On the Move

Given that I started this blog to be a professional outlet for the code that I write, the experiences I have, etc, I have decided it’s time to move Code, Crafts, and Craic over to my professional site, nextjenmobile.com. It seems silly to have them link to each other, and have different identities, mushing them together just makes sense.

My next few posts will be cross-posted to both here, and blog.nextjenmobile.com (the subdomain won’t exist until tonight, don’t click on it, unless it’s like, the 23rd when you’re reading this). Although I will no longer be writing there as of 31 December 2015, I will maintain the name of the blog on NextJen.

Thanks for understanding and I will post when I have completed the transfer. I hope you will join me on this new chapter.

Creating A Website – My Adventure with Launching NextJen Mobile

My very first website was horribly designed, did absolutely nothing, and thankfully, no longer exists. I had a lot of help with that site, I didn’t do any of the hosting things myself. I was 18, and still not sold on the technology thing as a career. I was fully invested in becoming an athletic trainer for the Detroit Red Wings, so I didn’t give it much thought. Even though it wasn’t a great site, I did learn a lot.

I’ve built a couple other half-assed attempts at sites since then, but nothing I ever actually put out on the web. I have a couple blogs (including this one) and I’ve done a lot of customizing on one of them. It’s not quite the same as building from scratch, which I enjoy, though I frequently sit and stare at a blinking cursor before at least some of it starts to just flow out of me. Google and StackOverflow are still my best friends, like just about every developer on the planet.

I’ve been so busy with other projects, work, and life in general, I just haven’t had the energy until this week. But on Monday, I finally put the black and white sketches for NextJen Mobile that I’ve had for a few months into 0s and 1s.

Looking at these sketches, I thought purple (my favorite color) would be the color scheme for the site design. But, it was hard to find a main shade that didn’t make me want to kick something. I decided to take a very scientific approach to picking my new scheme: clicking around on a color wheel until I found one that I liked. I ended up with a darker denim-ish, teal-y blue, that I really liked for my main color  (#00679B, in case you’re wondering).

Once that was done, the biggest question was, what should my logo be? I was drawing so many blanks. I had zero ideas.  Then I had one that sucked.

At least it was something though. I figured that I could get the site out there, and figure out a better logo later. Then I got really lucky when a friend of mine, Clark Rasmussen, who is way better at logo design than I am, pinged me saying that he had an idea for my logo. Once he writes up his post on the work he did with it, I’ll link to it here. Edit: He has since written about the design for this logo, and the design of the new MIRide logo here.

Way better, am I right?! Thank goodness for more talented friends. With an awesome logo, I was finally at the step of actually releasing this to the web.  Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve never actually done this part on my own, so I was nervous.

First thing I did was ask around at work about hosting services. One of my coworkers mentioned that a different coworker raves about NearlyFreeSpeech.net. After poking around a bit, I decided to move forward with them. I trust both coworkers’ judgement, they are both incredibly smart, so the choice was not difficult.

So far, I have been very pleased with them. Set up was simple, the FAQ was very helpful when I ran into problems, as well as suggestions for SFTP tools. I use WinSCP at work, but I have a mac at home, so obviously that was not an option for me. I downloaded Fugu, a free mac equivalent to only be informed by Elphaba that mac doesn’t support PowerPC apps any more, so that was not a choice for me. Transmit4 had a seven day free trial, so I gave it a shot. I was very pleased with the UI and the experience I had with them last night. (Because I had to upload new files a couple times to fix things that I may or may not have forgotten to do during the initial building… oops).

Somethings that I discovered while putting my site on the web last night:

  1. If an image is not visible on your site, but you have everything appropriately referenced, check the permissions in your public directory. In Transmit4 you can right click the file, hit ‘Get Info’, and you can edit the permissions in the resulting dialogue box. Crazily enough, the world has to have read permissions for them to be able to see the image.
  2. After pointing the domain at the correct DNS servers, my site still wasn’t serving to the world. And I couldn’t figure out why. Turned out the problem was that I was still on a free “check us out!” account, not a paid account. Once I was on a paid account, my site started working. Crazy how that works!

It has been a lot of fun to work on this site, and actually build something of my own that ends up live on the web, albeit a little anti-climactic.  Part of the “anti” being that I didn’t just have the site be magically LIVE when I pushed the files up to the server due to point #2 above. Somehow, it’s less nerve-wracking to push my own files to the web, than when I am pushing them to the LIVE servers at work. Maybe because if I screw something up on my own site, I won’t be costing my employer money in DevOps, lost sales, and what have you. At least at this point it won’t cost me any money if I screw something up!

