Disqus - Latest Comments for leftist

Re: State of the 2017 Rails Stack

Pete Forde — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 22:33:23 -0000

Postgres has support for hstore, json datatypes which are very useful. Postgres also has really good geofencing add-ins for those who search in physical space.

Re: FreshForce Citrus Juicer

Pete Forde — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 11:54:51 -0000

You've got me intrigued, but when I go to Amazon it's clear that there is a lemon juicer, a lime juicer and an orange juicer. It seems as though it's not just a color choice, but that there is actually a plausible case for owning two or even three separate uni-tools.

Is the need for a lemon juicer really so different from a lime juicer that separate devices are required or desired? Seems a bit much, even before considering the investment.

Re: Building Rails API

Pete Forde — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 16:39:11 -0000

Thanks for the post - I didn't realized rails_api was going to be merged.

Thinking through the hybrid solution, could you not mount a rails_api project (pointed at the same databases) as a separate app living off a virtual folder using Rack? Though I suppose you would have to jump through some hoops to use the same model classes.

Re: Lomography LC-A 120 Compact Medium Format Camera

Pete Forde — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 22:06:49 -0000

It is not correct that medium format film "pulls in more light". It has a much larger surface area and the focal length is roughly twice what you'd get on 35mm. However, ISO 100 is the same exposure regardless of what kind of camera you have - even digital.

Re: Toronto Urban Roots Festival: Good for Both Kicking Back and Rocking Out

Pete Forde — Mon, 07 Jul 2014 23:43:17 -0000

I'm happy to report that Scott Spillane's beard is 100% real.

Re: Craftsmanship

Pete Forde — Sat, 01 Feb 2014 01:26:58 -0000

Just reflecting on this post, Sacha. I ended up returning to this in a post last year: http://hackertourism.com/is...

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

Pete Forde — Wed, 25 Dec 2013 02:05:43 -0000

I really enjoyed your follow-up, Brian! And it's always fun to see your name pop up in someone's post. I'm flattered that you remembered my comments from way back when.

Since the first post I exited Unspace, leaving it in the more-than-capable hands of Meghann and the rest of the team. Sadly, there was a fire that wiped out our (awesome) office in August, but the silver lining is that it has apparently brought the team together on a new level — and there's a cool new office that's 100% Pete-free. Point to be made: it makes sense to create a succession plan. I started Unspace in 2004 and by early 2011 I was on to something new, even if I didn't realize it immediately. It took several years for me to find someone awesome enough to take over and do the gradual knowledge transfer. My only regret is that I drew my own departure out over too long a period, which wasn't easy on Meghann and the team. I still had my office set up, and still used my Unspace email. It's hard to let go, but it's what has to happen.

I wrote about my transition here: http://hackertourism.com/gr...

One major change in my thinking has been around billing. I don't intend to ever start another consultancy, but during Unspace I was convinced that hourly billing was the winning strategy. I could have argued convincingly and passionately to this effect.

I was wrong, and it pains me to think how much stress I could have saved if I'd moved to value-based pricing. We see the projects that we build as art, so it should be up to us to decide how long to work on something in order for us to consider it a job well done. I wrote about this here: http://hackertourism.com/va...

However, the main detail from that post is that there's a book called "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" which blew my mind and changed how I do business. It's free to read online, and I cannot recommend it enough. I intended to read maybe 1-2 chapters and ended up not moving from my standing desk until it was done. It'd become dark outside. http://winwithoutpitching.c...

I'm glad that you've doubled-down on EmberJS — it's important to differentiate and I agree that it's the long-run winner. Yehuda, Tom and Carl are brilliant minds and I trust them explicitly.

Your points on hiring (culture fit + 1wk project) and firing (quickly!) are bang on. I also agree that 12-16 is the ideal size for culture. http://philosophically.com/...

I'm not surprised that your product development endeavour failed; this seems to be a common pattern for dev shops. My suggestion is that you actually just stick to being a good dev shop, and treat product development as a distraction to be avoided. If you really must go there, spin up a separate company, embrace customer driven development and make sure that you're solving a real problem: https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Finally, I'm sorry that Wicked Good Ruby lost money. RubyFringe broke even and FutureRuby actually lost similar money to your event... but only if Meghann and my time was donated. :) In reality, it was a blast to do and had massive credibility, hiring and marketing/PR benefits long-term that made it feel worth it. I'm convinced that most people that announce conferences underestimate the work required by a factor of 10-12x. Running a conference is a second full-time job, and it's often thankless.

