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Symfony2 Impressions

violin photo
Photo by mitch98000

Recently, I had a short engagement for a client who had an existing application written in Symfony2.  I haven’t really touched the modern PHP frameworks (the most recent experience was CakePHP 1.2, which was last released almost 3 years ago).  It was a pleasant surprise.

What was awesome about Symfony?

  • It forces you to think in terms of components (called bundles).  Even the core functionality is a bundle.
  • There are many bundles out there to let you get up to speed quickly.
  • It uses Composer, a dependency management tool much like Maven or NPM, to manage packages.
  • The documentation is extensive and versioned.
  • There is a clear product roadmap, including long term releases and clear deprecation dates
  • It has built in integration testing functionality, which lets you test clicks and form submissions and search the DOM for expected results.
  • There is clear configuration support for different environments.
  • It uses an ORM which seems capable–I didn’t get to dive into this too much.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, and I didn’t get a chance to live with this solution for more than a few weeks.  I don’t know how active the community is, though the google group seems relatively active.  I’m sure there are warts in Symfony2–searching for ‘symfony2 sucks’ turned up a few rants.  But, for a greenfield webapp project, I’d happily use Symfony2.

PHP Web Applications | moore |

Don’t forget to deactivate inactive items in easyrec

delete photo
Photo by Ervins Strauhmanis

I wrote before about easyrec, a recommendation system with an easy to integrate javascript API, but just recently realized that I was still showing inactive items as ‘recommended’.  This is because I was marking items inactive in my database, but not in my easyrec system.

Luckily, there’s an API call to mark items inactive.  You could of course manually login and mark them as inactive, but using the API and a bit of SQL lets me run this check for all the items.  Right now I’m just doing this manually, but will probably put it in a cron job to make sure all inactive items are marked so in easyrec.

Here’s the SQL (escaped so it doesn’t wrap):

select concat('wget "http://hostname/api/1.0/json/setitemactive?apikey=apikey&tenantid=tenantid&\
active=false&itemtype=ITEM&itemid=',id,'"; sleep 5;')
from itemtable where enabled = 0;

I have an item table that looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `itemtable` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
...
`enabled` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
...

Where enabled is set to 0 for disabled items and 1 for enabled items. The id column is numeric and also happens to be the easyrec item id number, in a happy coincidence.

The end output is a series of wget and sleep commands that I can run in the shell. I added in the sleep commands because I’m on the demo host of easyrec and didn’t want to overwhelm their server with updates.

 

APIs Java Web Applications | moore |

GuideStar, or Find the Form 990

nonprofit photo
Photo by jurvetson

Tis the season!  You may not give as much as Bill Gates (in fact, I bet you don’t).  But, if you give money to any non profits, you should be aware that the IRS requires every 501(c)(3) organization to file a form 990. (This post is not going to be useful to my readers in other countries, but I’d be interested to know if there are analogous services elsewhere.)

That form 990 is required to be publicly available. You can request a copy as well.

But, you may be in the middle of making a donation, or you may not want to contact the organization to request a 990. GuideStar is a non-profit information aggregator, and they have 990’s for most organizations. You do have to create a free account, but that’s it. If you pay for a premium account, you have access to more years of 990s, but I’ve found that for the casual inquiry, what the free account provides is enough.

There is all kinds of interesting information in the 990. Here’s the 2013 990 for the New York City Ballet. In it, we can see that this organization:

  • has 66M of revenue and expenses
  • has millions of dollars of investment income
  • paid 3.4M in advertising
  • paid 20k for meetings
  • has a large number of directors who all work for free
  • pays the ‘ballet master in chief’ 800k in salary

And plenty of other interesting information.

If you are thinking of giving to an organization, you can learn a lot about it from the form 990’s it files.

Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Follow people on Hacker News, get new posts in your inbox

Ever since Jeff Beard introduced me to Hacker News, it’s been one of my favorite sites.  You can check out my profile here.

Justin Jackson pointed me to a useful tool which lets you follow activity on HackerNews: HNWatcher. This lets you set up searches for various terms, users or other interesting topics on Hacker News, and emails you the results regularly.

Right now, I simply follow a few users that say interesting things, but I could see it being as useful as google alerts for staying on top of certain topics.

If you’re an avid Hacker Newser, or are interested in what this demographic (startups, hackers, overindexed on Silicon Valley, overwhelmingly young and male) has to say, sign up for HNWatcher today.

Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Helping a friend gather data and reach prospects with gentle intros

coffee photo
Photo by My Aching Head

I had coffee with a friend the other day, and he shared a business idea. I thought it was an awesome idea–I certainly saw the need in the marketplace and believed he had the skillset and resources to execute on the idea.

