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Notes on Deploying Rails

April 12th, 2012 · No Comments

I’m going to update this post as I come up with new stuff – I just want a place to keep common things I need to remember the details for. Configure garbage collection settings for ruby Starting with Ruby 1.9.3 you can configure the GC for rails in environment variables. Ruby GC defaults are way [...]

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How To Sink Your Lean Bootstrap #4: The X.0 Release

April 2nd, 2012 · 1 Comment

Just to Recap… Bootstraps 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 always conscious [...]

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Cool People I Want to Meet Someday

February 21st, 2012 · 2 Comments

Who doesn’t have a list like this? Here’s mine, in no particular order: Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto – the inventor of Ruby, a language that revived my love of programming and turned my career back into a passion. My interest in meeting Matz is amplified by our common connections to the LDS church in Japan and [...]

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How to sink your lean bootstrap #3: An unsupportive life ecosystem

February 7th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Just to Recap… Bootstraps 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 always conscious [...]

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How to sink your lean bootstrap #2: Chasing Dante’s Banner

February 6th, 2012 · 1 Comment

Just to Recap… 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 always [...]

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How to Sink Your Bootstrapped Startup #1: The Premature “Big Picture” Pivot

January 30th, 2012 · 10 Comments

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 [...]

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Tags: Uncategorized