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Why I think Dashman failed
Almost every time I tell someone what Dashman, one of my startups, was, their response is: “Oh, I really needed that back in 20somethingteen”. Yet I didn’t manage to make Dashman a commercial success. I collected several hundreds of email addresses over years of people interested in Dashman. Yet it failed, nobody bought it. How…
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Buying tools
I have a few maxims when it comes to buying tools. One I heard from Adam Savage and I think he heard it from someone else. When buying a tool you haven’t used before: When buying a tool you haven’t used before, buy the cheapest possible working version. Not the toy one, but the next…
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I’m very proud of what I achieved at Wifinity
Disclaimer: I’m blatantly tooting my own horn here because I’m proud of what I achieved, and very proud of what my team achieved. This is a personal story and a shout out to some awesome people. Today Jordan Bundy, someone I hired when I was at Wifinity sent all of us this message (pic included):…
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Good bye LastPass
I’ve been using LastPass for 7 years or more and I have converted various business and people to use LastPass but that ended today. I’m a security minded person so I’m not abandoning passwords managers, just LastPass. A few days ago I woke up and my LastPass vault looked like this: That looks bad… I…
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How I started documenting at a new company
I once got a job at a company that was acquiring a massive piece of intellectual property from another and it was my task to build a team to maintain and transition the knowledge as well as running assets (servers, databases, etc). The company that hired me had no relevant the documentation and the IP…
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Distributed companies vs time zones
Time zones is the arch rival of distributed companies (or rather, the earth being round, but I digress into the meaning of time zones). When you run a distributed company and you hire people, you might be tempted to hire from all over the world but there’s a problem. If you hire someone that lives…
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How I’m testing seed data generation
When I create a new Rails project I like to have a robust seeds that can be used to quickly bootstrap development, testing and staging environments to interact with the application. I think this is critical for development speed. If a developer creates a feature to, for example, connect two records together, you just want…
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The startup CTO dilemma
About 10 years ago I took my first job as CTO but I wasn’t a CTO, I just had the title. I was a developer with ambition. I made mistakes, very expensive mistakes, mistakes that contributed to the failure of the startup. Since then I have learned and grown a lot and although there’s still…
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Nicer printing of Rails models
I like my models to be printed nicely, to make the class of the model as well as the id and other data available, so, when they end up in a log or console, I can now exactly what it is. I’ve been doing this since before Rails 3 and since Rails projects now have…
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Editing Rails 6.0 credentials on Windows
Rails 6 shipped with a very nice feature to keep encrypted credentials on the repo but separate them by environment, so you can have the credentials for development, staging and production, encrypted with different keys, that you keep safe at different levels. For example, you might give the development key to all developers, but the…