CodeSimple by Brad Milne

The One Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster

I spend a fair amount of my own time teaching myself to code and recently, trying to build an actual application that I plan to put online and have other people use. Recently, while I was in a bit of slump trying to make a major push on the app. I knew that the next stage - figuring out the DB structure and then coding a music quiz - was going to be difficult.

In fact I knew that it was going to be a grind and that the majority of the my weekend was going to be dedicated to reading out-dated Stack Overflow articles and struggling to find simple solutions to simple problems. But the day before, an incredible developer that I work with gave me a piece of advice I won’t be forgetting anytime soon:

The key to being a good developer is to be able to find your answer as quickly as possible without learning anything else.

To be honest, it hurt when I heard it because I literally have spent probably close to 100 hours so far looking for answers online and getting caught up into learning something else. You know how it is… because you don’t know what you don’t know it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that whatever you’re learning at the time is worthwhile. IT ISN’T.

The most important thing you need to do is launch a product. Finish you application, get the website live, etc. Anything that keeps you from it is a distraction that you’ll have plenty of time to learn about when you need to finish a project and that exact issue is stopping you from it.

Ever since then I’ve been much more productive because I don’t feel bad ignoring most of what I read about Rails and coding online - the same stuff that would have me worried that I don’t know enough.

Posted 3 months ago

18 notes

Tags: rails, coding, startups, learning to code,

Keeping Your Rails Development Environment As Similar To Production As Possible

It’s a pain in the ass to setup a local development environment that mimics what you’re going to be deploying on Heroku but I’ll tell you right now - it’s worth it.

The way I’ve always had it set up was SQLite for my local DB with Webrick as my local server and then using the standard Heroku defaults ( I believe at the time of writing it’s Postgres and the Thin webserver) on production. Like many others I pretty much reused what I learned in Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial and went with it.

Unfortunately while working on an application that I’m putting together now, I ran into a multi-hour frustrating issue that finally convinced me I need to go through the pain and learn to setup a proper local development environment.

(For those interested the issue that I ran into had to do with a Boolean DB field that caused a conflict between my local SQLite and my production PostgreSQL DBs.)

As usual - I’m so grateful and happy to pay the $9/month for my subscription to RailsCasts where he has an amazing tutorial about setting up a project using Postgres as your local DB and migrating an existing SQLite DB to Postgres. While it took me a little bit of time to sort out the workflow of creating a Postgres DB and migrating them, I haven’t once yet experienced any pain in pushing DBs up to Heroku.

A bit of upfront work but I know that I’m saving myself many frustrating hours in the long run.

Posted 3 months ago

1 note

Tags: coding, startups, rails, postgres,

Brad Milne’s Latest Post on Content Marketing Institute

getelevate:

Just a note to let you know that my latest post on content marketing distribution is online. The topic is ‘3 B2B Content Distribution Turbochargers You Should Activate.’ Please reshare!

Reblogged 3 months ago from getelevate

2 notes

My Experience: Rails vs. Django

I’ve read enough times to not worry about which language or framework to learn and I know that it makes sense. But I recently made the decision to switch to learning to code using Rails instead of Django even though we use Django at Elevate.

A major tradeoff is that I can’t ask any of the incredible guys I work with to take a look at whatever is tripping me up (and there’s ALWAYS something to give me problems.) That said I never asked them too much since I respect their time and our joint commitment to the company too much to burden them with my beginner’s questions.

The reason that I made the switch though was because I found that it was easier in Rails to make progress on my own. Especially as a beginner, I find it easy to buy into the ‘convention over configuration’ that Rails preaches. The truth is I know nothing about servers and I have absolutely no independent preferences for any software. The only thing I care about is that I can build a simple version of whatever I’m trying to do in as little time and with as little frustration as possible.

Spending a few months with each will teach you that they both can do the exact same stuff and they’re both advanced, awesome pieces of software that help you develop things quickly. The only thing that should sway you is how quickly can you develop as a programmer with either one. Between Code School and most importantly, RailsCasts, I find it quicker to advance using Rails.

