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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

Interview with a early stage SaaS founder

I had the chance to talk with my good friend and former colleague Corey Snipes about his SaaS project. He recently launched Meeting Star, a lightweight SaaS tool to help coordinate tech meetups. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

——-

Why did you come up with this product?

It began as a desire to fill my own need, for a lightweight and inexpensive place to manage small local tech events. It seemed like a fairly straightforward set of features, which wouldn’t take long to build and release as a product. (Don’t they always?) I was aware of several other tech meetup organizers who were looking for an alternative to meetup.com (often due to price, sometimes due to dislike of the feature set or UI). I did quite a bit of research last fall and didn’t find any suitable alternatives so I built it.

What do you hope to achieve with this app?

I have a few parallel interests here. I want a tool that’s useful to me as a meetup organizer. I want to leverage my experience building, marketing, and operating other software products — both my own, and for customers I’ve had over the years. I want to add a business line in my portfolio that provides value and makes people happy, while also being financially sustainable. I also run a separate, conference-related application and I anticipate some complementary lift between the two.

How much research did you do before plunging in and writing it?

Quite a bit. You can always do more, of course. I poked around online and found several lists, articles, and discussion threads about alternative platforms. I followed conversations of other meetup organizers discussing the relative merits of various methods. I made a list and tried seven or eight of what seemed like the top contender products. I was looking for a place to run my meetups, though, not specifically looking at competition. But in the end, everything was either trying to be a full-featured community management piece, or was such a terribly crafted alternative that I felt there were exactly zero real usable options for what I wanted to do.

Who is the product aimed at?

This particular [app] was born of my own needs, and I tend toward tech and entrepreneurship meetups. It’s well-suited to tech and software meetups. Those are the people in my network. Those are the meetups I attend and organize, and those are the users whose needs I can most easily identify and meet. Since it’s a reasonably lightweight application, it’s actually well-suited to many different kinds of groups, but software/tech/biz meetups are my focus.

What would make you consider this product a success?

Right now, success is getting ten paying, happy customers and getting things dialed in to their needs. I subscribe to Patrick McKenzie’s wisdom that the first ten customers are critical for turning your idea into something people want to use. And also, for proving it’s not a fluke. If you can get to ten, you can get to a hundred. And if you can get to a hundred, you can get to a thousand. For me, long-term success is a useful, sustainable product that has revenue to turn into improvements, runs smoothly, and maybe also puts a little money in my kids’ college fund.

——-

You can find out more about Corey, including why he’s moving to Cleveland, at his website.

Interview Useful Tools Web Applications | moore | | Leave a comment

Feature branch development

I remember when I had lunch with a friend, back when I was using SVN and he was using git.  He said “it’ll change your life”.  I had read about darcs years ago and had read Joel’s post about distributed version control systems.  I was still like “meh.  SVN does what I need it to do–tag releases, keep track of changes, and I can branch if I need to”.

Boy, was I wrong.

I’ve been using git since around 2014, and it’s great.  I don’t remember where I heard it, but someone said “branching in SVN is easy, it’s the merging that is difficult”.  Git takes the pain out of merging (mostly, of course you can still hose yourself pretty well).  I have to also reference this classic XKCD comic whenever I talk about git.

Regardless, one of the things I’m loving about working with git is that if you always use feature branches, use story numbers in your branch name (like story-update-123), and you set up your prepare-commit-msg script, you can track back every change to a story.  Here’s my prepare-commit-msg script:

#!/bin/sh

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

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

Another nice feature of the branch handling is that you can roll forward and backward branches. I use bitbucket, so I use the GUI revert command, which creates a nice revert PR. (I then immediately revert the revert PR so that I can apply the intended changes in the future by merging the second PR.) This makes it possible to push a feature to staging, realize it isn’t fully baked, and revert it so you can get out another feature release. Perhaps you could do this with SVN or another centralized VCS, but I was never comfortable enough with branches to do it.

