Jason Wong

Rounding out

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:12:59 -0700

I’ve been rounding out my developer skills, by learning some front end design. I’ll be posting more about that in the future, but here’s a piece from the New Yorker on Google’s design evolution.

Close.io API & Ruby

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:34:05 -0700

Last week, I signed up for close.io for my CRM. Their backend & examples are written in Python, so I wrote a web2lead app hooking in their API using Sinatra, HTTParty, and Slim.

I bashed my head in for a day, until I realized I needed a trailing slash on Lead.post(‘/api/v1/lead/ - ugh.

Hopefully, some of you can use this. Close.io has been a good service, and their customer service is very responsive. Waiting for Contactually to hook into Close.io!

Solving the post-sick nightly persistent cough

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:17:14 -0700

1. 12 Hour Mucinex
2. Down with a glass of hot tea
3. Heaping spoonful of loquat syrup (it’s mostly honey anyways). Do not dilute with water.
4. Sleep on your side (I usually sleep on my back, but that seems to make it marginally worse).

This seems to do the trick for me, as the loquat gives me about 20-40 minutes to fall asleep without the throat irritation.

Debugging SCSS/SASS in Chrome

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:01:23 -0700

Debugging SASS/SCSS in Chrome takes a few extra steps. This tutorial took me 95% of the way, but I needed to enable the devtools experiments, first. FireSass for firebug/Firefox works fine, but if you like to do your css debugging in Chrome, here’s how you do it.

1. “Enable Developer Tools Experiments” in

chrome://flags/

2. Follow the instructions below. You should be golden.

How to make Chrome understand the SASS/SCSS in your rails app

Migrating from Zurb Foundation / Twitter Bootstrap to Bourbon & Neat

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:01:00 -0700

Moving the Rails custom forms from Foundation 3 to 4 is a PITA, so in frustation, I’m taking my next project closer to the metal.

I’m utilising Bourbon.io, a scss library and Neat, a grid framework for Bourbon. It’s less code (for faster downloads), allows semantic naming, and fits well within SMACSS principles. This improves the end-user experience, the developer (me) experience, and I get to learn an easy to use framework I’ve been itching to try. That’s 3 wins. I’ll take it!

If you’re coming from Bootstrap, you make grids declaring CSS column classes in HTML:

https://gist.github.com/jason/5207085

Similarly for Foundation:

https://gist.github.com/jason/5207092

With Neat, you to apply the grid spacing to the CSS itself. It’s semantically cleaner, because you’re naming the layout piece - a span4 only refers to a column size. An article or a sidebar gives developers context to work with.

https://gist.github.com/jason/5207111

In retrospect, I should have called l-row l-header. l-row is an equivalent to the Foundation row class, and I don’t mind using an @include across my CSS classes.

If you’ve been using Foundation or Bootstrap, and want to get a better idea of what’s really going on underneath, while saving time through plenty of great mixins and shortcuts, I’d highly recommend Bourbon & Neat. The combo saves a ton of time vs rolling your own CSS from scratch, and doesn’t go overboard on overhead. After a few projects with Bourbon & Neat, you might occasionally go back to BS or Foundation for rapid prototyping, but I’m guessing you won’t.

Top 5 Ramen Joints in the US

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:15:32 -0700

So who wants to go to Sacramento with me?

Top 5 Ramen Joints in the US

The Monday After

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:06:00 -0700

AppAcademy got me addicted to learning technologies, and refining my new skills. This weekend, completed the wonderful RegexOne, which introduced me to the fundamentals of Regex - a concept I’d never understood until this weekend. I also covered CodeSchool’s RSpec, Rails Best Practice classes for review.

I’ve also decided that I need to learn at least one of the MVC Javascript front end frameworks. I’m skipping Backbone, for now, as I’ve heard you eventually need/want the features of the larger frameworks, and I’m going to wait on Ember, until the documentation improves, and there are nicer step-by-step tutorials.

Angular appears both accessible AND well documented, something everyone starting on a framework needs. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Appacademy, Week 9, Day 1

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 06:39:00 -0800

We began final projects, and what a difference one week of practice makes! Last week, it took 2 days to plan models & associations for a 7 table schema, and today, it took me 1 for a 10 table! I’ll take 2x improvement any day. This week only gets about 4 days for our final projects, so I’ll take it. My final project is WTFJS a mashup of JSFiddle & Stack Overflow.

This time around, I’m putting more time into planning tools, which is already paying off. I drew ER-Diagrams using Sketch a fantastic vector drawing tool, and rails-erd served as a sanity check that I didn’t miss any pluralizations or other possible mistakes in the implementation of said diagrams. I’m also creating stories using PivotalTracker.

It’s the last week of AppAcademy, and I’m starting to get a little emotional. I haven’t spent 8 hours a day learning with the same 16 people since… never. Even elementary school was a group of 30 people. And they’re all great, likable people.

AppAcademy Week 8, Day 5

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 08:23:15 -0800

Demo Day! For 5 days, there have been some impressive demos. What I’m realizing is that a little JavaScript goes a looong way. Yesterday, VoteCounter just took members, and counted votes.

