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Hey, I'm JP!
I worked with many startups and touched just about everything possible in a startup.
From software development to hiring a distributed team. From leading a team to cleaning your Google Analytics data, do some conversion rate optimization plus some sales.
I am a SaaS consultant and can help you with your code, analytics, and marketing or just general SaaS things.
I have some availability, let's chat! š
TL;DR: In June of 2017, I started a second SaaS, Simple Segment. Iāve shut it down a few days ago. Iām doubling down on Metrics Watch and still do consulting (a lot of Google Analytics consulting and also building SaaSes and web apps, reach out and say hi!)
So you have this new business idea. Are you ready to get your MVP (minimum viable product) built by a contractor? Congrats!
Important disclaimer: I am NOT a lawyer. This is based on my personal experience and my understanding of the law.
So you have this nice Jasmine suite thatās very useful and maybe even proud ofā¦but it takes over a minute to run? It seems to get stuck at one or a few specs but you canāt figure out which one? I had that exact problem this morning while working on my SaaS, Metrics Watch (near real-time alerts for Google Analytics).
Thereās some people who will change your life, some will know it and change it radically. On the other hand, there are the people that you meet and actually change your life quite a bit too, but might not know, because they only said one sentence that triggered a life change, or they introduced you to someone who changed your life. I had a lot of those moments, like everyone, but Iām going to tell you a few stories. Why? I want you to have a better life, whatever that means for you, by meeting people. Meet people. If you meet people and have honest discussions and relations, I think a lot of great things will happen to you.
Now. Now is the time. September 16th will be my last day at Rainforest QA. I decided to leave and start doing freelancing while bootstrapping Metrics Watch.
I have been working on a project for a few months now that I am about to launch in a few weeks: Metrics Watch. What is it doing? Alerts for Google Analytics (and other metrics sources).
As some of you might have noticed, I recently changed job and I am now working at Rainforest QA (check us out if you do anything web-related!). Why am I telling you that? Because I am introducing you the result of the test project I made before joining the fine folks of Rainforest: Fourchette.
A lot of great gems do this: they automatically include themselves into ActiveRecord::Base, or even worse, into Object or Class directly. I am looking at you, state_machine. In some cases, it is enough for me to not use it (still looking at you, state_machine).
10 minutes. This is all you need. In fact, there is an extra buffer in those 10 minutes to get your configuration working. Let's do this!
I have just pushed to Rubygems the new versions of Monologue and monologue-markdown. All the details inside.
The plan with that blog post, which is more of a step-by-step thing where I wonāt explain a lot of things, but do it, is to have a VM with Dokku installed where you can push your app built with one of the supported language (by default: Ruby, Node.js, Java, Play!, Python, PHP, Clojure, Go, Dart) and run it with a PostgreSQL 9.1 server in itās own Docker container. Iāll assume Rails for a few Rails specific steps, but you can skip those if you are not a Rails person.
This sentence could have different meanings:
People get in touch with me quite often to ask me how to learn Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails, get better or updated with their craftsmanship. Here are some resources I think are awesome, some paid, some free.
You just made a big change that broke a lot of tests and you would love to know which specs have the most failing tests? Here is how to add a breakdown of the files with the most failing specs.
You know what is Monologue, right? It is a basic blogging engine built as a Rails mountable engine and has few dependencies to make it easy to embed in an already existing Rails app. You can also use it in a brand new Rails app! It has few features but it is easy to extend.
As you might know, I worked with three guys on a hackaton last weekend: Rails Rumble. We had 48 hours to build an app. We had a lot of fun! That was my first real hackaton and most probably not the last one. Letās see how we did.
Rails Rumble has started around 21 hours ago. What are we up to? Here is the objective (from our Rails Rumble page):
Last week I decided to register to Rails Rumble. I had no idea what would be my project at first. I had a few ideas but still was alone and not sure of what would be my project yet. Iāve invited a friend and ex-coworker, Alex, earlier this week and we did a planning session, short & sweet. There was no doubt, we would build Wizenews.com
TL;DR: I have just released the first public beta of Monologueās next ābigā version. Say welcome to 0.2.0.beta3!
Ok, that was an easy one.
All that being said (hum, nothing?), I'll participate to my first real hackaton this week-end: Rails Rumble. 48 hours to create a full-fledged app, fun? Hell yeah!
UPDATE 2: this blog is NOT running on Monologue or Vocal but on Jekyll, hosted on S3 with Cloudflare in front of it.
I just released a minor version of Monologue which contains a few small features and few bug fixes. There is a ābreakingā change about the URL patterns, but a migration is included. Do not forget to run a ādb:migrateā.
I recently started to ask myself if I should be doing a simple website forĀ Monologue to separate my personal blog from Monologue related stuff. I would see a blog (surprise!), few guides there, acces to a forum maybe or maybe I should just start an IRC channel and a Google Groups? Eventually there could also be a list of extensions. It might be too early? Any thoughts?
Iāve launched Monologue two weeks ago now. Itās been a great ride since then. There was much more noise around it than I could have dreamed of for an initial release. Hereās a summary of what happened and whatās next.
I recently started to work on a basic blogging engine. It is a Rails (mountable) engine which means it can be mounted within an already existing Rails 3.1+ app or in a new Rails app dedicated to a blog. It also means it has a completely isolated namespace. It has been powering this blog for sometime now and I have the pleasure to announce today that it reached it's first stable release on rubygems. It is called Monologue. It has a really short list of features and that is what I wanted, for now at least. We'll see where that leads Monologue in the future.
Rails engines are awesome, but can also be a pain in the [choose your word]. Mixing Spree and Refinery is a great example of how things can go bad. Both are great products that are easy to extend, but both are using Devise. And then the depency nightmare starts. They both require Devise 2, yay! They still use both Devise, so, what engine will handle logins, logouts, roles, user management, etc? Spree or Refinery? Can you feel the pain? I did feel itā¦
I first launched that blog with a bought theme that I stripped down. I didnāt like the result as much I as I wanted to like it. Still, I decided it was time to launch my blog, so I did. But now, I trashed āoldā look āredesignedā it from āscratchā with a simple design, which was the goal at first. I used Skeleton. You should take a look at it.
I have used open source products for a long time. I first used Linux around 1997 or maybe before, can't remember exactly. What I remember is that it was way, WAY, less intuitive to install and use. It was still great. I could also tell you how bad was my first lines of PHP which were probably written in 1997 or 1998. It was horrible. Still talking about my code here. I have always been a huge open source fan, but not a purist who can't see the right solution for a given problem.
A nice addition to Rails that came with version 3.1 was the mountable engines which are basically full Rails apps that you can mount in another Rails app. They have fully isolated namespace, which is great! That will let you add, say, an e-commerce solution like Spree, a forum like Forem or a CMS like Refinery or Locomotive in your own Rails application.