All in all, git has been life changing as a developer. Thanks Russ, you were right!

Programming Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Turning Zendesk tickets into help center articles

We used Zendesk as part of our ticketing system at The Food Corridor. (Other parts are phone calls and an email inbox.)

I’ve been pretty underwhelmed with Zendesk as a ticketing system–I find it hard to understand and the UX is overly complicated for our needs. However, we recently moved a large number of FAQs into the Zendesk help center, and I found that aspect of the software to be awesome. I’m especially excited to see if it cuts down on customer interaction by being integrated into the web widget.

There’s also a cool way to take comments on tickets (typically with answers to common questions) and turn them into help center articles. Here’s how you do that:

An admin needs to install this Zendesk application and I recommend setting the ‘draft only’ option.

Then, the steps are:

  • Go to a ticket.
  • Click on the ‘apps’ button in the upper right hand corner
  • Click ‘post article’
  • Select the comment you want to post (you can only pick one)
  • Enter your title
  • Modify html if you’re comfortable, but realize it will be a draft article regardless, and you’ll have a chance to change it later)
  • Click ‘next’
  • Choose a section of your help center
  • Click ‘post to section’
  • Click the ‘view’ button (for some reason the edit button didn’t work for me)
  • Click ‘edit article’ (upper left)
  • Modify the content if needed using the guide editor, which is nice and WYSIWYG
  • Change from ‘draft’ to ‘published’ to make the answer available

I remember a knowledge base project over 15 years ago that was aiming at sharing knowledge across our organization. It flailed. Zendesk help center seems to be well on the way to achieving such aims.

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

The power of December challenges

I am in the final stretches of my December blogging challenge.  I’ve done this with other challenges in the past (exercise, meditation).

While some folks start their New Year’s Resolution’s in January, I find that December works better for me (maybe July will be better for you).  A challenge is different than a resolution, because a resolution has no end date, where a challenge stops.  Also, because of the holidays, this month is already choppy.  That means if I take some time each day to do something new, it’s not going to impact other obligations as much as it would in a less choppy time.  December is also the darkest month in Boulder; having a task to ‘check off’ every day feels like progress, and that feels good.

You can either pick a new thing or a task you’ve tried to do in the past.  All of my experience is with the latter.  New things are often exciting enough for me that I don’t need any kind of push to experience them.  But something I’ve tried lackadaisically that I intellectually know is worth exploring–that kind of challenge is perfect for a month.

A month is long enough to give a new habit a chance and to learn some of the benefits and warts of it. It’s also short enough that you can gut your way through it.  I read about people doing challenges for a year, but I am not sure I have the mental stamina to commit for that long.  After some December challenges, I was happy to drop the activity, because I didn’t get much value from it (or not enough for the effort).  Others I picked up later.

As far pure mechanics, I’ve found that a PDF calendar that you can ‘X’ out each day is helpful.  Post this someplace you will see it (by your bed or your desk).  Get a big sharpie and enjoy the ‘X’ing out process.

I also think it’s important to publicly state any kind of ‘I’m doing this for a month’ goals because that external pressure will help you when encountering a day where you really don’t want to do the task (like today, for me. haha). “Public” can mean announced on Facebook, Twitter or a blog, but it could be a conversation with your roommate or SO or family members.

I know that this is a bit late for December 2017, but hopefully it will inspire you in the future–there are plenty of months for a challenge in 2018.

Lifehack Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

Sources for custom t-shirts

This list of providers of custom t-shirts came off the Techfriends slack where someone asked about vendors that handle small runs of custom t-shirts.

I have no experience with any of these.  Some folks had some comments, which I paraphrased and added.

Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

The UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook

I’ve been reading the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook.  It’s a real tome, with about 1500 pages.  It’s got five authors and some great cartoons, and covers everything from shell scripts to disk to email to system management daemons (check out the table of contents).  No one should ever read this book cover to cover.  That would be just silly.

