Disqus - Latest Comments for laktek

Re: Moving from Wordpress to Hugo

laktek — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 06:42:15 -0000

Nice setup! How much it costs for your droplet?

For anyone else intrigued by such a system, but doesn't have time to spend on setup and maintenance - check Pragma (https://pragma.build). It's currently in private beta and will offer both CDN and SSL support out of the box.

Re: As Long As We Have 20-30 SaaS Decacorns by 2021 … All Is Good

laktek — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 11:43:08 -0000

I believe in the next 4-5 years, almost every SaaS unicorns will be B2B. This will be fueled by the cloud native infrastructure the world is moving. Here's a more elaborate post on it http://www.laktek.com/2017/...

Re: How We Developed the Hiveage iOS App

laktek — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 06:17:20 -0000

Nice post! Do you use WKWebView for rendering views or layouts were done using storyboards?

Re: Problems with Youth Entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka

laktek — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 07:37:23 -0000

Do you think MAS and Brandix would have been possible without BOI? Also, companies of such scale depend heavily on government subsidises. AFAIK, both companies branched out some of their processes to India after receiving land & other infrastructure benefits (correct me if I'm wrong).

Also, I'm too young to remember exact folding of events in history, but isn't the ground work and mentality change done by people like Kumar Dewapura helped to build companies like MAS and Brandix?

Government don't have to directly fund entrepreneurs. But it still need to work on the frameworks to bring external investments to the country (similar to what happened in 80-90s). Take a look at programs like MaGIC (http://impact.mymagic.my/ ), which came under lot of criticisms and skepticism when it was first launched. But today I'm little envious of what they have achieved in terms of creating their own eco-system and gaining attention of the rest of the world.

I remember our O/L Social Studies teacher used to describe us as "නාකි සුද්දියන්ට ජංගි මහන රටක්". Is that the mentality we want to keep passing on to our future generations?

Re: Problems with Youth Entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka

laktek — Fri, 24 Jul 2015 06:39:31 -0000

Sorry, couldn't resist jumping on this as I went through this phase ("still going through" is actually more correct)

From what I've experienced external pressures got very little to do with your decision on what & where to work. It's mostly your own gut coming into play. Are you proud of your work? Do you honestly feel you're making an impact to other peoples lives? Is your work aligns with your fundamental beliefs? Is it the best way to make use of your talents?

If you can tick those boxes, you care very little about what your parents or significant others has to tell about your work. Reason why most people walk away is they cannot give honest answers to themselves.

Re: SaaS for Sri Lankan Software Entrepreneurs

laktek — Sat, 06 Jun 2015 21:03:14 -0000

IMO, more than the financial difficulties and technical capability following are the root causes that prevent Sri Lankan youth from taking the entrepreneurial journey :

1) Low self-esteem

2) Lack of exposure to the world

3) English (you can wrap it nicely in the term "communication skills", but we all know it's just fucking english)

These are kind of intervened, so pumping on one can boost others as well. That's something I expect from people like you guys.

Create a tribe for kids to be inspired and gather around. 10 years ago, I was lucky that there were LKLUG and Kottu.org, which shaped up my mindset. I wonder what are the similar alternatives to kids today?

Re: Starting it over again

laktek — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:26:06 -0000

Woah! Seems you've been on a roller-coaster ride. One bit of advice, be open to remote working. I'm sure that will help you to attract more talent.

Re: The Perfect DIY Yoghurt at Home Recipe

laktek — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 08:40:14 -0000

This is awesome! How did you make the treacle?

Re: Introducing jQuery Smart AutoComplete...

laktek — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 08:51:17 -0000

Not sure why it didn't work. Demo also uses the same version in GitHub.

Was there any error logged in the console?

Re: So You Want a Better Blogging Tool? | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 23:06:39 -0000

You can publish the blog as any other Punch site, using the publish command - https://github.com/laktek/p...

Re: Rapidly Prototyping Web Applications with Punch

laktek — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 22:01:05 -0000

It's possible to replace the default file-system based cache handler to a simple in-memory cache handler, which will cause to refresh on each reload.

I'll update the docs with an example.

Re: Creating asynchronous web services with Goliath

laktek — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:44:46 -0000

I think you're better off using a message queue like resque (or zeromq) along with a webhook based implementation for this.

Re: The Next Generation is Here! | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:49:49 -0000

Malli, Nice to see you here :)

Re: End of a Chapter | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 05:30:19 -0000

Thanks Jervis.

It's just a minor slump in the cricket team. I'm sure you got your money's worth the last time they traveled there :)

Re: End of a Chapter | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 08:21:17 -0000

Thanks Yasith!

Re: End of a Chapter | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 08:20:58 -0000

Thanks Akila :)

Re: End of a Chapter | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 08:20:40 -0000

Thank you Sanjiva!

Yep, Vesess was a dream company one could imagine to work :)

Re: End of a Chapter | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 14:29:32 -0000

Thanks for the wishes mate :)

Re: JSCamp Asia | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 07:30:03 -0000

Thanks. Slideshare doesn't support HTML slides (maybe someone should build a site to share HTML slides ;)).

Re: JSCamp Asia | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 05:41:53 -0000

Great! Tweet me when the CFP is up?

Re: JSCamp Asia | LakTEK (Lakshan Perera)

laktek — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 05:08:37 -0000

Cool! Love to join them next time...

