I'm Director of Engineering & Product at Close. I'm interested in startups, programming, UX, SaaS, and building great web products. More about me.
What makes a new feature or product update “done” versus what makes it “really done”? At Close.io we developed our own process to answer this question, based on years of shipping new features for our sales communication platform. Today, we want to share this checklist with you.
Read the rest of this entry »I’m working on invoice/receipt generation for Close.io and wanted to create simple PDFs using nothing but HTML.
Using Flask, mimerender, and xhtml2pdf, here’s how:
My blog post on the Close.io blog was pretty popular (18,000 pageviews & lots of HN comments) so I wanted to cross-post it here:
We like to think of our sales software, Close.io, as having a lot of magic under the hood. When we do our jobs successfully, our users may not even notice, but their lives will be made a little easier. We try to make features just work without requiring users to think too much, even if that adds complexity in code.
Here are a few examples:
Read the rest of this entry »We use git and GitHub’s Pull Requests fairly heavily in developing Close.io sales software. My main problem with pull requests as code review is that it focuses my attention too much on the specific lines of code added/removed/modified, but not enough on the context of where they were added/removed.
At the end of a year I like looking back and seeing what I’ve accomplished and what new technologies I started working with in the year. Here’s a little summary.
In doing product management on an engineering-led project, GitHub Issues rock. The killer features are that it’s a) really simple, b) tightly integrated with code (you can reference/close issues via commit messages), and c) facilitates discussion of issues just like it does of code.
What GitHub Issues suck at is being able to get a high-level view, where you can see more than 30 issues at a time, and broken out by milestone or by person. (You can only filter to see issues for one milestone or one person, but not easily move multiple issues between them.)
I’d really like to see a Trello-style interface for managing GitHub Issues. Some very limited integrations exist, but what I’m looking for would let you quickly move issues around between milestones. This would help plan a product roadmap and be able to visualize what the upcoming milestones look like in one place.
We write QUnit tests for Close.io, a big Backbone.js app, to help avoid introducing bugs. Pretty quickly when testing front-end JavaScript code you’ll have to deal with how to test asynchronous callbacks and especially code related to AJAX/XHR requests and how their responses are handled. Here are some basic examples of how to use Sinon.JS to handle this.
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I just got a sweet new MacBook Pro Retina – way faster than my old MBP. I wanted to do a clean install rather than restoring from a TimeMachine backup, which meant reinstalling software and manually transferring stuff over that I really needed. I kept a list…
For a new Backbone.js + Flask project I’m using grunt + grunt-contrib, RequireJS’s r.js, Flask-Assets / webassets for static file (LESS/CSS, JS) compilation. But I needed a good way to get my nicely optimized static files onto a CDN and serving proper HTTP headers.
Using the excellent s3cmd tool, here’s what I came up with.
This example will break for browsers/proxies that don’t support gzip, but this is fine for my needs. Any other solution would either require a custom origin web server or writing different filenames in HTML depending on the request coming in. But since I want to use S3 as my origin this is the easiest/simplest solution.
Since all assets are “built” with a md5 version number hash in the file name, I want far futures headers to cache permanently.
This weekend I upgraded OS X from Lion to Mountain Lion. Documenting steps I had to do to get all my development environments working with MacPorts.
Steps:
I just wrote a pretty in-depth article on the Quizlet Blog: “How We Do Product Development at Quizlet: An Inside Look at the Making of Speller” which describes the process of how Andrew and I created “Speller”, the latest study mode on Quizlet.
…a behind the scenes look at how we created Speller, our engineering challenges and processes, and how we obsessed over the user experience and the educational experience.
Includes some technical details of how we programmed it (mostly JavaScript), the text-to-speech, development process and usability testing, and lots of screenshots of the different iterations we did in order to get the UI right.
It’s a little long, but hopefully worth the read!
In three weeks from today, I will have graduated, with honors, from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Computer Engineering (software emphasis) and a minor in Business Administration. Overall, I’ve had an incredible college experience and have learned a ton, had some great experiences, and built relationships with a lot of really great people.
I thought it’d be worth mentioning the classes at UF that, looking back, had the greatest impact on me. I’ve taken a bunch of classes over the past 4.5 years, but these were the ones that I really can appreciate the most…
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