Information Technology Dark Side

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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See it in action New Filter from David Christiansen on Vimeo. How it works

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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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