TripJam was born out of a frustration with planning trips with my friends: conversations were scattered between group chats and quickly buried by other topics; the important details of the trip were split between spreadsheets, Google Maps, and chats; it was difficult to determine what needed to happen next to…
If you're building a side project your motivation likely fits in the overlap of two broad categories: education (and, in general, practicing the joy of your craft) and money (clout, fame, etc). The story of these three dead projects is ultimately the story of how (not) to balance these motivations…
My motivation for developing QuickQ, a knowledge sharing platform, is to eliminate knowledge silos within growing teams. One of the most common sources of knowledge siloing is from microservices. I don't oppose microservices - once you're past a certain scale they have their place - but I have noticed they…
In the rapid-growth phase of a startup, one of the most challenging problems is ensuring that your growing team has access to the required knowledge to properly and efficiently do their jobs. This is an issue in every company, but it's particularly difficult for a startup for several reasons. With…
Note: As was pointed out in numerous comments on Hacker News and here, this approach is problematic for a number of reasons. Transferring a secret key between devices in this manner can leave you vulnerable to serverside exploits and increases the likelyhood that your key will be exposed. This method…
When I announced my group chat application, Mentat, on some forums a few weeks ago, a common question was "Why would I use this over the apps already out there?" Fair enough; while I've derived a lot of personal enjoyment from designing this side project from the ground…
At work I've recently had to build and release an Android app many times over, each time with slight bug fixes and updates, for a client to test. I'm hoping to incorporate Fastlane and/or a CI tool to automate this soon, but in the meantime I'm burdened with the…
Learning Erlang, and the OTP framework in particular, has given me a better understanding of distributed systems and their fundamental building blocks. Before this, my experience with distributed systems was solely in the realm of Kubernetes, which we use at work for deploying scalable, distributed web services. I was introduced…
A while ago I published redux-remote-datatable. It's a React and Redux-based table for serverside-processed data, and it looks like this: At the request of a GitHub user, I added an example implementation of the API written in Ruby on Rails. You can find that here. This is the server I…
One of my most frequently-used open-source tools is datatables.net, a jquery-based interactive table with dynamic sorting and searching. I sought to bring the simplicity of that project's serverside API to React, using Redux to handle state changes. The result is redux-remote-datatable. I limited the scope solely to server-processed data…