Startup Weekend attempt to shove building an entire business into one weekend. You show up, pitch an idea if you want, vote on ideas, then join up with one that you like. Everyone splits up and gets to work, looking forward to Sunday afternoon when you present your work to a bunch of people.

Thanks!

First, thanks to the organizers. They did a great job answering questions, being available, planning good meals. The venue at the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce was fantastic, as well.

Comparison to Rails Rumble

My previous experience with weekend events like this was Rails Rumble. There, you build an entire web application in 48 hours. It has to work. No one cares about if it makes money. So, coming into the weekend with that premise made me think that we’d actually have some sort of working prototype at the end of the weekend.

On Sunday, they posted the judging criteria on the website. Somehow, I’d missed these during the intro presentation:

Judging Criteria

Customer Validation

• Interview potential and target customers.
• Integrate feedback into your product.
• Build a fan base and would-be customers.

Business model

• Differentiate yourself from competitors.
• Define your customer acquisition and rollout strategy.
• Clearly and realistically articulate your revenue model.

Execution

• Develop a functional protoype.
• Execute well as a team.

I was surprised to see “develop a functional prototype” as 1/3 of the judging. A prototype? To me, that’s something you demo and throw away. For instance, maybe you build it in a mockup tool to get an idea of what screens and flows you’ll have.

So, I focused on this working demo. Exclusively. Meanwhile, the teams that placed had no functionality working; just ideas on how it would work, but they spent a lot more effort on the other sections of their project.

You Ain’t Gonna Need It

In the agile world, we use the term YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It) a lot. We try not to build features that we’re not going to need. As the saying goes, “No code runs faster than no code.” By focusing on building the smallest thing that works, we can be more productive.

Applying this to the business as a whole, we shouldn’t work on businesses that aren’t going to work. Do the smallest thing that works to validate your business before you jump into designing and coding.

This means asking questions first like “will people pay me for this?” and “how will we find customers?”

Currently, our company builds web applications for others, so I haven’t been focused on these questions. As we start thinking about other ideas and products, they’re going to become increasingly important.

Why Isn’t Someone Else Doing It

This is a great question to ask. Thanks to Nick Seguin @nickseguin for bringing it up in conversation. I think a good corollary is “How Are We Going To Do This Better?” or something similar. In short, differentiation.

In Closing

All in all, I had a great time. I learned a lot, put some faces to Twitter avatars, had some great conversations, and enjoyed myself. Certainly, I have a lot of food for though, as well.

Comments are welcome, either below or emailed directly to wes on this domain.

We continued to maintain Lowdown after Rails Rumble, but it’s time to let it go live its own life.

So, as of today:

1. Lowdown is now 100% free with unlimited projects and unlimited collaborators. All current and paid subscribers have been converted to the free plan.
2. Lowdown is now Open Source Software. For more information please visit: http://github.com/databasically/lowdown
3. Support for the free hosted version has moved to Github issues. Please see #2 for more information.
4. We’ve migrated Lowdown to Heroku. All current projects will be intact, although there may be minor (if any) disruption in service as DNS propagates. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks for trying/using Lowdown! If you’re interested in participating in the OS version, please contact us: @databasically

Whenever you see Fetching source index for http://rubygems.org/ when you do a bundle install, that’s bundler downloading the file with all of the gems’ information.

Now, bundler 1.1 is smarter about this. It can ask rubygems.org directly to give it the dependencies for a list of gems (see this post for a better explanation of the actual rubygems bundler API calls) and use that to start downloading the gems.

Here are my results, for a project with a brand new empty gemset:

$ gem install bundler -v=1.0.18 && time bundle install
Installing ...
Your bundle is complete! Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

real	48.174s
user	38.411s
sys	19.535s

$ gem install bundler -v=1.1.0 && time bundle install
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/.......
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/..

Your bundle is complete! Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.

real	22.015s
user	28.377s
sys	18.442s

Speedy!

Check out the bundle install --verbose option if you want more insight into what bundler is doing, too.

What’s New In Ruby

February 2012

Ruby on Rails 3.2 released

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/

• Faster development mode
• End of Ruby 1.8.7

• puts Person.active.limit(5).explain

• Automatically shows when > half a second
• TaggedLogger

ActiveRecord Store

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  store :settings, accessors: [ :color, :homepage ]
end

u = User.new(color: 'black', homepage: '37signals.com')
u.color # Accessor stored attribute

  # Any attribute, even if not specified with an accessor
u.settings[:country] = 'Denmark'

RubyMine 4.0 released

http://blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2012/02/rubymine-4-is-here-to-make-you-feel-the-productivity/

RubyMine is a popular Ruby and Rails IDE by JetBrains (the folks behind IntelliJ IDEA).

A focus has been put on improving its performance and UI, but it now also supports all of Rails 3.2 features, including CoffeeScript compilation right from the IDE.

Spree 1.0 Released

http://spreecommerce.com/

Spree is almost certainly the most popular, fully featured Rails-based e-commerce system and its creators are proud to announce the release of version 1.0.0.

Strano

https://github.com/joelmoss/strano
The Github backed Capistrano deployment management UI.

Guard::RSpectacle

https://github.com/netzpirat/guard-rspectacle
Guard::RSpectacle automatically tests your application with RSpec when files are modified.

