Notes from Software Debt Book

Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.

Always leave the code in better shape than when you started.

The following questions should help you decide whether to start refactoring when you see an opportunity for it:

1. Does this change directly affect the feature I am working on?
2. Would the change add clarity for the feature implementation?
3. Will the change provide automated tests where there currently are none?
4. Does the refactoring look like a large endeavor involving significant portions of the application components?

Refactor if the answer to the first three questions is an yes. If the answer to the fourth question is yes. Then I use experience as a guide to help me produce a relative size estimate of the effort involved in this refactoring compared to the initial estimate of size for the feature implementation. If the size of the refactoring is significantly larger than the original estimate given to the Product Owner, I will bring the refac- toring up to the team for discussion. Bringing up a large refactoring to the rest of the team will result in one of the following general outcomes:

The team thinks it is good idea to start the large refactoring because its estimated size does not adversely affect delivery of what the team committed to during this iteration.
The team decides that the refactoring is large enough that it should be brought up to the Product Owner. The Product Owner could add it to the Product Backlog or decide to drop scope for the current iteration to accommodate the refactoring.
Another team member has information that will make this refactor- ing smaller or not necessary. Sometimes other team members have worked in this area of code or on a similar situation in the past and have knowledge of other ways to implement the changes needed.


Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.

Design Review

Design review sessions are periodic meetings where team members are able to share and get feedback on design decisions. Effective design reviews involve the development team members. The design review provides a forum for the team to converge on common design decisions and ultimately clarity in the application’s structure. The typical design review session involves all development team members. The agenda for the meeting is sent out to the team beforehand and includes the one or more design decisions that will be discussed. At the meeting, each design decision is presented while the rest of the team asks questions and dis- cusses the merits and challenges they see. Through this discussion the devel- opment team captures action items to take into the software construction process.

How to get Google voice chat to work on mac os

sudo killall coreaudiod

Gitbook Notes

https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook/blob/master/docs/setup.md
https://toolchain.gitbook.com/syntax/markdown.html#images

Full Stack Developer Course Notes

Development Environment Setup

1. Install browser-sync https://browsersync.io/

npm install -g browser-sync

2. browser-sync --version

3. Start the browser-sync to watch all the files for changes.

browser-sync start --server --directory --files "*"

UI User Story Example

Miya is part of the awesome group called The Foundation. She is a developer by trade and she wants to send cold email to do market research in her area of interest, IP law. She tries quickemail.io and finds it's interface very confusing. She is new to cold email marketing. She signsup for toutapp and finds that it is very bloated. She posts on TF forum to get some recommendation for cold email marketing automation tools. They recommend vocus which is also not beginner friendly. She has questions like: Will this allow me to upload a CSV file and schedule the emails to send out based on template. Vocus website does not provide any answers to these questions.

Miya found the quickmail.io interface very confusing to use. Instead of days, you had to convert the days to hours for the followup sequence. It had variation and A/B testing as part of the setup which was not required for her initial set of emails to be sent. It was difficult to find the merge fields and had to contact support several times over the period of 5 days. She did not know whether it was a bug due to the browser she was using or which icon would display the merge fields. She had a specific task to complete but found it extremely difficult to use the product. The training video she found on youtube channel of quickmail.io was irrelevant and she wasted few hours of her time watching the unrelated video to her task. She was very frustrated.

As a developer she started to do research on open tracking and threading features found in other products. She figured out threading is not really required. She found out that only the first email open must be tracked and ignore the email open when they are replying to her email. Scheduling the emails to trigger would require a fair amount of work. She found some good resources on how to authenticate to use the Gmail API for sending emails.

Goal: Cold email and followup for contacting prospects

Business Model Canvas for SaaS Business

Key Partners
What can you outsource to whom?

Web Hosting Providers
IaaS Providers
Open Source Projects

Key Activities
What will you need to master?

Customer interviews
Product Development (Product design, Software Development)
Deployment and Maintenance

Key Resources
What do you ned to build up?

Code base
Developers

Value Propositions
What is your unique value proposition?

Business Productivity and Collaboration

Customer Relationships

Customer Conference
Associations
Events
Acquire and Lockin

Channels
How to communicate and deliver?

Self service
Web
Phone
Email

Customer Segments
Who are your customers?

IP Attorneys

Cost Structure
What are my costs?

Product development
Partner costs (IaaS)
Marketing and Sales
Hosting Fees
Customer Acquisition Costs
Salaries

Revenue Streams
How will you make money?

Usage based, by user or by transaction

The Four Pillars of Wealth

Clay Collins and Perry Marshal recommend:

1. Automated Sale
2. Recurring Revenue
3. Sell a reproducible product or a tool (break time for money dependency and scale)
4. No accounts receivable (Get paid in advance)

1. Find pains
2. Presell
3. Outsource product development

1. Find the problem
2. Sell the solution
3. Hire a developer

1. Idea discovery
2. Sketch the solution (create a paper prototype to solve the problem)
3. Presell the sketch
4. Outsource product development
5. Launch the product

Find booming industries and sell them software tools.

References

Notes from Dane Maxwell's video transcript 
Read The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow

Cold Email Guide

How to achieve reply rates of 40, 50 or 70%.