Today, it’s got a user auth through Devise, permissions, but more importantly, it draws a frigging chart in your face as each vote is successfully registered in the application. That’s the feature that got all of the oohs and aahs.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 4

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 08:20:23 -0800

I’m realizing that I’m spending a lot of time staring at code, trying to figure out a best practice way of doing it. While I’m not quite there (I still have a couple lousy names that I need to change), I want to get these patterns to the level where it’s automatic, and when I go back to my code, it’s easy to understand.

AppAcademy Week 8, Day 1

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 08:02:23 -0800

Personal Projects! 5 days of solo development. I’m excited.

I’m developing a VoteCounter, and spent the weekend studying up on my Javascript as well as Rails Best Practices.

I’m hoping to have all of my Models & Associations done by tomorrow.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 5

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:59:03 -0800

We had some nice detailed instruction on creating a rotating carousel for our shopping cart through JavaScript and some CSS trickery. I’m not the first person to think that I’m really enjoying jquery.animate().

I’m sure you’re not the last person to groan reading that.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 3

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:55:05 -0800

Back to Rails & Javascript with a shopping cart application! I’m starting to understand what the node/express/meteor peeps are talking about when they talk about the cost of context switching. I haven’t had enough experience, so I’m mixing casing conventions, semicolons, etc, when I move between Ruby & Javascript. Experience will fix that.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 4

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:50:00 -0800

I’m programming solo today, so it’s moving along much more slowly than usual - but I get to type 2x as much as usual, and the patterns are making their way into my head. What’s great about solo development is that you can’t have a partner as a crutch, so you *have* to learn.

They provided us again with more detailed instruction for implementing Asteroids. I probably made it about 3/5s of the way through the exercise, but my implementation side experience with javascript is far, far better.

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 2

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:45:00 -0800

More work on the gist project. Every now and then, it’s great to work with someone who outmatches you, as you learn better patterns, workflows, insights etc.

The downside is that you slow down the team a bit. Sigh.

Afternoon was spent learning about HTML Canvas and using it with JavaScript, so we’re doing asteroids!

In other JS news, keyword this is mangy dog that doesn’t know who it belongs to. Ah, just google ‘keyword this javascript’, and you’ll notice how much of a problem it poses. It’s really just a few days of practice to get used to it, but ugh, killing me!

AppAcademy, Week 7, Day 1

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 07:37:36 -0800

Ah, ajax & jQuery. Worked on a clone of gist, implementing a ridiculously light Rails back end to supply data for an interactive-ish javascript front end. Ryan Bates implements Ajax utilizing more of the Rails infrastructure, while we are posting to json, and implementing all of the javascript in-page. It’s a little bit like going from simple-form to form_tag (except starker). We get a better understanding of what’s going on underneath the hood, and long term learning, but man, the other way’s so much easier! :-).

Compared to shorter projects, we’ve been provided with more instruction, so the breakdown is much more manageable.

Ruby 2.0pre0 and YOLO

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:01:45 -0800

The wonders of being the first to upgrade means I got to file my first bug! Long story short, the OpenSSL cert needed to be renamed cert.pem in the OpenSSL directory. The solution was patched same day, so how’s that for service?

The next big issue is that debugger and pry-debugger are broken… I’m left with console.log until this is fixed!

Mailboooooooooooxxxxxx!

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:11:42 -0800

After whittling my way down the Mailbox waiting list (from 230k), I finally got my copy. Mailbox supports my Gmail and Google Apps (i5labs) email addresses, so I’m in business. I started the day at over 4,000 emails in my combined inboxes, but combined with Sparrow (for OS X) I brought that down to 198. Once I get some invoicing out of the way, I can bring that down to 50, and I’ll be at IB0 within a week.

I have a few other mail tools that I use to keep myself sane. 1. Sanebox. I can’t live without it, as it keeps my phone from buzzing with spams, notices, etc. 2. Contactually, I started using 2 weeks ago, and it’s been amazing. If you want to keep in touch with people - friends, acquaintances, leads, etc, I can’t stop recommending Contactually. It’s incredible. I’m looking forward to configuring all 3 more deeply.

In the meantime, Mailbox has replaced Sparrow, and I’ll write some follow up notes in the coming weeks.

Michael Galpert has some notes on combining the Sanebox and Mailbox experience with a “shared” folder that he calls Daily Reads.

App Academy, Week 6, Day 5

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 10:49:52 -0800

Ajax! We got a lecture on how to implement it, but I didn’t get quite far enough into my project to save photo coordinates and their tags into a Rails App. I’ll try to get that done this weekend.

App Academy, Week 6, Day 4

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 10:46:00 -0800

More Snake. It’s got a more than a few items to think about - growing the snake when the apple is eaten, collisions, walls, etc. A lot of what we learned in the first few weeks of building minesweeper, chess, etc can be re-applied. Rendering to the web utilizing jquery is a pretty fun exercise.

Also began an exercise to re-implement Facebook’s Photo Tagging feature - just the JS side. Pretty freaking amazing that 6 weeks of training has allowed us to build this much.