February 2012
2 posts
1 tag
My Journey on the StartupBus
As you may know, I rode the NYC StartupBus last year with a kickass crew of hackers, designers, and hustlers. The Red Bull was plentiful, the sleep was not. I can say without a doubt that the StartupBus had a bigger impact on me than any single tech-related event.
My Story
Things had been going pretty slow at BeanSprout and I have a regular impulse to do ridiculous things that involve...
Most Useful Things To Learn in Python for...
If you’re just getting started in Python there are some things you should learn that will get you productive right away. In my experience with learning from no prior technical experience, I’ve found that 90% of what you’re doing is manipulating data structures to do what you want. Here’s the things I would recommend you learn right away so you can do some damage.
List...
January 2012
10 posts
Appification of Web Design
My awesome web designer friend made a really interesting comment the other day when we were discussing a project. He said that there’s this “appification” of web design that’s going on right now. What he meant is that more and more websites are pushing this trend looking more like an app you might find on the iPhone or Android. Maybe not in the exact UI sense, but in the...
1 tag
How to overwrite the save of a Django form like a...
Use the “super” function to use the save method built into the form plus the extra things you need. Example:
class DebateMediaForm(forms.ModelForm):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
super(DebateMediaForm, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
self.fields['image'].required = True
self.fields['source'].label = "Image Source"
class Meta:
...
5 tags
A/B Split Testing with Django
Dear internet startups, there’s no excuse not to A/B test your shit. You will learn horrible things about yourself. For example, that “really cool feature that you added that is so awesome people are going to be glued to my app,” doesn’t actually do anything to improve your core metrics. In fact they may be hurting them. Since it’s hard to test apples to apples you...
1 tag
Early thoughts on Clojure after one weekend
I started learning Clojure this weekend, a Lisp language that’s built for concurrency. It makes you approach solving problems in a functional way. This is all new to me coming from Python; an object oriented programming. However, since I don’t have any formal background in CS all of this stuff is new to me anyway :), but I’ve gotten used to doing things the Python way.
To sum it...
3 tags
Infinite Scroll with Django
Twitter style infinite scroll using Django as your backend is actually pretty simple. I did it for the TimeoutDebate archive page. You can break it down into these simple steps:
Scrolling past a certain point triggers a jquery ajax event
Django responds with a json object
Insert the new data into the document, reload the scroll handler
That’s really not much different than any other ajax...
My Mom just Debugged My Web App
I’m so impressed and embarrassed that my mom debugs my code…
Hi,
Remember that when I tried to update my goal progress it didn’t work on Firefox? To learn Phthon I have converted one of my php script to Python script and found out that it works on other browsers but not on Firefox. I googled - apparently Firefox needs the content type for Python script to execute...
4 tags
This is why I love Flask
from flask import Flask
from flask import render_template, url_for
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def homepage():
return render_template('index.html')
if __name__ == '__main__':
app.run(debug=True)
url_for('static', filename='/stylesheets/compass_foundation.css')
Cool! This is a single page app using Flask. Oh and you can run a test server with “python...
A Simple Recipe for Managing Releases with...
I’ve been using mercurial to manage releases based on this article. After using this method for almost a year, I wanted to share the advantages and disadvantages.
The greatest appeal is that it is super simple. Two branches are all that is required, one called “stable” and the other “default.” The stable branch represents stable code that is ready for release. Use...
5 tags
Using PJAX to Speed Up a Django Web Application
Last week I started working on a new side project with my business partner @artiepatel called TimeoutDebate, an interactive sports blog and game like ESPN’s PTI (note, it’s not fully useable on iOS browsers yet). I’ve checked out PJAX and thought it would fit perfectly for this kind of content based website. Basically, it makes everything appear really snappy because all of the...
8 tags
Learning to Code - Choosing a Language
Based on all the feedback I’ve been getting from interviewing all the Developer Mentor Program, the first problem that comes up when someone decides they want to learn to code is often “Where do I begin?” This should help all the #learntocode2012 people narrow down what you want to learn.
Backend vs Frontend
Web programming is divided up into two sides (you may have heard these...
December 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Learning to Code - I did it this year. Your turn.
Next week marks the one year anniversary since I started to learn to code with no previous experience (I have a bullshit degree in marketing). I still worked full time on my startup while learning at night and on weekends. In 3 months I was contributing code to my startup, in 5 months I was writing webapps from the bottom up. Since then I’ve become the tech co-founder for my startup...
2 tags
Reset CSS in a Specific Element
I’m using a charting library that was getting mangled by my global css (foundation css and jqplot). The charting library’s css had certain elements that weren’t styled, but the global css I wrote does. Rather than go into the charting libraries css and make the modification to override each specific css element that was causing it to choke I decided I wanted to reset the css just...
4 tags
Django Form Validation and Ajax
Ready to ajaxify your django forms? Doing so with simple forms can be a breeze, just submit the form, check for is_ajax(), return an HttpResponse. Where it all falls apart is when you have multiple fields and multiple validation type of errors. You could write all the logic yourself on the front end javascript or you could get it for free with django forms. The point of this post is to show you...
3 tags
Find of the week: Foundation CSS
Foundation is an awesome responsive css framework from Zurb. I usually use 960gs, but after playing with Foundation for 5 minutes I decided to use it for my current project.
Here’s an example of it: http://nudgelystaging-qu6we2kn.dotcloud.com/
Why is it cool?
It will automatically resize your layout based on the screen size or device. For example, once the browser width reaches a certain...
November 2011
2 posts
Javascript page reload with cross browser...
This one stumped me for awhile because everyone seems to have their preferred method of doing page reloads using only javascript. After trying several, I was having compatibility issues with firefox 3.5 on windows. Javascript is pain in the ass sometimes (most of the time) when you have to worry about all the major browsers.
Here’s the best solution I could find and, after testing, it...
Find of the week: Awesome jquery tooltip library... →
I was looking for a simple way to make attractive tooltips to help users understand the features available in GoalSay. qTip was super easy to implement into the web app. If you’re already using jquery, qTip is an easy choice. Check out the demos!