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Useful Tools - 2. page

Easily extracting conversations from a slack group

Man slack liningSlack is an amazing productivity tool when used correctly. One of the primary uses I’ve seen is for open source projects to provide support (Craft CMS, OG-AWS) or for communities to be built (Techfriends, Denver Devs). If you don’t have the luxury of the owner of your slack being Slack’s VP of engineering, the costs of $x/month/user can cause these types of slacks to remain on the free plan.

Which means that you are limited to the last 10k of messages.

And that’s fine for the vast majority of messages. Sometimes, however a discussion is so good that it deserves to be indexed and shared, which means it needs to be pulled out of the Slack walled garden and onto the web (I also wrote about how to do this with the Facebook Group walled garden last year). Sometimes you might just want to save it beyond the 10k message limit for your own selfish reasons.

You can of course do this extraction manually (I did so here and here). But that’s a lot of work.

Another option is to use Zapier. The slack integration is trivial to set up, and has a number of options. From there you can push to a google spreadsheet (if you want to do further reification) or directly to WordPress (or any of the other integrations).

The nice part about this is that the Zapier slack integration is that you have a variety of options that can trigger the publishing of a message to a spreadsheet:

  • a post of a public message in a specific channel
  • a post of a public message in any channel
  • starring of a message by you
  • attachment of a certain reaction emoji (I picked a floppy disk) to a message, no matter who adds the emoji

I’ve just started doing this but am excited to have a low friction way to pull high value conversations out of slack. Slack is great for synchronous communication and easy discussion. When real knowledge drops, it should be shared with the future and anyone who can type into a search box. Do make sure to let folks know because there may be some expectation of privacy that you’ll want to respect.

Tips Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

MS Edge

Spelling on chalkboardI use MS Edge a lot (yes, I’m a windows user. Windows + Vagrant means I get to use all the user and developer software I want).

One thing that is an understated benefit of Edge is the autocorrect. Every text box automatically has spelling correction. That’s so nice for tools like slack and webmail where you are writing all day every day. It really means that just like you don’t have to know how to get someplace (because Google Maps) now you don’t even have to look up how to spell a word. Looks like you can turn if off if you want, but its deeply embedded in the OS.

 

Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Using WordPress as a CRUD Database, API Included

Ethernet cordBased on this HN discussion, which I discussed a while back, I looked at how to set up WP as a CRUD database accessible via API.

It wasn’t hard. Steps:

  1. Install WordPress (I used ec2 and the Cloudformation sample template)
  2. Install the following plugins
  3. I also installed the following optional plugins
  4. I created a custom post type of ‘todo’ and added a couple of custom fields.
  5. I was able to get the todos by going to these URLs (apparently you can have the API live at wp-json, but that required some rejiggering of url permalinks).
    • http://host/wordpress/?rest_route=/wp/v2/todo/8
    • http://host/wordpress/?rest_route=/wp/v2/todos

Here’s an example of the output:

{
  "id": 8,
  "date": "2018-03-05T02:38:26",
  "date_gmt": "2018-03-05T02:38:26",
  "guid": {
    "rendered": "http://host/wordpress/?post_type=todo&p=8"
  },
  "modified": "2018-03-05T02:40:01",
  "modified_gmt": "2018-03-05T02:40:01",
  "slug": "auto-draft",
  "status": "publish",
  "type": "todo",
  "link": "http://host/wordpress/todo/auto-draft/",
  "title": {
    "rendered": "Buy Milk"
  },
  "template": "",
  "acf": {
    "": false,
    "due_date": "20180308",
    "description": "please buy milk.",
    "who_owns_it": {
      "ID": "1",
      "user_firstname": "",
      "user_lastname": "",
      "nickname": "mooreds",
      "user_nicename": "mooreds",
      "display_name": "mooreds",
      "user_email": "...",
      "user_url": "",
      "user_registered": "2018-03-05 02:21:36",
      "user_description": "",
      "user_avatar": "..."
    },
    "done": false
  },
  "_links": {
    "self": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/todo/8"
      }
    ],
    "collection": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/todo"
      }
    ],
    "about": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/types/todo"
      }
    ],
    "wp:attachment": [
      {
        "href": "http://host/wordpress/wp-json/wp/v2/media?parent=8"
      }
    ],
    "curies": [
      {
        "name": "wp",
        "href": "https://api.w.org/{rel}",
        "templated": true
      }
    ]
  }
}

The custom post fields are all under the ACF key, and you can see that there was an expansion of the who_owns_it field. If you are going to do this, make sure have the the normal title tag be part of the custom post, otherwise the WP UX for editing the custom posts won’t be much use.

Not perfectly restful, but a super simple way to set up an API that non technical folks can use to create, update or delete records and that you can consume in other systems.

APIs Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Easily visualizing location data with Google Fusion Tables

Hands with map on itSometimes you have a list of locations in a Google spreadsheet and want to visualize where the locations using a map. Google Fusion tables lets you do just that, for free, with no technical expertise needed.