He’s still in the exploratory phase, so I offered to send gentle intros to people in my network who I thought would benefit from his idea. (The target market is anyone with a custom web application that makes money, or anyone who builds custom web applications and is looking for a way to provide ongoing support–if that is you, contact me if you would like to learn more.)  I asked him to write a small spiel that he’d feel comfortable with me sharing.  If you are thinking of doing this, make your friend write a spiel for you.  If they can’t write a spiel, chances are they won’t be good at follow up and your intros will be wasted.

Then, I went through my LinkedIn network and put contacts into categories:

  1. this person (or the company for which they work) might want to partner with my friend
  2. this person (or the company for which they work) is a possible client for my friend’s offering
  3. this person might know people who are in categories 1 or 2.
  4. this person (or the company for which they work) is not a good fit for what my friend is working on
  5. who is this person?

And then I sent soft pitch emails to almost everyone in categories 1, 2 and 3.  The content varied based on which category someone was in, but for category 1, the email was something like:

I have a friend who owns a hosting company who is looking to talk to consulting companies about a possible new product he is thinking about offering.  Here is his spiel:

 

[…spiel from friend …]

 

I wasn’t sure if this kind of software maintenance was something that your company wanted to keep inhouse, or if you would be interested in discussing this with him.  I wanted to check before I did intros.    Is this something you think is worth learning more about?

This way, my friends and contacts on LinkedIn don’t get spammed from someone they don’t know.  Instead, they get an informative email from me, asking if they want to learn more.  If they do (and about 10% did), I do mutual introductions, and then the ball is in their court.  (Side note: here’s a great intro email etiquette guide.)

Why did I do this?  Well, there were a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, because I thought it would be a win win for both sides.  My friend gets more data about his offering and how the market will react to it.  My contacts/friends on LinkedIn learn about a new product from a trusted source.

Second, I was able to do some social network housecleaning.  I was able to ‘unlink’ with all people in category #5–it’s always nice to clean up your social graph.

Third, I reached out to people and had some interesting conversations.  Some folks I hadn’t talked to in years.  It’s good to reach out to people, and always better to do so with something of use to them, rather than a plea for work.

This was a fair bit of effort (a couple of hours).  I can’t imagine doing this monthly, but once a quarter seems reasonable, especially if I’m reaching out to a different segment of my network each time.  And I don’t have to do the whole process every time–spiel, linkedin, soft pitch, intro.  I actually like scanning news sites and simply sending interesting articles to old contacts: “Thought you might be interested in this <link> because of XXX and YYY”.  Those are super simple to send, and again, provide value and raise your profile.

Next time you talk to a friend who has a great idea, who can execute on it, and who will follow up with anybody you introduce them to, consider reviewing your social graph for prospects.  Gentle intros can benefit all three of you.

Business Consulting Web Applications | moore |

Open Source, Consulting and Building SaaS Products

construction photo
Photo by JD Hancock

I was browsing Hacker News the other day, and ran across this article, lamenting how difficult it was to support a company with an open source project and that insomuch as one could, consulting generated far more revenue than selling SaaS services like hosting.  For the record, I’ve never touched LocomotiveCMS.  From a brief glance, it looks nice.

While I feel for them, I think that they have alternatives:

  • Sell premium support.  Right now, it appears the only way to get premium support is to host with them, and it seems that many clients are more interested in self hosted solutions.  Makes sense–if you are a rails developer (the target market for this CMS) you already have a hosting solution.  But if premium support was offered separately, they could hire someone (possibly part time) less skilled than Didier, the primary developer, and have them take care of tier 1 support.  And still offer a warm fuzzy feeling for harder problems, which would escalate to Didier.  Companies like to pay for that kind of service, even if they don’t always use it.  This strategy would also decrease the amount of revenue needed to hire someone to help Didier (customer server folks are less expensive than developers).
  • Sell an ebook (or a couple).  These are far easier to create and sell than a SaaS product.  (I use leanpub!)  It could be an ‘authoritative guide to LocomotiveCMS’ or just focus on one part.  Since Didier knows which questions he often answers for people who have paid him money, he’s probably got a very good idea of where the pain points are.
  • Someone suggested this in the comments, but a marketplace for plugins to LocomotiveCMS seems like a natural way to go.  Again, i don’t know that community, and marketplaces for CMSes can be hard to kick start, but this is worth evaluating.
  • I’m sure there are others.  Here’s an exhaustive list of business models, courtesy of the AVC community, so if I were them, I’d review and see what was a fit.