Anyhow, I'm pleased by your progress. You should be exceptionally proud of the legacy you're building with DockYard. Feel free to drop me a line at hello@peteforde.com if you ever want to set up a Skype call and talk shop.

Re: Dear American Media: Who You Should Talk To About Rob Ford

Pete Forde — Sun, 17 Nov 2013 11:54:27 -0000

Try 2007:

http://contests.eyeweekly.c...

Re: Dear American Media: Who You Should Talk To About Rob Ford

Pete Forde — Sat, 16 Nov 2013 17:15:42 -0000

I appreciate and generally agree with this list, but I kept scrolling down expecting to see Edward Keenan on your list of DOs right alongside Robyn Doolittle. His op-eds on Ford dating back to the beginning of his tenure as a fringe city counsellor are nuanced, educational and fun.

Re: Unhuddled - To Independence — Dan Hough — Independent Software Developer

Pete Forde — Mon, 11 Nov 2013 13:34:08 -0000

Congratulations on achieving escape velocity, Dan!

I'm on a similar mission and after almost two years I'm pretty sure that I'll never return to a 9-5 grind position ever again. I wrote about my changes here: http://hackertourism.com/gr...

The most important advice I have is that the reason you do something dramatically impacts whether you're able to enjoy doing it. I love to code, but coding for clients left me anxious and depressed. Today you cannot hire me to code (or take photographs) because I've drawn a line. These are things I will do only for myself, as a creative outlet.

The key, then, is to find things that you're good at doing that make money but don't burn you out. I like consulting because it's value-based instead of something where I would get paid by the hour.

Re: Apple Won’t Say Why it Banned a Toronto Artist’s Comic Book From the App Store

Pete Forde — Thu, 07 Nov 2013 17:22:29 -0000

If you don't like it, why not let Tim Cook know? tcook at apple.com

Knowing is half the battle.

Re: The City Will Hold Public Consultations on Jets at the Island Airport

Pete Forde — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 22:35:49 -0000

I'm a frequent if not regular Porter flyer. I live at Queen and Spadina so being able to get to an airport that doesn't make me feel like a criminal quickly is a huge win.

That said, a lot of the magic has gone away for me. The prices have skyrocketed compared to before, certainly. Now there's priced seating and they've mostly stopped serving substantial food on the flights. I remember taking my first flight to Ottawa and being blown away both by the quality of service and the fact that they served me a hot roast beef sandwich and a small bottle of red wine on a 50 minute flight that cost under $100.

I have very mixed feelings about the proposed additions. I have noticed that the ferry and terminal are getting busier all of the time, and the staff just aren't as willing to go the extra mile and win you over or help if there's a problem.

From what I understood, standardizing on one type of plane was a solid business move because it allowed them to focus their entire maintenance fleet on repairing one type of vehicle. Now adding a jet to the mix presumably means that the costs will once again be passed on to us.

In the end, I'll still keep taking it because flying out of Pearson is a universally exhausting experience. I wish that I could say I'm still a passionate Porter fan, but these days it's basically nothing more than a notch above average but in a very convenient place.

Re: Lexi Belle & T. Mills

Pete Forde — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 00:26:07 -0000

Excellent shoot! Lexi looks so different with dark hair.

Any leads on the swimsuit she's wearing? That's incredible.

Re: The quiet war in tech

Pete Forde — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:02:43 -0000

An old mentor of mine gave a [typically prescient] TEDx talk that I suspect you'd find topical and relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: BlueTube Update | BlueTube Audio

Pete Forde — Wed, 29 May 2013 20:13:44 -0000

Delays happen, sure. Your most recent estimate said May, and that's cool too.

This update effectively releases you from the burden of even making a new estimation, which is not the best message to send out when you just blew through another promised deliverable date.

Based on your current internal estimates, when should we expect to start seeing shipping details?

Re: Coming soon to a Dropbox for Business near you: Single sign-on (SSO)

Pete Forde — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:52:21 -0000

Does this mean that I can have my personal account and login to one or multiple customer team/business groups at the same time?