To do so, you need to create a spreadsheet. I created a spreadsheet of birthplaces of the Presidents of the USA. Here’s the spreadsheet. You want to make sure you have column headers and that your location information is all in one column. You can see that I concatenated birth city and state into one column, because you can only map one column (unless you have lat/lng, in which case you can use those two columns). You also can’t concatenate any columns when the data has been pulled into fusion tables.

Then, create a new google fusion table (under the ‘more’ menu). Choose a spreadsheet as your data source and then past in the spreadsheet link.

Your location column may or may not have been given a data type of location. If not, use the ‘edit’ menu then ‘change columns’ to convert it to a location type.

Add a map using the red plus sign and select your column as the location. Wait for your column to be geocoded (if you have lat/lng you shouldn’t need to do this).

And there you are. Here’s the map I generated. You can see that if you click on the marker you will get information about each president, which is a nice bonus feature. You can also share this within your organization or with the wider world and do additional filtering.

Fusion tables is great when you have the structured data and just need a simple map representation.

Caveats:

  • Once your data is in fusion tables, you are extremely limited on what you can do with it (see the concatenation above, for example). Do whatever data massaging you need in the spreadsheet. This also means that you probably want the spreadsheet to be your source of record.
  • There’s no way to update your data. So when the next president enters office, I will either have to create a whole new fusion table or delete all the rows and re-import.
  • Fusion tables seems to no longer be under active development. At least I haven’t seen many feature changes over the past couple of years. It is out of beta. I think it’s fine to build adhoc tooling on top of this service, but if I were looking for the core of my business I’d avoid this.
Google Apps Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Passwordsafe, redux

Guy looking menacingly at a computerI have written before about passwordsafe (about a decade ago!). I just wanted to reiterate how having all your authentication information in one or more password safe files is such a lifesaver for transitions. You can easily change all the passwords at one go (using randomly generated strong passwords, of course), though you may have to deploy applications or change environment variables to do this. You also can easily see all the systems and external services that help make your application “go”.

I’ve heard about good things about tools like Lastpass and whatnot, but passwordsafe is open source, can live on a thumb drive, is multi platform and has a small feature set. It’s also extremely easy to set up and get going, especially if you store it in version control. And for a small team moving fast, the perfect solution is the enemy of the good.

Do something–even a shared google doc will get you some of the benefits.

Security Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Useful Tool: Intercom

Intercom In WallIntercom has been extremely helpful in allowing targeted messages to help users gain knowledge of The Food Corridor application. (Thanks for the recommendation, OTL!) What I’ve found most useful about Intercom is that it allows non technical users to build rulesets to target specific messages. This helps you help your users uncover new functionality, but only at the moment when the functionality is useful.

For example, if someone has signed up but not created a booking in TFC, we can send them a message a week after they sign up with a helpful link. This message can be via email or an in-app message, and if they respond to the in-app message, it notifies customer support just as if a chat was started any other way.

As a developer, all I had to do to get this data (which lives in our database) up to Intercom was to craft a javascript object. I added a method in the application_controller and have it cached for a while, because we ended up sending dozens of attributes up, and they are slow changing. From then on, the message targeting is done entirely within Intercom, where the non technical user can build rules based on this custom data plus any data that Intercom collects by default (last login, etc).

If you do want to target messages specific web pages (only pop up a message on page XXX, but not page YYY) you need an understanding of regular expressions. Depending on how comfortable your non technical users are and how complicated your site is, a developer may need to write the first regular expression and then have the other users extend it.

I’m skipping over other pieces of Intercom, including a knowledge base and in app synchronous chat. I think those are valuable as well, but the real win for me was allowing non technical users to control in app messaging with minimal software development investment.

Useful Tools Web Applications | moore | | Leave a comment

Metabase: An Easy Query Builder For Your RDBMS

If you have a relational database as the primary datastore for your application, and you want to easily allow non technical folks to build reports against data in that database, I highly recommend evaluating metabase. This open source query builder is dead simple to install (takes about one minute on a free heroku dyno). You can create individual users, and they all get access to an easy to use interface so they can look at data in your tables. All the nomenclature is non technical, nary a select, group by or from clause to be seen. It’s written in java, but you don’t have to know java to run it.

We haven’t used this for long, so I can’t talk much about the warts, but I was referred to this by someone else who had great success in using it in their organization. The only downside that I’ve seen so far is that joins are not supported, so you end up having to create views if your database is normalized. More on that decision.

BPA Business Java Useful Tools | moore |

Speed up development by catching your mail locally

Have you ever been developing some kind of application that sends email? You need to test how the email looks, so you have to have access to an external SMTP server and you have to configure your application to use that. You can definitely set up sendgrid or another MTA to send email from your local computer and then use a real email address as your target. However, then to develop this portion of the application you need to be online.

Another option that I’ve found is the Mailcatcher gem. This is a small ruby program that you can easily configure as your SMTP endpoint. Then when your development environment sends mail, mailcatcher catches it. Then you can visit a URL on your local computer and view received emails. As soon as mailcatcher shuts down, the emails are lost, however.

Even though this is a ruby gem, you can use the app with different languages–as long as it you can configure the application to point to an SMTP server, you’re good (in the readme, there are examples for Django and PHP).