In any case, take the time to research the learning resources for whatever technology you’re planning on choosing. You’re going to be spending 80% of your time there instead of in your text editor - believe me.

Good luck and keep coding!

Posted 7 months ago

1 note

Tags: rails, django, coding,

APIs for New Coders (Django + Bootstrap + Twython)

In a previous post I detailed how I wanted to learn how to connect to Facebook using a small Django project. My thinking is that just about any web application these days has to connect in some way to the major platforms online (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) and just about any ambitious coding project you want to take on in the future needs to connect to a payments provider (Stripe, Braintree, etc.) if you’re ever planning on making money from it.

And outside of the social + payments world, there are so many fantastic services available go developers now for email to photo sharing to anything else you can imagine, you’re going to have to learn how to hook up your project to someone else’s API.

For the complete beginners, the best definition I can give you comes from Wikipedia:

The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and updated in multiple locations on the web.

Essentially, if an online service has an API you can connect your application to it and make use of the content / user profiles on the service.

Although I first started out thinking I’d dive into the Facebook API, since we use the Twitter API extensively at work, I figured if I ran into some issues like I usually do I could easily find out the answer.

After a bunch of research where I looked at various Django apps like Django-Social-Auth and Tweepy I decided to go with Twython because I could best understand how the code actually worked and how I wanted to use it.

To get started I copied a Django skeleton with Bootstrap that I have saved locally. I then copied the example models.py, views.py, urls.py and tweets.html from the incredibly useful example file that Twython creator Ryan McGrath put together.

The only hangup at that point was that I needed to go and change the app name (since I didn’t clone the app directly) in the three files to the app name I had created for the project and I was good to go. /Login sent me to authenticate my Twitter credentials and /user-timeline prints out a list of tweets.

I’m going to dig further into the project I’m working on and my changes will be up on GitHub but I’m pretty damned pleased I managed to connect an app to the Twitter API.

Mission Accomplished!

—

If you’re interested in what I get up to during the day check out www.getelevate.com.

Posted 9 months ago

Tags: django, bootstrap, twython, coding, API,

Learning To Code One Small Task At A Time

Large coding projects are hard. Smaller projects are generally easier. I regularly remind myself of this simple advice in order to keep pushing ahead and learn more.

I’m a terrible coder. But one of the realities of picking up a new skill is that you’re not going to be good at it for the foreseeable future. But trusting that if you keep working hard at it and putting in the time and effort you will improve is hopefully enough for you to persevere.

Something that’s fairly common to hear when people are talking about learning something new is the strategy of breaking a large task down into small, manageable tasks. On one hand, you have a better chance of understanding and completing the task, and on the other, you set achievable milestones that are always gratifying to reach.

If you’re teaching yourself to code, you’re probably thinking about some pretty ambitious projects for yourself in the future that likely include a bunch of stuff you don’t know how to do yet. This is a good thing.

Right now I have an idea for a project where the main requirement is that I need users to login with Facebook and I need access to some of their data. However when I go through the Django Social Auth app (or anything similar) I’m immediately intimidated since they all show off how the app can connect to 20 different services.

I really want to build a prototype though so I’ve planned out how I’m going to achieve it.

For me to take a logical next step, I need to break this down into much smaller chunks. My plan is to learn:

1.) Basic Django login

2.) Basic Django login with extensions to the user model

3.) Social Auth integration with Facebook login

4.) Social Auth integration with Facebook login and API request

So my large project is now broken down into 4 parts where each step will logically lead into the next and at the end of it I will accomplish the main thing I wanted to learn in the first place. And I’m confident that once I learn one, the next will be fairly easy to understand.

Keep coding!

——

If you’re interested in what I get up to during the day please check out www.getelevate.com.

