Yet Another Pull-To-Refresh Library
Pull to refresh is by far the most popular paradigm used in refreshing feed based views on an iOS device. First introduced by Loren Brichter of Tweetie, pull to refresh has made its way into just about every touch based device out there. Here’s the latest incarnation on the PS Vita (taken from @mattgemmell): In fact, the idea was so good that Brichter decided to legally slap his name on it. Here’s a picture to help you better understand how this technology works (taken from gorumors.com): Thankfully, Brichter doesn’t require you to obtain a license to use it shamelessly in your own app, bless him! Current Solutions Now, our…
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Why American Entrepreneurs Are Superior…
I’ve been living in San Francisco for more than 2 years. I wasn’t an entrepreneur when I moved here and I’m still not. Hopefully one day I will be, but I guess those 2 years have been more of an introduction to entrepreneurship. Discovering the tech startup world in San Francisco has been far more fulfilling than my last 5 years studying in college. Coming from France, attuning to American culture has been a long process for me, and it has taken some time for me to embrace it. Here are some takeaway lessons I’ve picked up over these last years. American Story Telling The simple example I have in…
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My journey though open-source and fun JSON tricks
I recently attended a Ruby on Rails speed dating event here in San Francisco. Participants there were attempting to meet companies who would hire them on fulltime. And they only had five minutes to wow you. This is all over the din of 39 other participants attempting to do the same thing and with the shouting of the organizer barking out minute-by-minute reminders. You’re gonna have to be impressive to stand out, and you will have to leave something behind that you can be remembered by. I’ve been doing open source software for a few years now. I came to Miso through open source. I really like open source, and…
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Adventures in Scaling, Part 3: PostgreSQL Streaming Replication
In my last post in this series, I overviewed how to get PostgreSQL setup, running and properly tuned on your system. This works well to setup a primary database for your system but depending on your needs, you may find yourself in a position where you would like to start taking advantage of the Streaming Replication and High Availability built into PostgreSQL 9. When running a database such as PostgreSQL on a server, a single primary master database that performs all reads and writes for your applications will likely not be able to sustain your traffic forever. At a certain point, your application will generate too many concurrent reads and…
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Work Efficiently With XCode
XCode often slows down the entire system to a crawl, forcing the coder to either restart the application or even the computer itself. Unfortunately, we can’t control how aggressively XCode uses system resources. Fortunately, we can learn to work faster and more efficiently by learning some of the hidden conveniences inside XCode. Below are some tips and tricks I use in my everyday coding sessions. This post has the beginner in mind, though I hope advanced and expert XCode users may occasionally find something useful. **Disclaimer: Examples below are done using XCode 4.2.1 Master Your Shortcuts The goal here is to use the hot keys to speed up your work…
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You’re Overthinking It
You comb Hacker News daily, marveling at the neatly packaged startup tales, uber-effective best practices, super clever engineering solutions, and lots and lots of links to websites filled with Helvetica, minimalism, and pastel colors. You’ve attended Lean Startup workshops, read Four Steps to the Epiphany, and subscribe to the Silicon Valley Product Group blog. Honestly, it’s all very intimidating. My product advice, from one overthinker to another overthinker – throw it all away. I mean, read the articles, enjoy the stories, and try to form your own opinions, but I wouldn’t take it too seriously. A year into my first startup, my first major product epiphany was to never, never,…
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Quips: Hackathon #2 Recap
It’s been a while since our last hackathon, so we were excited to do another to end the year 2011 at Miso. In the 6 months since our last hackathon, the team at Miso has grown significantly and that has allowed us the option to split into two different teams to work out on separate ideas. I got placed on the Quips team, so that’s what I’ll be talking about today. What is Quips? Have you ever hung out with friends, and someone said something so hilarious you wanted to quote them on your social network of choice? That’s the moment we wanted to capture. Drawing inspiration from quote cards…
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Miso Engineering Culture, Part I: we believe in sharing
Within Miso as a company, communication is key Before talking about how the engineering team works, it might be useful to mention Miso is a small team and that we try to communicate efficiently between each other and to be aware of the work others are doing. Still, we don’t want to waste time by attending meetings which aren’t productive for us. That’s why we use several channels of communication at work: Yammer, we use it to post about the status of our work or to share a link for everyone Emails, like everyone else for targeted questions, long updates or event invites Campfire, it’s by far my favorite. We…
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Turn ruby code into simple daemons with Dante
Context At Miso, the engineering team has recently been working on a major shift to our architecture. Namely, moving to a much purer service oriented approach. Our new strategy as a whole is going to be the subject of many blog posts in the future. This transition has required us to setup a lot of new services. These services range from small API services written in Sinatra and Renee to front-end heavy services in Padrino, even to internal services communicating with protobuf messages. Every one of these services has a lot of shared behaviors in common; each needs to log output, be monitored, be daemonized and easily start / stoppable,…
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Collaborate and track tasks with ease using GitDocs
At Miso, we have tried a lot of task tracking tools of all shapes and sizes. However, since we are a small team, we all end up using those in conjunction with just a plain text file where we ‘really’ track our tasks. Nothing beats a simple text file for detailed personal task tracking and project tracking. I have been using text-file based task management since as long as I can remember and most of the team shares this sentiment. A separate issue that commonly comes up is just a place to dump code snippets, setup guides, team references, etc. We have used a wiki for this, and are currently…
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