Disqus - Latest Comments for Eric Allam

Re: 5 Facebook Application Gotchas | 20bits

Eric Allam — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:06:58 -0000

iLike had a couple million of users before facebook platform launched.

Re: Are you an accidental or habitual entrepreneur?

Eric Allam — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:36:47 -0000

Paul, thanks for the link and the write-up. Glad you enjoyed the habitual vs. accidental post, hopefully ill be able to pull out more articles like that in the future.

Re: Are you an accidental or habitual entrepreneur?

Eric Allam — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:36:47 -0000

Paul, thanks for the link and the write-up. Glad you enjoyed the habitual vs. accidental post, hopefully ill be able to pull out more articles like that in the future.

Re: Defining interfaces through mocking

Eric Allam — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:51:00 -0000

Mark, great introduction to Rspec and stubbing/mocking. I have recently fallen for Rspec and stubbing because, as you said, it makes our interfaces better.

One thing that caught be attention were your expectations. For instance:

@auction.valid?.should_equal false

Could be written like this:

@auction.should_not_be_valid

Rspec is clever enough (using method_missing) to run the method :valid? on the @auction object and make sure its false (because of the should_not). I find its cleaner that way and it will also take advantage of Rspec's new generated spec names feature.

Re: We don't write tests. There just isn't time for luxuries.

Eric Allam — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:09:00 -0000

@cedric: You don't need to use Selenium to test javascript. You can use JSunit, which as the name states is an easy to use Javascript Unit testing library. Selenium should be used for integration tests, or acceptance tests, not unit tests on your javascript code.

http://www.jsunit.net/

Re: We don't write tests. There just isn't time for luxuries.

Eric Allam — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:09:00 -0000

Re: We don't write tests. There just isn't time for luxuries.

Eric Allam — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:09:00 -0000

Re: We don't write tests. There just isn't time for luxuries.

Eric Allam — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:09:00 -0000

Re: One Problem With Creative Types

Eric Allam — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 23:01:20 -0000

Ahh yes, the email day, I know that feeling. One day your inbox is flooded with great ideas, comments, and inquiries. Everything is flowing, feeling good, moving forward. Then, everything stalls. Clients are nowhere to be found. Partners are missing. The second sock of a pair has been eatin by the dryer.

Those numbers for creators/consumers/ignoramuses are staggering. Only 1%. I guess it depends on what "creation" means. If you include myspace blogs I'd imagine that number would jump up pretty high. But, obviously, I don't consider that true creation.

Well, you have a new subscriber. I won't be able to make it to podcamp, but im interested to see what comes of GNM. Love the logo!

Re: The "Social" in Social Software

Eric Allam — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 15:04:22 -0000

Since I live in Tallahassee, FL (soon to be Orlando) I can't say I have had any similar experience. But, I believe getting to know the people behind the product is important, and that blogs can help you to do that. I'm more likely to buy a product from a company that has a blog than one that doesn't.

Maybe one day I'll make it over to California, and finally meet some people face to face.

Re: The Underground Blogosphere

Eric Allam — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 18:09:52 -0000

Theres nothing wrong with it. Hell, I WANT other bloggers to email me with interesting things to say. It shows me that they believe that my blog is influential enough to try to "pitch" too. Part of me thinks that article was written for traffic purposes. "Digg bait" if you will.

Re: It's Not Luck

Eric Allam — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:16:07 -0000

Instead of calling events like that "fate" I say that its a "sign from the universe" telling me im heading in the right direction.

For instance, I am currently about to launch fizboflorida.com, which is a new type of for sale buy owner website. When zillow announced their open api, I took it as a sign from the universe telling me im heading the right way, and that zillow was going to help build fizboflorida.com into something special.

Some signs from the universe are smaller, and to catch them you must keep your ears and eyes open. It is a good feeling, it almost feels like what your doing has meaning, Awesome stuff.

Re: Rant: Wall Street Journal on New Media

Eric Allam — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:24:50 -0000

Hey, sweet microphone! Yea, reading that WSJ article was hard. I love how they use the word "amateur" so many times. It has such harsh connotations. Too bad these so called "amateurs" are often times much more entertaining then the "old media".

By the way, I love it when people post when they're pissed off. All the bullshit gets thrown out the window. No need to tip toe around anything. Good SHIT!

Re: Passion as a Requirement

Eric Allam — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 17:01:29 -0000

I am passionate about new things that could change the world. I love things that constantly change, that don't get boring. I am passionate about change, I would say, but more specifically growing. Being static is boring. I don't care how much money I have, if I'm not changing, I am not living.

Re: True Return on Investment

Eric Allam — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:02:21 -0000

Your absolutely right, the ROI is in the intangibles. Meeting new people, sharing ideas, creating new things, receiving an audience and attention. Awesome post.

By the way, nice cliffhander at the end. A pretty good way to bring people back, I would say. Can't wait.

Re: Back to the important news: eBay bans Google Checkout

Eric Allam — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:52:16 -0000

Interesting Read here:

http://xpaypal.blogspot.com/2006/06/5-reasons-w...

While I don't agree with all of his points, it does seem to me that Paypal is much better suited for eBay auctions. The Fraud point is the strongest of all 5, IMHO.

Re: What tech couldn't you live without?

Eric Allam — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:56:41 -0000

Interesting, looks like dodgeball is owned by Google. Check out the bottom of the dodgeball homepage.

Re: features and bugs

Eric Allam — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:14:00 -0000

Great example using rails for the “replace conditional logic with polymorphism” refactoring. Of course this is a much better way to code (by better I mean cleaner, less prone to bugs, easier to read), but I would argue that it is probably not the best OO way to go. I have learned to use composition over inheritance, as i’ve run into places where inheritance can be a hindrence. For example, in the above example, the better solution would have been to use a Payment Strategy, that would be instantiated through a Factory, and using delegate appropriate methods using rails delegator. That way you would only have 1 employee class, with a different strategy class for each type of payment:

class Employee < ActiveRecord::Base;
delegate :pay, :to => :payment_strategy
def payment_strategy; PaymentFactory.new(self.payment_strategy); end
end
class CommissionStrategy; end
class HourlyStrategy; end
class SalaryStrategy: end
class PaymentFactory; end

Of course, you’d have to keep an extra field in the emp table to hold the payment strategy. This could be a simple integer field, or a string, depending on your preference. This way, if you wanted to add a new type of payment, you wouldn’t have to create a new emp class, just a new payment strategy class. Also, if a emp went from salary to commission, you just change the payment strategy for that emp, not the class of the object.

Re: she's a beauty

Eric Allam — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 11:26:00 -0000

Woah, weird. I just discovered render_to_string two days ago. It can be very helpful (i was using it to render fbml, which is the facebook markup language, and pass it to a post to their api, so pretty similar to your use.)

Re: SINTAXI

Eric Allam — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:33:26 -0000

All this merb love is great and all but, where are the production sites built on Merb and Datamapper? Rails had Basecamp, what does Merb have?