Ajmal Afif ajmalafif

Computers

13" Macbook Pro 3.3 GHz i7 (late 2016)
Microsoft Surface Book (2016)

Peripherals

I was wrapping up 310 (Robust Production Quality Applications with Rails) after 3 busy weeks and 168 hours of work. I felt very comfortable building modest applications end-to-end and integrating with third party API's like Stripe and Twilio.

I was considering the review project I was going to build (#spaced repetition anyone?) that would encapsulate the course. As I'm reaching this point Gavin McGimpsey (we know him, we love him) posted about Ruby Rampage--a 48 hour hackathon.

Serendipity! It's always nice to outsource motivation for mundane work so you can save a portion of your willpower (AKA glucose/ketones) to stay mentally 'frosty' (we are all cognitive misers, so sayeth Nobel Psychologist Daniel Kahneman).

Plus, it was a chance to compete--iron sharpens iron and all that.

The Verdict

So how did it go? Well, I went into the weekend confident, slipped on the starting line, and failed completely. It was terrific.

Setup Work

Make a list of competitive/alternative services: See competitors.md file
Set up Google News alerts for "side project marketing" and "startup marketing".
Make list of blogs, subscribe to RSS feeds in Feedbin:
- Startup marketing blogs
- Side project blogs
- Small business marketing blogs
- Chicago small business/startup bloggers
Come up with a name and domain name

Auto-deploying built products to gh-pages with Travis

This is a set up for projects which want to check in only their source files, but have their gh-pages branch automatically updated with some compiled output every time they push.

Create a compile script

You want a script that does a local compile to e.g. an out/ directory. Let's call this compile.sh for our purposes, but for your project it might be npm build or gulp make-docs or anything similar.

The out/ directory should contain everything you want deployed to gh-pages. That almost always includes an index.html.

Make it real

Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discussions around concrete examples, not handy-waving abstractions. Don't say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it

Nothing is real until it's being used by a real user. This doesn't mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Do it with style

This is a very rough script to export your octopress files to Ghost. You will still need to check your data but it will give you a head start. Feel free to fork and optimize the script for your purpose.

The following should be considered:

You need to execute the script in the source/_posts directory
You need to manually copy all the images to /var/www/ghost/content/images
Images with external URLs are not handled
Blockquotes have their issues
Lists are not exported correctly

	<div class="grid">
	<div class="grid__item one-half medium-down--one-whole">
	<p>One Half<br>
	One Whole (medium down)</p>
	</div>
	<div class="grid__item one-half medium-down--one-whole">
	<p>One Half<br>
	One Whole (medium down)</p>
	</div>
	<div class="grid__item one-quarter large--one-half medium-down--one-whole">

	{% if settings.type_base_family contains 'Google' %}
	{%- assign type_base_parts = settings.type_base_family \| split: '_' -%}
	{% capture baseGoogleUrl %}{{ type_base_parts[1] }}:400,700{% endcapture %}
	{{ '//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=' \| append: baseGoogleUrl \| stylesheet_tag }}
	{% endif %}
	{% if settings.type_header_family contains 'Google' %}
	{% unless settings.type_header_family contains type_base_parts[1] and settings.type_header_family contains '700' %}
	{%- assign type_header_parts = settings.type_header_family \| split: '_' -%}
	{% capture headerGoogleUrl %}{{ type_header_parts[1] }}:{{ type_header_parts[2] }}{% endcapture %}
	{{ '//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=' \| append: headerGoogleUrl \| stylesheet_tag }}

	{
	"name": "Typography",
	"settings": [
	{
	"type": "header",
	"content": "Headings and buttons"
	},
	{
	"type": "select",
	"id": "type_header_family",