In my comment on the HN post, I talk about how products often face a “round peg in an elliptical hole” problem. I meant that products often solve 80% of the problem for 80% of the users.  They also require users to change their processes (more crystallization).  Typically there’s just enough offset that people feel cognitive drag.  (Of course, the same thing usually happens with custom solutions, you just don’t know that until you are done.  Doh!)

Especially in crowded markets, like CMSes, it is far far easier to sell enough hours to make a living customizing a solution than it is to sell enough products to make a living.  Brennan Dunn covers this ground well.  Every consulting company I’ve ever seen or been a part of, and every consultant I’ve ever known (except the ones who were contracting for one client and really were employees with more flexibility), dreams of transitioning from non scalable consulting by the hour to scalable product sales.  One friend even had a name for it–the “von MacIntyre machine”, which would make money while he slept.

But it’s hard.

Business Dynamic Languages Web Applications | moore |

RSS Pick: Dion Almaer

dion almaer photo
Photo by marcosfernandez

I think that the RSS reader is such a fantastic invention. It lets me monitor many bloggers and news sites, and see new content.  This lets you have an eye on lots of writers, including some that haven’t written for a long time.  I’m going to be highlighting blogs that I follow, one per month.

The first is Dion Almaer’s, who, unfortunately, has moved most of his writing to Medium.  But Dion is a great technologist.  He currently is employed at WalmartLabs Mobile.  He’s written such gems as:

Your coding voice:

When people ask me about Java and why I don’t often write applications in it, my answer is not that I think “Java sucks”. I think the JVM is amazing technology, and there are a ton of fantastic APIs. Using Java is a great answer for many situations. However, the least amount of fun that I have had programming has been when using the Java language. It isn’t just that it feels frustratingly verbose, although that is part of it.

and Browsers are Finally Catching Up (in 2009):

But, the browsers are finally changing. The new crop come with technologies that show that the browser vendors are thinking about building a platform for desktop quality applications. The Chrome comic book was full of this.

Remember the Chrome Comic Book?

Dion, thanks for sharing your knowledge, please resurrect your blog!  (Dion, I know this is an old photo–feel free to send me a new one and I’ll update this post.)

Blog RSS Pick Web Applications | moore |

Installing the AngularJS Docs on Your Computer

unplugged photo
Photo by jenny downing

If you want access to the AngularJS API docs offline, download the zipfile for the version you are using (latest as of writing is 1.2.23), unzip it it to a web server directory, and visit the URL in your browser.

The docs need to be served via http or https to work, so you can’t just download the zip file, unzip, and open up the index.html file in your browser.

I use the python simple web server.  If you are also using this simple web server, make sure to start the python web server in the top level directory of the unzipped files, not the docs directory.  The docs reach up a level and pull in javascript and css.

Obviously, you don’t get any links to outside blogs, articles or videos, but this does give you the API, the tutorial and the guide.  When I’m without internet access, having this on my computer gives me at least a fighting chance of solving any issues I run into.

AngularJS Javascript Web Applications | moore |

King Soopers, Please Fix Your HomeShop Service

 

groceries photo
Photo by State Library and Archives of Florida

King Soopers is leaving money on the table.

I tweeted about this a while ago, but thought it was worth expanding into a full blog post.

Now, first, let me say that I haven’t used new shopping services like Instacart, but I agree with Gary Vee (link is a video, you want to go to 6:50)–home shopping gives me more time and that is an extremely precious commodity that I am willing to trade money for.

King Soopers, for readers outside of Colorado, is one of the two major grocery store chains–it’s owned by Kroger, a name that may be more familiar to you.  (The other is Safeway, and they don’t do home delivery to my area.)  The King Soopers online shopping experience, is abysmal.

Let me count the ways:

  1. It’s difficult to find the link from their home page (here it is if you want to try King Soopers HomeShop).
  2. There is no clear delivery map–you have to enter your address and then you find out if they do deliveries to your location.
  3. The UI of the shopping experience hasn’t changed since 2009 (the first time I used it).
  4. Searching is tough–synonyms are not handled (searching for ‘scallions’ returns no produce results, whereas searching for ‘green onions’ does, even though they are the same vegetable).
  5. Product description for produce is unclear. For instance, here is the description some onions: “King Soopers/Onions Yellow Organic Fresh Produce (Each)“, but the price is is by the pound.  So, when I put in 1 into the quantity section, am I getting one onion or one pound of onions?  I don’t know.
  6. Sorting is limited to ‘Brand’ or ‘Description’.  That’s right folks, an ecommerce site where you can’t sort on price.
  7. Browse options are not clear–they have an ‘aisle’ metaphor, but organic produce is in a different category than regular produce.
  8. Product images are spotty.
  9. They don’t have a submit event fire when you hit ‘enter’ in the search box.  To be fair, this issue only affects FireFox.
  10. They don’t have every product a store has.  But wait, aren’t they fulfilling from the same warehouse?  I don’t know.