Re: Introducing jQuery Smart AutoComplete...

laktek — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 14:51:39 -0000

To search by the name, you need to create a custom filter function. Check the section "
Define your own Filtering Algorithm" in the post.

Re: Going Big This Thanksgiving

laktek — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:21:51 -0000

It's enabled for the demo account. You just need to add credentials of a valid sandbox account from the add-on settings screen.

Re: Embrace the Static Web with Punch

laktek — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 06:04:07 -0000

I have used plenty of Open Source software and only times I had to jump into their IRC channels were when I had hit with some obscure bug while trying to run on the bleeding edge or when I wanted to suggest some advanced use case.

If you expect your users to seek help via IRC for the basics steps of installing and getting started, there are indeed some serious flaws in the workflow of your software. You're wasting the quality time of you and the user if you expect to provide such tips via IRC. I'd suggest you should rather invest that time to improve your software.

Thanks again for commenting here and do let me know if you improve on the suggestions I made.

Re: Embrace the Static Web with Punch

laktek — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:52:31 -0000

Hi Benjamin,

As you suggested, I took some time today to actually try out DocPad. I installed version 6.11.1 and proceeded to peruse the Beginners Guide -http://bevry.me/learn/docpa....

Here are the notes I collected during my trial. I have also added comparisons to Punch on similar processes.

* Beginner's Guide doesn't mention how to setup a new site. It just says "Create a default.html.eco file in the src/layouts directory, and paste in this small code:".

I only discovered about `docpad run` while watching [this presentation](https://vimeo.com/53755097)

Also running `docpad run` for the first time installs boatload of plugins, without giving any clue of their purpose.

On the other hand, "punch setup mysite" is fairly straight forward, which creates a simple directory structure (templates, contents and config.json) and provides clear steps user need to follow to get up and running immediately.

* Eco templating seems to offer lot of flexibility and functions. But I didn't find it beginner friendly at all. It actually involves a steep learning curve for new users. For example, here are some stuff that ran through my mind when looking at the very first eco code in the guide.

- What does `@` before a keyword means? Does it symbolize a variable or then why it's added before `getBlock`.

- What's the difference between `<%= %>` and `<%- %>`. I guess it's for HTML escaping, but isn't `@content` also output HTML?

- What properties and attributes are available in the `@document` object.

- "All blocks support .add(['something','something']) where something can be html or a url to the asset - while it is encouraged to use blocks, you don't have to (but if you don't you'll wonder why some plugins don't work)."

The above sentence was totally confusing. What does `.add` do? What are those values in the array? Attributes? appends/prepends? options to be passed to plugins? If I don't have to use blocks why did you show all these to me anyway?

It's true users will get to find answers to this questions later in the documentation. But many users will get easily distracted or feel this is too overwhelming at the start itself.

Compare that with the example layout in Punch. It's much easier to grasp what's happening there for a new user. She would see 3 types of special tags (`{{title}}`, `{{{content}}}`, `{{> header }} ), apart from the regular HTML. The hands-on tutorial explains the purposes of these tags clearly at this point.

By using a logic-less templating system like Mustache as the default, Punch makes the environment much more intuitive for a user who is just getting the start.

* DocPad has a separate `src/files` directory to store static assets. In Punch all your layouts, static and pre-compiled (LESS, CoffeeScript) assets are stored in a single directory called `templates`. You can organize the files in any structure you want inside this directory. The structure would be preserved and reflected in the same way in the `output` directory.

This way it is really easy for users to begin with an existing skeleton like HTML5 boilerplate by just copying it to `templates` directory. Also, it avoids lot of confusions when it comes to referencing and importing files (for example, loading a static CSS file in a LESS file).

Think of a scenario, where you plan do a redesign to your site after some time. For a site built with Punch, it's easy as just replacing the `templates` directory with the new one. Also, you can switch back and forth between two themes easily by keeping two template directories. However, in DocPad you must replace both `layouts` and `files` directories during a redesign and often users will prefer to leave the older versions for reference, creating unnecessary bloat.

* Similar to Jekyll, Docpad also defines content as a mix of HTML/markdown block and some metadata (in YAML and un-standardized format called CSON?). Punch defines its entire content model in JSON, giving the user to full flexibility to use any data source (such as Web APIs, document stores) provide the content. Also, they can structure the content model for a page in any way they want.

In Punch you insert multiple blocks of parsable content (ie. Markdown) in anywhere you like within a page layout. Whereas in DocPad's you have to place all your page content goes in one single block of `@content`, which forces users to write HTML inside their content to get the desired layouts.

Basically, compared to Punch, DocPad doesn't offer much separation of content from the layout.

* I'm not sure how I can define site-wide data in DocPad, as we do with `contents/shared.json` in Punch).

* It was not clear for me, where I should place pre-compiled assets such as LESS or CoffeeScript in Docpad. Are they belong in `layouts` or in `documents`?

* I did not see a way to do Asset Bundling in Docpad.

* Also, It would be cool if DocPad had Punch like publishing process to easily publish a site to a S3 bucket or custom server with SFTP.

* What is the recommended way to add custom helpers to a site in DocPad? I thought `@getBlock` provides a way for this, but documentation didn't provide much guide on writing custom helpers.

I also created a ticket explaining some of the other trivial issues I experienced while going through the beginner's guide - http://github.com/bevry/doc...

Hope this feedback helps and perhaps convince you to give a another try on Punch in a more objective manner.