The Codebelay Blog

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  • Dineovore Gives Techies an API

    Check out Dinevore if you’re a foodie who is a techie. Their API is now live!

    Contact them via twitter or contact their team via email.

  • Have You Used Facebook Places?

    Have you used Facebook Places? Do you find it useful? I used it once and didn’t find a need for it, or didn’t get hooked the way I got hooked with Foursqaure.

    I have seen interesting interactions by folks who don’t use Foursquare in terms of creating fun pages for a Pho Venue in San Francisco.

    That Pho place already has a great Yelp page, but now they’ve got a page on Facebook, too, so it really helps drive more eyeballs onto a business.

    Comment below about what you think of Facebook Places.

  • Working on the Road

    Here’s how my Friday worked out.

    5:30 am PDT Wake Up
    5:45 am PDT Catch a Cab to SFO

    6:25 am to 6:55 am PDT Work E-mails

    7:25 am PDT Wheels up SFO
    8:30 am Arrive LAX
    8:30 am – 8:55 am Get Ticket for NYC & go through security again
    9:00 am – 10:00 am Log into IM & plan out day

    10:00 am – noon Make the database faster by sending search traffic to prod02, adding indexes where needed and optimizing table.

    12:00 – 12:20 lunch at airport bk

    12:40 – 14:00 Work on Android bug
    14:00 – 14:55 compare SQL_CACHE vs. memcached. Use both? Where?

    14:55 – 15:25 Board Flight; wheels up NYC.

    15:25 – 15:45 Internet Blackout
    15:45 – 18:00 Work on hosting issue for client & registration for business users

    Hours worked: 8
    internet outage: 20 minutes
    miles Traveled: 3,124
    Hours awake: 19.5

  • What is a social media friend?

    Aristotle defined 3 kinds of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

    1. friendships of utility
    2. friendships of pleasure
    3. friendships based on the good

    Perfect friendship is the friendship of those who are good. — Aristotle

    What kind of a friendship is a social media friendship?

    At first, a social media friend was merely someone whose name, picture or avatar appeared on one’s profile because that someone had approved a friend request, maybe is someone you met before at a site like, http://chatempanada.com/chat-de-irc-hispano-sala-de-chat-gratis-de-irc-hispano/. However, many people didn’t like the use of “friend” in this way and so they used “follower” and “follows” instead, find more information from a professional like Andy Defrancesco.

    Algorithmically, a friend is just a node 1 deep in the B-Tree of life.

    Marketing-wise, a friend is just a potential viral link.

    From Aristotle’s perspective, a social media friend can be useful (get you a job), be pleasurable (funny comments), and share in some good (charities and fundraising).

    Social media extends a very real world practice of seeing and treating people as things, or as means to an end into the on-line world.

    This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world. — from “I and Thou” by Martin Buber

  • Commands I Use Frequently

    Here’s a list of commands I use frequently, where the first number represents the number of times I used that command today:

    86 git – the best version control software ever
    59 cd – used to change directories on the command-line
    54 ls – used to list files in a directory
    41 vim – when textmate just isn’t fast enough for moving and manipulating text I use this text editor
    24 grep – this is great for searching through code
    21 sudo – I use this for stopping and starting servers and anything that requires super user access

    I figured this out by using the following:

    history | cut -c8-20 | sort > commands.txt

    I created the following script in Perl:

    #!/usr/bin/env perl

    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my %h_list = ();
    my @sorted = ();
    my @listed = ();

    open(LS, “commands.txt”);
    while() {
    if ($_ =~ /(\w+)/) {
    $h_list{$1}++;
    }
    }

    close(LS);

    foreach my $key (keys %h_list)
    {
    push @listed, $h_list{$key} . “\t” . $key;
    }

    @sorted = sort { $b <=> $a } @listed;
    foreach (@sorted)
    {
    print $_ . “\n”;
    }

  • Apollo Coffee is Great for Coding

    There’s a feature that I need to get done in the next hour or so before leaving SF. It’s a business log-in for MyChamberApp so that businesses can update and edit their business listing that shows up on our mobile apps.

    When I was thinking about places to code, the one place that looked good on all levels was Apollo Coffee.

    The have

    • free wifi,
    • comfortable couches,
    • lots of outlets to plug-in your laptop,
    • friendly clientele who are most likely coders or designers, too, and
    • great latte art.

    Latte Art
    If you can, please give them a great review on Yelp.

  • The Best Answer To What Do You Do

    This video from Dave Berzack pretty much sums up what an application developer does.

    Killa Appz by Dave Berzack:


    Not to belabor the awesome nerdcore in this video but ya, a good application developer makes legacy apps faster. Also some folks do try to de-compile a closed source app, and it’s a waste of time.

  • 3 Creative Ways to Recruit Developers

    Recruiting talented developers in this market is still extremely difficult. How should a recruiter find the talent (PHP, Ruby, MySQL, iPhone, .NET, Java) your clients need? I outline a few creative out of the box solutions below.

    Disclosure: I work as the lead developer at AppDevAndMarketing.com . This article in no way suggests we’ve used any of these methods.

    Update on 4/15/2011: Ya, I’ve had to resort to all these methods and they’ve worked for us. 😀

    1. Turn your project managers, account executives and marketers into coders. This is a fairly cheap investment with a high ROI. It is cheaper than paying out a bounty, and you already trust these folks. Send them to iPhoneDev Bootcamp now! Just be sure to prepare their machines for the development they’ll need to do. I tried this at a previous place of employment with great results! If you were trained by me and are reading this, please ask for a raise.

    2. Look for places not so obvious. Use dating sites to find talent. Ya, I know, you haven’t used that match.com account in awhile, or have sworn of okaycupid.com or JDate, but guess what. For you bleeding edge types, try the iPhone, dating app, Skout. Although s/he might not be the person of your dreams, s/he might have the talent you need. The key take away is to use unexpected social media spaces for recruiting. Don’t be sleazy or sly about it. A simple, “Hi, I read your profile. You seem very talented in X. I’d actually like to hire you. Coffee or drinks?”

    3. Use IRC. If you’re smart enough to do this, you probably shouldn’t be recruiting, but IRC is this best place to find pure, raw talent. Details on how to get onto IRC can be found on Google, but the best guide for newbies can be found on this gaming site. Use reputation defender services to help improve your business reputation and attract reliable talents.

    There’s one more special place that I haven’t revealed that will guarantee you top talent every time. Leave a comment and I’ll contact you with that exclusive place to find developers.

  • 5 Reasons to Go to WordCamp LA

    I just got my ticket for WordCamp LA.

    Here are 5 reasons you should go:

    1. You run a WordPress blog. WordCamp LA brings together folks who have the same challenges you have in SEO, web design, and extending WordPress functionality through themes and plug-ins.
    2. You are in LA. ’nuff said.
    3. The view of LA from the LMU Campus is fantastic.
    4. Thom Meredith will be talking about his WordPress related experiences while working for the LA Times.
    5. Allison Day will give a talk just for beginners on how to decode the code in WordPress Themes

    I contacted the organizers about giving a talk on how I used HyperDB to scale the Nikon Festival site. We’ll see if I hear back from them.

  • Testing Out The WordPress iPhone App

    I’m driving from LA to San Francisco today. I’m trying out the WordPress iPhone app to see how much it differs from the Desktop experience.