So, why would you ever use King Soopers HomeShop?  Because home delivery is so dang easy, and spending an extra $11 to not have to go to the store is worth it, especially for a big shopping trip.  There are other reasons as well:

  • No (or far fewer) impulse buys.  Maybe this is the reason they aren’t investing in this product?
  • You can save a list of staples and just re-order it.
  • Did I mention they deliver food to your house?  The drivers have been very nice, and even brought the bags into our house at times.
  • The UI for picking a pickup time is good, and I haven’t encountered any traffic jams.
  • I’ve been happy about the quality of non fungible items I’ve had picked out for me (such as lettuce).
  • They are good about substitutions.  If something you request is out of stock, there are three choices: ‘no substitutions, just omit’ or ‘please substitute’.  If you choose the latter, you can either accept or reject the substitution at delivery.

But the best reason for using HomeShop is the convenience of having your food delivered to you for a reasonable price.  As a busy person, this is huge.

I really really want King Soopers to repair the crappy parts of this service and make it amazing.  Heck, I’ll even consult with you on it.  Home delivery is a win in so many ways–please fix it, King Soopers.

Technology and Society Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |

Zapier is awesome!

APIs are sprouting up everywhere. This is great for developers (and for end users) because it allows all kinds of automation. However, there are times when the investment of writing code to connect two APIs is too much.

Why might writing code be too much?

  • The problem is still fluid and writing code will lock in a solution.
  • There are more pressing business problems to solve.
  • There are no engineering resources available, and/or no money to hire a dev.

If any of these reasons apply to a problem you are facing, consider Zapier (or a competitor like IFTTT). These services are much like Excel macros–they require less software engineering expertise but can leverage some of the power of programming to automate away work. I’m only going to write about Zapier, since that is the solution with which I am familiar.

Zapier runs the connections between each service (called ‘Zaps’) at regular intervals. Zaps are built using a web only interface that leverages the APIs in a manner that, while not completely intuitive, is thoroughly manageable by anyone who can sum up a column in Excel.

Here’s the class of problems for which Zapier is good:

  • Connecting two services for which Zapier has connectors–this list is quite extensive.
  • Syncing needs to happen no more than every 5 minutes (15 for the free account).
  • No processing of the data during the transfer is needed (except possibly omitting some fields)–you are simply moving data from one place to another–no Yahoo! Pipes like transformations are possible in transit.
  • One way sync is OK (though there are workarounds).
  • You don’t need to bulk load initial data via Zapier–you either can disregard initial data or load it in some other fashion.
  • You have a reasonable number of sources and sinks–each linked source and sink will take up one Zap.
  • You have to have valid accounts with each source and sink.

That’s a fair number of limitations, but even so there are a large number of common problems that are solvable by Zapier. Some examples:

  • Syncing a list of contacts from one source to another.
  • Taking a google form submission and adding a user to a mailing list.
  • Moving a row from one Google spreadsheet to another.
  • Taking an email and adding it to a database.
  • Adding a customer who you have just invoiced in QuickBooks to an email list.

These are all types of problems that can be done manually, but if frequency or scale increases, the process can run people ragged.

I want to call special attention to the email processing ability of Zapier. If you have a well-formatted email that you often receive that you want to further process, Zapier can parse it into interesting fields and send that data along to a sink like a Google Spreadsheet. Examples of well-formatted emails include order confirmations, contact us forms, and newsletter subscriptions.

I have found the Zapier support folks very responsive, whether that was troubleshooting an issue with Google docs, finding out how to pronounce the company name, or explaining why having 100 Zaps reading from one Google spreadsheet was a bad idea. Having responsive support staff reassures me, because once Zapier gets embedded into business processes, ripping it out is going to be very painful and a lot of work.

You can also write your own Zaps if you have custom APIs that you’d like to integrate with. I haven’t explored this much–it does seem like a developer centric task.

Zapier is not an all purpose tool nor a total replacement for developers, but it is definitely a great app to have in your toolbox. Take a look and see what little (or big) niggling problem that you haven’t had time to write code for (or, if you can’t write code, what you haven’t been able to get an engineer to write code for) it might solve.

APIs Useful Tools Web Applications | moore |