Re: Turbolinks and the Prague Café Effect

Pete Forde — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:32:51 -0000

Adopting CoffeeScript by default never bothered me. It's an opinionated default that I could turn off by commenting out one line, and while I like CoffeeScript the end result is largely the same whether you use it or you don't from an application design perspective.

Adopting TurboLinks by default doesn't sit well with me, because it fundamentally changes the way that developers are supposed to conceptualize their applications, and there are gotchas that counter-act the magic performance gains many will expect.

It certainly adds yet another technology people have to be familiar with to use Rails in an out-of-the-box way, and that's a shame.

Re: Bye, MongoDB. Hello, Cloudant!

Pete Forde — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:29:51 -0000

I'm not here to judge. Maybe they have good reasons. Again, I am legitimately interested in their evaluation process.

Re: Bye, MongoDB. Hello, Cloudant!

Pete Forde — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:27:49 -0000

Genuinely interested in why a relational database wasn't a good choice for these concerns.

Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched

Pete Forde — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 16:10:12 -0000

I can appreciate why this would seem like the morning after a rave, but if you stop and consider what really just happened — a whole bunch of other startup founders just drove by slowly on the way to the next post — then you have nothing to feel sad about.

Those 8000+ visitors are presumably not your target demographic, and it's unlikely that you're solving a problem that they have.

I really recommend that you read the 1st CopyHackers book on identifying the motivations of the people most likely to be your paying customers. Many startups fail because they try to shoot for a general market. In reality, you will convert very well if you correctly anticipate the motivations of the top 20% vs trying to be all things to all people.

The reason is that no matter how great your landing page is, you cannot manufacture motivation in your visitors — even a brilliant product will fail if you market it to the wrong people. Everything in your public messaging should reinforce exactly one message:

We solve X problem for Y.

Resist the urge to add more X, and don't be so hard on yourself if you are ignored by Z, because your product is for Y.

Re: Streetcars For Toronto: An Anniversary

Pete Forde — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 19:26:07 -0000

Cool write-up, Steve. I'm glad you folks fought the good fight.

That said, I'm trying to cross-reference what you're saying with this 1965 map showing all of the subway, streetcar and trolley bus routes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

According to this map, a lot more than Rogers and Oakwood were chopped. What of Earlscourt, Coxwell and Parliament? It also suggests that there were streetcars on Spadina significantly after 1948.

I'm pained to see how vast Toronto's streetcar network used to be.

Re: Lessons Learned: The First Six Months of Running a Software Consultancy

Pete Forde — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 03:29:06 -0000

This was a really enjoyable read, Brian! I happen to disagree with large swathes of your conclusions, and my gut tells me that you might revise your views as you get better at doing this. It would be strange if everything fell into place for you in six months, after all. Plus, you haven't even weathered a full calendar year to know when the annual quiet times are... so you're not out of the woods, yet.

OSS is not for attracting customers, it's for recruiting top talent. Most clients don't actually care what tools you use, so long as they feel heard and you don't embarrass them or cost them their job for selecting you. Haml was created in the context of a project that likely had no concept or understanding of the significance of this detail, for example.

I'm sorry to hear that your user group isn't getting you clients. The good news is that you're just doing it wrong, and this is easily fixed without becoming a shameless whore. The reason it's not working is that you're running a user group when you should just ditch the technical agenda and host a social mixer in a friendly pub that is willing to turn off the music so you can talk, preferably in your own area. Encourage everyone to come: developers (client and server) using any language they enjoy, designers, boyfriends, girlfriends, daughters. Let people eat and talk quietly for an hour, and then push the tables out of the way so that you can go into mingle mode for the balance of the evening. If someone wants to address the group for recruitment, I introduce them, they stand on a chair and at the end they have to buy a round of drinks. It's quite effective. The importance of the social mixer cannot be overstated, as most of the hiring, deal-making and team establishing in Toronto happens at Rails Pub Nite. Since there's no agenda, people often talk about everything but development, to great effect. After all, they develop all day, and RPN is an opportunity to form social bonds as a community of interesting people that help each other out and refer business around. So many new friendships and waves of introductions.

We started RPN in 2005 with 20 people, and now we've hosted 70 of them and there's 850 people. We supplement this with 1-2 annual job fairs at Unspace HQ as well as conferences and we try to bring in speakers a few times a year as well. The key difference that should motivate you is that clients come to both of our events, but clients at RPN are there when they aren't recruiting. They are comfortable with the non-technical discussion, they open up, they ask for advice. It's humanizing. It's safe to say that without ever pitching Unspace directly we've grossed several million dollars in booked work as a direct result of sending out an invitation 11 times a year.