I’ve been really enjoying picking and choosing chapters to read, however.  The sheer breadth of this book means that anyone with an interest in modern software development can find something useful in it.

Given my interest in AWS, I read all the sections about cloud computing.  These were high level and not super interesting to me, but I think they’d be great if you were a novice about cloud computing, and they did have a great survey of the major public cloud providers and when it made sense to use each of them.

Then I moved on to the networking sections.  I honestly can say that I didn’t understand fundamental routing protocols before I read that section.  This is obviously closer to the heart of system administration, and the authors did a great job with concepts and hands on knowledge of networking.

After that I moved on to containers.  Did you know that Docker is the new hotness?  I had heard of it, but didn’t understand why.  Now I do.  It’s hot for much the same reason as the ‘fat jar’ deployment is preferred in java land.  Having one single artifact that rolls up code and dependencies is a way to simplify deployments of production code, including rollbacks.  The authors focus on the fundamentals of containers, primarily Docker, but they also cover various orchestration layers like Mesos and Kubernetes.

I’m now in the middle of a chapter about continuous integration and continuous deployment, where they are discussing the concepts as well as Jenkins, one of the key technologies (see, I told you everyone could find something in this book).  After that, I look forward to reading about configuration management.

If you work in software at all and are involved in production systems, you’ll be able to find something in the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (and if you aren’t, I’d be interested in knowing who owns that responsibility).

Books Cloud Computing Useful Tools | moore |

Thoughtworks Radar

Last night at the Boulder Ruby Meetup, Marty from Haught Codeworks walked through the Thoughtworks Technology Radar.  This is an informative way to keep on top of the latest technology trends without spending a lot of time researching and reading.  Sure, you could get the same information from reading Hacker News regularly, but the Radar is less haphazard.

The Radar is published every six months or so, and pulls from experts inside Thoughtworks (a leading software consultancy). You can view techniques, languages and frameworks, tools, and platforms.  Each area has a number of technologies and the proposed level of adoption (hold, assess, trial, adopt).  Within each radar you can dive in and learn more about the technology, like say, weex. You can also see the movement of a technology through the proposed levels of adoption over time.

You can also search for a given technology, if you are interested in seeing what the status us.  Sometimes technologies are archived, like Elm.

Note that this is not perfect.  The lag is real, but may help you avoid chasing shiny objects.  The Radar is also inherently biased because of the methodology, but given Thoughtworks size, scope and leadership, it’s probably one of the best technology summaries.  It’s certainly the best one I’ve run across.

Technology Useful Tools | moore | | 2 Comments

Rails Gems: Ahoy

Sometimes you want more analytical detail than Google Analytics or Heap or other analytics offerings allow.  If you have an internal datastore that you want to match visits up with, you can either pull the tracking data from the web analytics tool, push your data up to the tool, or find some other way to get the web analytics data into your internal datastore.

If you choose the third option, ahoy is the rails gem for you.  It’s a simple install and will track visits and visitors (both signed in and anonymous), user agents, time of visit, and more.  You can then use it to correlate with internal goals.  For instance, if you have a funnel: ‘adwords -> visit -> signup -> create profile -> join group -> participate in group’, you may want to track each step of the funnel.  You may want to know how many groups each adwords click joining user joins.  There may be aspects of your application that are not accessible via the web that you want to correlate with external indicators (‘how often does billing fail with people who use safari’ is a (fartfetched) example). Answering these questions may be easier to do with SQL than it would be with leveraging an external tool.

However, cohort analysis and other sophisticated statistical analysis may be harder with this data, and if you are looking at doing that you may want to make the investment in pushing data up to one of the other tools, or tagging your application such that all relevant goals are measured by the web tool.

Regardless, ahoy is simple to set up and if you’re looking to pull in web tracking data into your datastore for additional insights, I highly recommend it.

Rails Useful Tools | moore |