Anyway, I have learned a lot during this experience, and I’m already thinking about how I can apply what I’ve learned to a few other projects I have in the pipes. I’m retro-ing on myself, if you will. This is one awesome adventure and I’m looking forward to the next step on the path.

Lessons Learned: Trello Edition

It’s been a long, long while since my last post, but I recently gave a talk on the lessons we learned using the API that Trello provides. These are broad lessons about what would make Trello work for our team better, and how we hope to move forward.

This talk was given at TechSmith’s internal conference, ReCon, on 6 October 2014. The blurred out sections are just me covering my own bum, and protecting TechSmith’s interests.
If you would like to get more information on the code we wrote, you can go here, here, here, and see Clark’s talk here.

Enjoy!

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing – A WRAP UP!

Whew.

What an adventure! My first Grace Hopper conference has come to a close. I am writing from the Minneapolis Airport, gate F10, where I am thinking about the whirlwind that the last few days have been.

It has been a very inspirational four days. Being surrounded by 4,600 other technical women is a boost for me.  Although I know that there are other women in tech, I don’t see them in person as much as I see men in tech. My husband’s entire team (save for two amazing women) are men. So many prominent people in tech are men. But I think we can change that, and I am really excited to be a part of making that change.

I wanted to share what I learned (or what I was reminded) over the last four days.

1. Women are awesome. AWESOME.

2. Women don’t negotiate their salaries enough and most often they are paid $6,500 less than their male counterparts – and that’s just starting salary.

3. I learned how to use Google Glass, and I had the opportunity to play with it. The wifi wasn’t working in the career fair center, so I didn’t get to use it in that capacity, but it was fun. I don’t know if I will ever want to own a pair, but it was fun to play with.

4. getraised.com. Fabulous resource. I had an opportunity to meet Matt Wallaert, one of the minds behind the site. He is a great speaker and I really enjoyed his lightening talk and speaking with him after. One of my favorite things that he said during his talk was, “Telling me that I care about feminism because I had an awesome mom is like telling me I only care about racism because I have black friends. And that is fucking bullshit.” I love that, we need more fantastic men helping women advocate for themselves and advocating for them when they can’t or won’t do it for themselves.

If you get the opportunity to see him speak, do it, he is a very energetic, engaging and funny speaker.

5. When speaking to a client about their product, write it down and follow up after the meeting via email to keep everyone on the same page. The human memory is faulty.

6. The Mall of America is huge. That has nothing to do with the conference, but I’ve never been there before, so that’s something I learned.

7. There is a very diverse opinion about MOOCs. Not all good, either. But I like them, a lot. They are an excellent resource to learn something new.

8. Brenda Chapman.

9. The TSA likes my Box shirt. Always a good thing, right?

10. Always talk to every company at a career fair, you never know where your next opportunity might present itself.

11.  Networking is EXHAUSTING.

12. Don’t forget to have fun!

There is a lot to learn by attending conferences, and I am really glad that I went. It helped, in a strange way, to combat my impostor syndrome. I hope it sticks around.

Cheers!

Learning Ruby — The Beginning of Another Journey

For the last year and few months, I have been learning a new field – really learning – not just playing like I had for the previous many years. I had dabbled in web development, even having my own (terrible and never updated) website. I only ever seemed to know how to get myself in trouble, but not how to get myself out. Now, I’m trying to learn as many different ways to get myself in trouble — and then get myself out!

In the last year and change I have learned C, HTML, CSS, php, MySQL, JavaScript, jQuery and now I am learning Ruby.

How did I get to Ruby?

Almost two months ago I applied for an apprenticeship at 8th Light, a company in Chicago. I managed to progress to an interview with Mike, after submitting several iterations of a TicTacToe program in JavaScript.

Unfortunately, I was not in a place in my coding journey to be offered a position at this time.

BUT(!) Mike is kind enough to have offered to personally mentor me, which I have accepted. Mike suggested that one of my next steps would be to learn straight up Ruby (not Ruby on Rails, just yet).

Over the last week I have been working my way through the Ruby Koans to help learn Ruby through test driven development. Two birds with one stone, as it were!

The format of the koans was a little difficult for me to pick up at first, but once I got the hang of that, I really started to enjoy them.  One of my favorite parts of the koans are the little bits of advice just above your progress bar. The best one is “sleep is the best meditation.”  I got stuck towards the beginning of the koans, it was late, and that was the mantra above my progress bar. So, I went to sleep, woke up the next morning, and it just clicked. Since then, I’ve been going through the koans and understanding most of what I do, if not, I have Google, StackOverflow and Mike.

I look forward to sharing my coding adventures here, and I am glad to have you along for the ride!