I strongly urge you to charge more than $125/hour, however you bill it. If I could go back in time and slap myself over one thing, it's the misguided belief that we had to build up some sort of credibility first. That feeling is a logical fallacy; you will find that your new clients don't question $200 any more than $125. In fact, every time we've increased our billable rate, the quality and calibre of our clientele has increased in a curve. The reason is that there's no practical difference between the two numbers. They are both "a lot of money", and generally the people who justify budgets are not paying out of their own pocket.

I strongly urge you not to work with clients that tap themselves out completely (draining reserve funds) because they won't leave themselves with any budget to promote their site, hire staff, or live while they get their business off the ground. They will then assign 100% of the blame to you.

The flip-side of this is that you should investigate your options so that you can offer your clients financing plans. Think about it: if you have two car dealerships and one offers financing, which one do you think will sell more cars? It means that your $50k minimum project (ditch $30k, those clients are guaranteed to be a pain in the ass) can effectively become a $100k minimum, at no additional risk to you.

The key to closing a successful pitch is that at the last moment you should endeavor to create romantic tension, in the form of "I think this is really cool, hopefully the team goes for it!" as this dramatically changes the power structure. The client realizes that it's not them choosing you, but your team accepting them. This is a favourable place to negotiate from.

I strongly suggest that you never answer RFPs. They are out-moded, thinly veiled spec-work for unsophisticated clients that don't respect your brainstorming time. 90% of companies that issue RFPs have already selected a vendor, but they are satisfying some obligation to solicit other options. At the very least, contact them by phone and ask them if they have a vendor of preference. If they are cagey, don't waste your energy.

You are not going to find a business development person that understands software the way they need to do to speak intimately on behalf of your team. This is because those individuals that are actually qualified want to work for larger companies like ThoughtWorks, where they are justifiably paid at least $150k PA base plus a generous commission (usually 15-20%). If you do the math on that, these people don't make sense for the DockYards or Unspaces of the world, because our relatively lean sizes (8-14 is the sweetest of sweet spots, trust me) are our biggest advantage.

I saved the best until last: I can solve your time management issues right now. It's actually very simple, but you might not like it.

Your days as a "lead developer" are over while you are the principal of a consultancy. What you are doing right now, no matter how you justify it to yourself, is burning the candle at both ends. The problem is that you can't give your projects the attention they deserve, and what your team is relying on you to do is keep the pipeline full months in advance with awesome clients so that they don't have to worry.

That doesn't mean you can't find opportunities to hack on personal projects or occasionally jump in to pinch-hit on something that demands your attention. But the further you go into this, the more clients and resources you bring on, the less realistic it will be for you to code. Trust me, I am eminently qualified to testify on this.

Burnout is not cool.

Finally, I urge you to consider the statements you made about the motivations of a good consultant. I believe that you have to love what you are doing, and no matter how smart you are it's impossible to fake passion if you're not looking forward to the next client. It will wear you down and make you feel gross, unless you enjoy meeting a wide variety of people and convincing them to give you large sums of money to remove their existential anxieties through the magic of custom software development.

This is a good time to stop and reflect as to whether this is the right situation for you. You wouldn't be the first to realize that this isn't the right fit, or sustainable for the long-haul. On the contrary, I have great respect for people that know when to wind down and try something new.

Re: 10 reasons why I switched to Spine.js

Pete Forde — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:58:03 -0000

You should consider joining us at Throne of JS this July:

http://throneofjs.com/

We're gathering all of the client-side MVC enthusiasts to spend a weekend learning tricks and building bridges. We're also pretty decent at throwing a party you'd want to be at.

Re: Check out our new tshirt!

Pete Forde — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 22:38:50 -0000

You know who else uses IFRAME? YouTube.

Re: Releasing the collection on GitHub

Pete Forde — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 19:38:50 -0000

This is really cool! I am curious to see what comes of your publishing efforts.

That said, I'm curious whether you considered posting this data on BuzzData. We designed BuzzData to be the perfect place for people working with datasets to comment, fork and annotate what they are working on.

Any comments or suggestions you have are certainly appreciated.

Pete