- Prepare a well targeted prospect list. Don't sell sweets to a diabetics list.
- Number one goal is to get a response (either positive or negative).
- Follow ups lead to 55% of responses.
- Follow up can be a one liner. Just wanted to make sure my email below didn't fall through the cracks.
- Be prepared for rejection.
- Aim for certain ratio and improve it (ex 1 positive reply for each negative reply)
- Contact at least 100 prospects before making any decision
- Make it short, layout a clear offering that compel them into replying
- Just reply 'yes' and I'll send you more information
- Use the name of the person in the email
- Get small commitments before going for big commitments
- You can pre-warm a relationship by using referrals like: Bugs Bunny mentioned I should get in touch with you
- Tuesday to Thursday is the best days to send

Problem Discovery Questions for Conference

I am attending a 3 day conference in my target market. I had to come up with questions based on the amount of time available. The goal is to learn about their problems.

One Question

1. What tasks take up the most time in your day?

Three Questions

2. What's the hardest part of your day?
3. What product do you wish you had that does not exist yet?

Seven Questions

4. What are some unmet needs you have?
5. What could be done to improve your experience with [process/role]?
6. What’s the hardest part about being a [demographic]?
7. What are your most important professional goals?

Google Trend for UX Design

Dealing with Vague Requirements in Software Development

1. Very vague and unknown requirements should be moved out of scope. Use scope control as a way to filter out.
2. Build a quick and dirty throwaway prototype to find answers to the vague / unknown requirements.
3. Identify the vague requirements and ask the product owner the right questions to fill in the blanks.
4. Conduct a requirements grooming session to flesh out the vague requirements.
5. Ask the stake holders to prioritize the backlog and work on the well defined requirements.

Downward Trend of Rails

Top Links for Second Week of Aug 2017

https://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-crash-course-in-analyzing-memory-usage-in-ruby
https://blog.codeship.com/advanced-enumeration-with-ruby/
https://thisbitofcode.com/managing-localization-rails/
https://blog.showoff.ie/using-gemstash-for-private-gem-hosting-8b6170da766c
http://semaphoreci.com/blog/2017/08/03/tips-on-treating-flakiness-in-your-test-suite.html
https://semaphoreci.com/blog/2017/08/09/faster-rails-eliminating-n-plus-one-queries.html
https://www.nopio.com/blog/ruby-state-machine-aasm-tutorial/
http://www.pablocantero.com/blog/2017/08/06/using-ruby-and-amazon-sqs-fifo-queues
https://depfu.io/blog/2017/08/02/bundler-and-private-dependencies

css link

Shay Howe's Book

Find all articles that is not tagged in Rails

ids = Tagging.where(taggable_type: "Article").collect(&:taggable_id).uniq

Article.where.not(id: ids).collect(&:id)

API Documentation with Tabs for Languages

Slate generates html from a markdown document and provides syntax highlighting for different languages that displays in separate tabs.

For internal use, API blueprint is a good option. For external use, slate is a great option to publish documentation. It generates good looking and developer friendly docs. We can copy the slate generated static files to a static site deployed on Google cloud. This is the easiest deployment. It avoids extra work that is required with AWS such as uploading to S3, configuring a bucket as a webserver etc.

Questions

1. Is slate markdown compatible with API blueprint markdown file (.apib) ?
2. Is there a tool that will convert .apib file to slate markdown file?

I started with the schema.rb file from a Rails project that I am currently working on.


References

- Using API Blueprint With MSON
- HTTP Documentation with API Blueprint

Vue.js 2 The Complete Guide Course

Things to focus when watching the video:

1. Using tabs and highlighting selected tab.
2. Defining routes for each tab.
3. Real development workflow with Webpack and Vue CLI
4. Deploying the app to AWS S3

Top Ruby Links for Aug 4, 2017

1. with __dir__ we can restore order in the Universe

2. Lint your Ruby code with Overcommit and static analysis tools

3. Asynchronous Elasticsearch bulk reindexing with Rails, Searchkick and Sidekiq

Learn by doing Vue.js 2 the Right Way

1. Replacing hard-coded URLs with configuration file values for different environments.
    Use webpack-merge and interceptors to configure URL in config folder dev.env.js and prod.env.js
2. API documentation for using JWT for authentication.
3. Using scoped style
4. Using aletifyjs to display form error messages
5. What is the vue-resource interceptor equivalent in axios?
6. vue-auth - Jwt auth library for Vue.js
7. Use vue.js router global guards to protect URLs that require login.

Rails Interview Questions

Ruby

1. What is the difference between a lambda, a block and a proc?
2. What are #method_missing and #send? Why are they useful?
3. Getter and setter methods
4. method overloading (Ruby does not have this feature)
5. Include vs Extend
6. Symbol vs String
7. What does yield do?
8. Difference between && and AND operators
9. Multiple inheritance
10. public, private, protected
11. How can you call the base class method from a subclass? (super)



Rails

1. How do you sort an Array of objects by a particular attribute? What is a better way to do sorting with ActiveRecord?
2. Explain CSRF and how Rails combats it.
3. Explain mass-assignment vulnerability.
4. Explain various forms of caching available in Rails.
5. How is something like 30.seconds.ago implemented?
6. HashWithIndifferentAccess
7. N+1 Query problem
8. has_one, belongs_to, has_many, has_many_through, polymorphic
9. database transactions
10. load, auto_load, require_relative
11. load vs require
12. How can you call the base class method from inside of its overridden method?
13. sql injection (sanitize user input)
14. Include vs Prepend
15. How to implement single table inheritance?
16. Eager loading (includes the association)
17. render vs redirect