Misc Posts

Photo: Marco Walker

As a vinyl collector (can you smell my elitism?), I really enjoyed learning more about the process. If only Mr. Rogers were able to narrate it for me.

"When I first landed in Portland — way back in November — one of the first events I went to was Startup Weekend. One of the first people I met was Cloudability CEO Mat Ellis.

He immediately turned and introduced me to Colby Aley, one of his engineers, and told me that Aley is among the best developers in town."

Great episode of The Talk Show where Jason Fried joins John Gruber to discuss the recent rebranding of 37 Signals to Basecamp, the simple secret to success in business and why DHH doesn't particularly care for fajitas. Queue it up on your next commute.

Looking forward to seeing how this turns out. Congrats to Linda on raising over $200k for this.

Really enjoyed this post by Lyza Gardner about knowing when to admit that you don’t know about a specific technology…yet.

We wanted to congratulate Ada Developers Academy up in Seattle, WA who successfully raised $46k for their project, which aims to teach more women how to program with Ruby on Rails. We look forward to hearing how the program goes with their students!

Make it Happen!

Wow. This is a game changer for small retail shops that sell their products online.

We’ve spoken to several companies over the past several years about their frustrations with maintaining a single inventory across two platforms (physical and online). Many of these stores were stuck on some custom eCommerce tool that a freelance developer built them several years ago. They weren’t being updated (with security patches, newer Rails releases)… the original developer is long gone and are faced with the scenario of having to hire a team like us to upgrade and improve their site.

In many of these scenarios, we have highlighted that services like Shopify are likely to be a better investment going forward. Just because they’ve invested thousands and thousands into an existing custom platform doesn’t mean they should continue to. While we live and breath off of designing applications and writing code… we don’t want to see anyone waste their money. In many scenarios, the POS was completely disconnected… and we’ve met many shops that are dealing with a QuickBooks inventory and have all these duplicate steps in their process.

I’m really glad to see that Shopify stepped up and went straight down to the retail level. This should alleviate a lot of pain for the small retail shops.