One note about it being a gem. Don’t put it in your Gemfile if you are building a rails app, because of possible conflicts. This means that if you manage your ruby environments via rvm you’ll need to re-install mailcatcher every time you change your ruby version.

Bonus: mailcatcher even has an API so you can use it in your integration test environment to verify that certain actions in your application caused certain emails to be sent.

Dynamic Languages PHP Rails Testing Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

How Trello Wowed Me By Handling An Edge Case

We are using Trello for our product development planning at The Food Corridor. Previously we were using Pivotal Tracker, which I chose, but a new team came on to help us and they were more comfortable with Trello. I may do a compare and contrast of these tools in the future, but for now I wanted to celebrate the beauty of a well designed piece of software.

I don’t mean how Trello looks, though it certainly looks pretty. I mean how they handle UX edge cases. I ran into one the other day, and it blew my mind that Trello acted as I had hoped.

Here’s the situation. We use the Trello numeric card ID along with this git hook:

#!/bin/sh

# from http://stackoverflow.com/a/16061192/203619

if story_id=`git branch |grep '*'|sed 's/.*-//'`
then
    echo "[#$story_id]" >> "$1"
fi

To help tie commits to stories. If someone is working on a story with the id 123, they work on a feature branch called add-new-feature-123. When committing, they may write a message like: “Updated the message to the end user when they save”, and this hook will automatically add “[#123]” onto that commit message.

When someone is looking at the code six months or two years from now, they will be able to look up that story and get context about why the message was changed beyond what was in the commit log.

We were cleaning up old releases in Trello and had moved all the released stories to another board. However, I noticed that the cards were renumbered when they were moved to that board. Whoops! That meant that the commit messages wouldn’t be useful in looking up the cards. I had discussions with the product manager and we decided to keep all future releases on the same board to maintain the numbers–we’d just archive them (it’s worth noting that when you search for 123 and the card is archived, the search won’t return the card unless you add the is:archived search operator to your query).

However, I was ready to write off the cards that had been moved to the other board. What were the chances that if I moved the cards back to the original board, the card numbers would be maintained? I gave it a try just to see.

Trello did the right thing! The cards, when moved back to the original board, assumed their original numeric ID.

I am very impressed, as I imagine there are a very small portion of Trello users who care about this behavior. As someone who doesn’t really care about design but does care about user experience, that is an example of attention to detail that I wanted to call out and praise.

Programming The Food Corridor Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Smashing: A Quick Dashboard Solution

I’m putting together a business metrics dashboard for The Food Corridor (what is old is new again, I remember a project at XOR, my first job out of school, that was all about creating a dashboard). I could have just thrown together some rails views, but I looked around and saw Smashing, which is a fork of Dashing, a dashboard project that came out of shopify.

Smashing is a sinatra app and is fairly simple to set up. It looks gorgeous, a lot better than anything I could hack together. I could install it on a free heroku dyno. Even though it will take a bit of time to spin up, it is now running for free. Smashing has nice MVC separation–you have dashboards which assemble widgets, and then jobs which push data to widgets on a schedule. Sending data looks something like this: send_event('val', { current: current }) where val is referenced in the widget.

You can create more than one dashboard (I did only one). They aren’t customizable by non developers, but once the widgets are written, they can be created by someone with a modicum of experience editing HTML.

Some tips:

  • Smashing stores its state in a file. If you are running on heroku, the filesystem is ephemeral. You have two options. You can store the state in an external data store like redis (patch mentioned here, I didn’t try it). Or you can rely on the systems you are polling for metrics to maintain the state. That’s the path I took.
  • The number widget has the ability to display percentage changed since last updated: send_event('val', { current: current, last: last }). Make sure that val is an integer–I sent a string like “100000” and that was treated as a zero for purposes of calculation.
  • If you are accessing any external systems, make sure you inject any secrets via environment variables.  For local development, I used dotenv.
  • You’ll want some kind of authentication system.
  • The widgets that come with Smashing aren’t complicated, but neither are they documented, so prepare to spend some time understanding what they expect.
  • I grouped jobs, which gather the data, by data source.  You can send multiple events per job, and I thought that made it clearer.  Connections to APIs or databases only needed to happen once as well.
  • The business metrics which I was displaying really only change on a monthly basis.  So I wanted to run the data gathering immediately, then in a week or two weeks.  Because of the ephemeral state, I expect the second run will never happy, but wanted to be prepared for it.  I did so by creating a function and calling it once on job load and then in the scheduler.

Here’s pseudo code for the job that pulls data from stripe:


Stripe.api_key = ENV['STRIPE_SECRET_KEY']

def stripe
  # pull data from stripe...
  send_event('stripeval', { current: current })
end

stripe

SCHEDULER.interval '1w' do
  stripe
end

Smashing is no full on technical metrics solution (like Scout or New Relic), but can be useful for displaying limited data in a beautiful format with a minimum of developmetn effort. If you’re looking for a dead simple dashboard, Smashing will work for you.

The Food Corridor Useful Tools Web Applications | moore | | Leave a comment