Lightning Talks

• Samuel Mullen: using search provider shortcuts in Google Chrome, blog post
• Jaime Bellmyer: searching with leap2
• Advanced REST Client: help view API responses with Chrome app link

So, here’s how:

Edit the virtual alias file:

(sudo) vi /etc/postfix/virtual

Add your alias and the address(es) it forwards to:

ssladmin@example.com   realemail@example.com
contact@example.com    sales@gmail.com,support@gmail.com

Reload the postfix virtual table:

postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

Also make sure you have following line in /etc/postfix/main.cf file:

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

If you didn’t have that and you just added it, reload all of postfix:

service postfix reload

For instance, this report with some $0 projects and some $0 clients. The previous bookmarklet would only hide the clients with a total of $0, which could still leave a lot of cruft floating around:

The new bookmarklet will reduce it down to this:

Here’s the actual code:

And here’s a bookmarklet to drag to your browser bookmark bar:
Harvest Hide Uninvoiced

Note: this is very dependent on the implementation of the Harvest report, so if this breaks in the future, you should ping me on twitter to let me know.

I love the Harvest Uninvoiced Report. I actually built the same thing for myself using the Harvest API, so I could run it at will and see what client balances were.

The Harvest provided one goes a couple steps further, showing expenses and giving a link to create an invoice.

One thing, though:

We have a lot of clients and there might be a while that we don’t do something for someone. Showing all of these clients that don’t have a balance makes it hard to focus on the ones that do have a balance. This is the ‘Uninvoiced’ report, after all, which I tend to use for “who do I need to invoice?”

Digging in, we can use some javascript to find the rows that are non-invoice-able and hide them:

Here’s a bookmarklet for you:
Harvest Hide Uninvoiceable

Drag it to your bookmarks bar, go to the uninvoiced report, and click to hide.

Questions and improvements welcome, best way to get ahold of me is to follow me on Twitter.

How do you remove all of these ^M characters from vim?

:%s/^M//g

The most difficult part of this is entering the control character.  You type ^V to get that, making the actual keys you press this:

:%s/<control>V<control>M//g

Breaking it down:

• :%s – search and replace using regular expressions
• ^M – the control V – control M characters
• g – global replace, ie replace all

DELETE DeletingFromTable
 FROM DeletingFromTable INNER JOIN CriteriaTable
 ON DeletingFromTable.field_id = CriteriaTable.id
 WHERE CriteriaTable.criteria = "value";

The key is that you specify the name of the table to be deleted from as the SELECT. So, the JOIN and WHERE do the selection and limiting, while the DELETE does the deleting.

You’re not limited to just one table, though. If you have a many-to-many relationship (for instance, Magazines and Subscribers, joined by a Subscription) and you’re removing a Subscriber, you need to remove any potential records from the join model as well.

DELETE subscribers, subscriptions
 FROM subscribers INNER JOIN subscriptions
   ON subscribers.id = subscriptions.subscriber_id
 INNER JOIN magazines
   ON subscriptions.magazine_id = magazines.id
 WHERE subscribers.name='Wes';

Deleting records with a join could also be done with a LEFT JOIN and a WHERE to see if the joined table was NULL, so that you could remove records in one table that didn’t have a match (like in preparation for adding a relationship.) Example post to come.

Create an account

Go to https://www.mailjet.com and create an account.

Note: the word “Faculatative” means “optional” on the signup form.

Add your sending address

• Add a sending address (Accounts > Sender Addresses)
• Update your Rails ActionMailer configuration
  • Find the settings you need at: https://www.mailjet.com/account/setup

        SMTP server:
        in.mailjet.com
    
        Username (API Key):
        12345678901234567890
    
        Password (Secret Key):
        99999999999999999999999999999999
    
        Port:
        25 or 587 (some providers block port 25)
    
        Use TLS:
        yes
      

  • Set these settings in config/application.rb (or config/environments/production.rb):

    
        config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false
        config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true
    
        config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
          :address => "in.mailjet.com",
          :enable_starttls_auto => true,
          :port => 587,
          :authentication => 'plain',
          :user_name => "12345678901234567890",
          :password => "99999999999999999999999999999999"
        }
    

Setup domain authentication (SPF and/or DomainKeys/DKIM)

SPF

Click Domain DNS and SMTP setup.
Then, under Domain Authentication, click your domain.

Setting up SPF requires adding a DNS entry. Mailjet will look at your existing one and give you the one to replace it with.
It’ll look something like:
domainname.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 include:spf.mailjet.com mx ~all"
In my DNS manager, I created a TXT record, gave it a name of “domainname.com.” and set the value to the
'v=spf1 include:spf.mailjet.com mx ~all' portion (without the quotes). The full example they give you is for the DNS zone syntax, which you may or may not have.

If you need help configuring this, we would be happy to help you.

DKIM

This is similar, a TXT record that has a key that identifies your server so mail can be sent. Same deal.

Test

Deploy your changes and kick off something that sends a mailer. We have a Notifier model that has a test_email() method that I just called from the console to push a test through. I just went to the reports and saw it there.

All in all, the service seems a little rough around the edges, mostly due to it being a French company that could use a little work on the translations and some serious love on the support documentations. Hope this helps you get started with Mailjet configuration!