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Useful Tools - 2. page

Ideas for marketing a dev centric product

I have a friend who has a company that produces a developer tool that provides a one stop shop for application authentication. It’s a good one and they’ve found some traction.

They are trying to follow the redhat/mongodb playbook–create a tool so good at solving developer problems that developers adopt it. Eventually some portion of enterprises will wake up one morning and realize that their developers are using this. The CIO will freak out and be happy to pay money to my friend’s company for support.

The question is, how do you get developers to find out about the solution and how it will make their lives better?

I am not a marketing guru, but I am a developer and have been involved in selling of software in the past, so I had some suggestions.

  • Read The New Kingmakers, by Stephen O’Grady, in particular “Courting the Developer Population” and “What to Do?”. You can get a PDF here. O’Grady has thought a lot about this problem and his blog is worth reading as well.
  • Find or create a community, and contribute to it. Depending on your audinence, this may be a reddit subforum, an old school php bbedit forum, a facebook group or even an IETF working group. An existing group is more likely to give you results, where a new group will give you more control. Aim for results.
  • Present case studies or testimonials of success using the software. How did a real person solve a real problem with your software?
  • If you can find analysts and/or bloggers focused in your problem space, contact them and offer to walk them through the solution. (To me, this seems more of a long shot, but could be a big hit if you find the right person.) Developer focused podcasts could be an option too, as long as you are talking about technology and the problem space, not your product.
  • Writing interesting content on your blog. Share it widely. Again, this doesn’t have to be about your product, in fact it shouldn’t. Instead, take topics you’ve learned by building your product, or in the communities of which you are part, or the problems developers have solved with your product, and highlight those topics.
  • Write talks for conferences. For developers, I’d look at conferences like gluecon and oscon. Meetups are good too–easier to get into but much less scalable. You attend virtual meetups as well as physical ones.
  • Set up a google alert for competitors’ names and keywords and see if you can add value to any discussions happening there.

Above all, don’t be salesy. Focus on making the developer’s life easy.

Business Security Useful Tools | moore |

Moving a database driven side project to Netlify

FishermanI recently moved a side project to Netlify. Netlify, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a static file hosting service with a great workflow, free SSL certificates, and a built in CDN. I made the move because the side project was a database driven site, but didn’t really use other server side interactivity (no user generated content, etc). I haven’t invested much in the side project over the past couple of years, but it still gets tens of hits a day and is useful to a users. It’s a top hit on google for certain keywords. I didn’t want to spend time updating the underlying application, but wanted it to be more secure. The site is only updated over a month or so every year. It is then read only for the next eleven months of the year, as it provides information on a very seasonal service.

Moving to Netlify (or, frankly, any other static site provider) provides the following benefits:

  • extremely low cost (Netlify is free for the level of traffic I have).
  • faster browsing experience for the end user (due to being behind a CDN).
  • free SSL certificates, with no hassle of setting up letsencrypt myself.
  • indirection–the source site can now be anywhere. I could put it on an ec2 instance that I only boot up when I need to push a new build, or could even host it locally. This means that I don’t need to worry about the updating the source application.

I could have chosen to do this with S3/Cloudfront/AWS Certificate manager/Lambda (or using technologies from some other cloud provider). But even though I’m familiar with all the steps to do this, it was lot of work. And Netlify was free and had done all the grunt work of bringing all these technologies (or similar ones, I’m not familiar with the tech behind the site, but they do write about it a bit).

What steps did I take to move a database driven directory site to Netlify? Enough that I wanted to document this for my future self.

  • Change the DNS for the site to have a lower TTL. During the transition from your site to Netlify, users may see versions served from either the old site or the new site, and you want to minimize that.
  • Remove all forms and other server side interactivity that your site has. You can replace them with javascript driven interactivity (like Disqus for comments). Netlify has some support for functions, but I didn’t explore that.
  • Set up Netlify using a default URL (they provide it, it is something like ‘foo-bar-123.netlify.com’). I deploy from Bitbucket. (I know some people hate on Bitbucket, and I don’t like all of their UI, but they are free for private repos, which is a win for me.) This let me understand how to deploy a simple one page site.
  • Download the site. I used wget: wget -mk http://mysite.com/ . The switches set up mirroring and convert all links to be relative.
  • Move the site to a subdirectory (I used web) and configure Netlify to deploy the HTML from that subdirectory. This lets you have other scripts outside of the webroot that can help you build the site.
  • Check in the site with the downloaded content and push it up to Bitbucket.
  • Watch the site be deployed to the Netlify default URL.
  • Access the site via SSL: ‘https://foo-bar-123.netlify.com’ and look in the console for “mixed active content” errors. Fix those as applicable. (If this was for a client, rather than a side project, I’d solve all of these.) Note that if the source site is http only, you may need to hardcode https URLs.
  • See that “pretty” html pages like ‘https://foo-bar-123.netlify.com/about’ are rendered as text.
  • Ask on Stackoverflow about the problem.
  • End up solving it by generating a _headers file after downloading the site. Update Stackoverflow question with the answer.
  • Test again that the site at the default URL looks good.
  • Update the webserver config and DNS for the database driven site. I wanted it to answer to both the old addresses: mysite.com/www.mysite.com and a new address: generator.mysite.com
  • Update DNS to point mysite.com and www.mysite.com to the Netlify site. Instructions here.
  • Wait for DNS to propagate. When it does, check to make sure that SSL works.
  • Add a password for generator.mysite.com
  • Test the download process with the password (the wget command changes to wget --user=USER --password=PASS -mk http://mysite.com/
  • Write a script to do the download process.
#!/bin/sh
wget -mk  --user=USER --password=PASS http://generator.mysite.com/
mv generator.mysite.com mysitecom
cd mysitecom
find `pwd` -type f |grep  -v \\. |sed "s#`pwd`/##" > list 
for i in `cat list`; do echo "/$i" >> _headers; echo "  Content-Type: text/html" >> _headers; done
rm list
cd ..
rm -rf web
mv mysitecom web
git add web
git commit -m "pull in latest from generator.mysite.com"
# could do a git push here as well if you wanted

Now, any time that I make changes to the site, I need to run this script and push to Netlify. I could put it in cron or a scheduled lambda if I thought I was going to make changes often. For now, I’m content to run it manually. One downside is that I self-host my analytics code and that site is not SSL enabled. So I’ll need to make a change if I want to continue to get statistics.

So, in the end I have a fast, secure site that is hosted outside my infrastructure and that is easy to update. This process, while not trivial, was easy enough that it has me thinking about where else I could use it (this blog, for instance). Highly recommend.

AWS Content Side Project Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

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