Disqus - Latest Comments for Croaky

Re: How Retargeting Gets Our SaaS $650/mo Customers for $6

Croaky — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:58:18 -0000

Haha, sorry. I had AdBlock on. :/ They look good. Thanks for sharing and congrats on the results so far.

Re: How Retargeting Gets Our SaaS $650/mo Customers for $6

Croaky — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 14:54:15 -0000

Can you show an example of the ad creative?

Re: #75 - Bash Scripting Pt. 1

Croaky — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 01:26:17 -0000

Good screencast! Regarding variable naming style, we go with:

"Use snake_case for variable names and ALLCAPS for environment variables."

https://github.com/thoughtb...

Re: Lessons Learned: The First Two Years of Running a Software Consultancy

Croaky — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 20:33:20 -0000

Great article, Brian. Really gutsy and valuable to share all the negative stuff. The jewelry heist story is amazing.

Good call on bringing in Gesmer and that's awesome news that there's a Boston Postgres group now that you're hosting.

I was going through a similar progression at the same time as you and learned the same lesson about the office manager. I should have hired Carlo 3-6 months sooner than I did. Makes a huge difference. Looking back, did Mariel stick out to you based on her application (pre-interview)? I had 300+ applications for our position (also due to Craigslist) and only interviewed 10 folks. I have absolutely no regrets about our decision and would recommend a similarly small list of folks to interview for anyone else who receives a ton of applications.

How did you try to assign time for the products? Do you schedule Fridays for open source and products like thoughtbot? Or use downtime between client projects on it?

Congrats on a great year.

Re: Multiple environments on Heroku

Croaky — Sun, 12 May 2013 17:55:56 -0000

Heroku

Re: Online presentation with thoughtbot and Heroku

Croaky — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:59:01 -0000

Your question got me wondering about whether this scales linearly. I need to do more research but I just ran a 5,000 current user load test with blitz.io against 60 dynos. It topped out at 104,000rpm.

Re: Online presentation with thoughtbot and Heroku

Croaky — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:43:15 -0000

I meant each dyno has been able to handle 1,000 requests per minute under the tests I've done (two dynos: 2,000 rpm, three dynos 3,000 rpm, etc.). Will edit the article to make it more clear by saying "Each dyno handling ~1,000 requests per minute."

Re: Ruby Science Redesigned

Croaky — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 13:20:03 -0000

Which typeface is it? Any interesting technical details of how this was accomplished via Pandoc?

Re: How and why to Splunk with Heroku

Croaky — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 01:01:52 -0000

Sorry to hear it. Any luck since this weekend?

I had good luck dropping the protocol when running the following:

heroku drains:add logs4.splunkstorm.com:YOURSPLUNKPORT

Did you find you needed it?

Re: Our tools of the trade

Croaky — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:46:47 -0000

We recommend Heroku. They create a Heroku account and add us as collaborators. Sometimes they share their credentials with us via a Google Spreadsheet.

Re: Our tools of the trade

Croaky — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:46:00 -0000

Might be interesting to set up Stripe for Freshbooks:

https://support.stripe.com/...

Re: Sort lines alphabetically in vim

Croaky — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:03:39 -0000

Yeah, CSS declaration groups are another great use case for this.

Re: Sort lines alphabetically in vim

Croaky — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:02:11 -0000

Haha, great catch. Fixed.

Re: Sort lines alphabetically in vim

Croaky — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:45:09 -0000

Thanks for the thoughts. The Gemfile is an example. The aim of the post was to expose people to the :sort feature of vim, which we learned last night at the SF Vim Enthusiasts Meetup.

Re: Better Support with Test Harnesses

Croaky — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 02:07:32 -0000

@Josh Clayton The Selenium wiki calls this the "Page Object Pattern" http://code.google.com/p/se...

Re: Improving Rails boot time with Zeus

Croaky — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 22:21:56 -0000

Older version of Zeus generated the /rails. Updated the post to use the newer /custom_plan.

Re: Improving Rails boot time with Zeus

Croaky — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 22:20:05 -0000

I'm having a hard time picturing it. Could you share some code?

Re: Improving Rails boot time with Zeus

Croaky — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 21:13:32 -0000

Yup, fixed.

Re: Foreman as process manager, Pow as DNS server

Croaky — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:26:17 -0000

Good call. Updated title.

Re: Foreman as process manager, Pow as DNS server

Croaky — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:08:25 -0000

@qrush I want to use the Procfile convention to define my process types and use Thin like production for development/production parity. Foreman's a nice solution to that and has the added benefit of running background jobs and other processes besides the web process.

Meanwhile, Pow's awesome at the DNS part. The two `echo`'s are a bit more work than a symlink but I'm okay with that for now. That seems to be the current solution offered by Pow. The pull request linked at the end seems to indicate there might be some improvements coming in Pow. If that lets me go back to the symlink or has some kind of automatic port-picker, that'd be nice as a next step improvement to this setup.

Re: Twiddle Wakka

Croaky — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:14:09 -0000

In the Rubygems User Guide, they call it the "pessimistic operator":

http://docs.rubygems.org/re...

Re: Twiddle Wakka

Croaky — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:12:56 -0000

I learned the name “twiddle wakka” at Jeremy Hinegardner’s Rubyconf 2010 talk, Anthropology of Ruby.

http://www.slideshare.net/c...

Re: Let’s stop telling programming newbies to learn Vim (or Emacs)

Croaky — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 02:18:50 -0000

I think it depends on how much frequent contact the newcomer is expected to have with an experienced developer and/or how much time the teacher is expecting to dedicate to the student. Vim is something I think is best taught in person over the course of days, not hours.

In http://apprentice.io, most of our students learn vim once they arrive. They have likely come from a few months of Sublime Text or TextMate usage, Michael Hartl's "Rails Tutorial" under their belt, and Google skills that include "[something] StackOverflow" and "[something] Railscast" and "[something] Github."

After a day or two of pairing, they have basic vim commands down, can enter and exit normal/insert/visual mode and get things done slowly. After a week or two, they're just as productive as the ceiling they would have reached in Sublime Text or TextMate. After a month, they have built muscle memory in a lifelong skill that will outlast Rails and its family of tools we use today.

That is a good fit for our goals. When the teacher knows they're spending enough time in person with someone that they will be able to pick up best-in-class practices and tools (pretty much the list you mentioned plus Postgres), I'd heartily recommend using vim, and thereby learning it in the process.

Re: Keep your Downloads Directory So Fresh and So Clean Clean

Croaky — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:07:42 -0000

Apple recommends using launchd like the approach here instead of using cron. They don't give their reason.

"Although it is still supported, cron is not a recommended solution. It has been deprecated in favor of launchd."

http://developer.apple.com/...

Re: Lessons Learned: The First Hire

Croaky — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 19:46:52 -0000

"Because we're doing client work and sometimes deadlines have to be met I've told everyone that there will be a day when they get Lumberged. I'm going to be the guy that will have to ask people to work over a weekend, I don't like it and I would be pissed if I was on the receiving end of that."

This can definitely be avoided by setting expectations correctly with clients. We tell our clients before we start working for them that we work Monday-Thursday for clients and never weekends.

On my first or second project for thoughtbot, we had a client ask us to work the weekend. We repeated our policy to them, worked the weekend to make the deadline, and fired them on Monday. I don't think we've been forced to work a weekend on another project I've seen in the 5 years since.

Employees respect an employer with hard-and-fast principles that improve their life. Clients that you want to work for also respect that you have principles and we've found that many also appreciate this particular "sustainable pace" principle, especially when they see it in action.