Posted 10 months ago

Tags: django, python, coding,

Learning Design Tools Helps You Write Better Code

If you’re getting into coding and trying your hand with HTML, CSS and maybe even some server side language, you might consider spending some time with Balsamiq & Pixemator.

Balsamiq is wireframing software. It’s drag and drop, black and white and is an incredibly fast way to whip up the outlines of a webpage. Below is something that I’m working on right now. This took about 10 minutes to do and most importantly, it made me think about key features and concepts as opposed to colors, perfect positioning and whether it works properly in IE or not. In short, it’s a great tool to help focus your thinking.

Pixelmator on the other hand is a fantastic piece of software (caveat: you need a Mac) that is essentially Photoshop-lite. It doesn’t have all the features of Photoshop but it works like a slightly more complicated version of Balsamiq and lets you produce high quality mockups of the pages you want to create. Playing around for a couple days you should be able to produce some decent looking pages.

But importantly, it helps you think about some design concerns other than key features and concepts. Instead, I find that it helps me think about color, spacing, usability and overall aesthetic.

It might seem like a step backward (at least to me) why you would learn some design tools instead of spending the same time focusing on your coding. It’s not.

These tools help refine your thinking about what you’re actually creating so that you don’t waste your time writing unnecessary code. Going back and redoing HTML, CSS, and your server-side code is part of the process… BUT so is refining your idea, questioning your core features, and caring about usability from the start.

Posted 10 months ago

Tags: coding, startups, design,

Listening > Being Smart

Every great product is based on a great need.

I was thinking about the iPhone the other day which is one of the greatest products of all time (and definitely one of the most successful) - but what makes it so great?

As a previous owner of one I can tell you it’s not the phone reception. And although the browser is good, it’s not like I’m away from my computer that much that I need it. In my opinion, what makes the iPhone great is that it’s customizable to solve any number of your personal pain points.

Having trouble with your weight? Download any of the calorie tracking apps or the gym apps. Need to remember your ideas? Evernote will take care of that. The entire culture of ‘There’s an app for that’ is about being able to use one single device to solve any pain point that you experience. So when I think about the iPhone as a gorgeously designed device that can solve anyone’s personal pain points - it makes perfect sense why a phone that doesn’t work great as a phone is one of the most popular products in history.

Not all of us are Steve Jobs. In fact, there might not be another one of us that’s Steve Jobs. But any of us can try and observe and understand a real life situation that frustrates someone enough that they would pay for a solution.

The more you pay attention to actual pain and listen to the people experience it, the better position you will be in to make a great product.

——

If you’re interested in what I get up to please check out www.getelevate.com.

Posted 11 months ago

Tags: startups, products,

The CEO is NOT the Talent

You may have coded the app yourself or landed the first sale but sooner you realize that you’re not the talent, the better your startup’s chances are.

Starting a company is incredibly difficult. From conceptualizing, prototyping, speaking to potential clients, learning how to do sales, recruiting, pivoting, etc. - it’s really hard. And it requires talent, perseverance, incredibly thick skin.

But if you have any success, you’re going to grow. And growing means that you’re going to cede responsibility to a number of parts of the business to the people you hire. Parts of the business that are meaningful and will directly impact the success of the company. Parts of the company that you will stake the entire existence of the company on.

If you’ve recruited successfully, each person that joins your company will be a talented, positive, creative person who gets results day in and day out. It also means that ratio of you to the people in your company will continue to skew in the direction of them.

While this is all happening, you need to realize that you’re NOT the talent. Humility can be hard, especially for first-time CEOs, but one of the most important things you can do is realize that the people that you hire are your company. They come up with the ideas, make the changes, and contribute and execute on the vision. Put simply, they’re the talent.

And as such you should do your best to include them on as many aspects of the company as you can while staying focused on providing an environment where they can thrive independently and as part of the team. Take the time to listen to their ideas, heed their advice and make sure you listen more than you talk.

Trust, involve, and appreciate the people you work with. And be humble. They’re the talent.

——

If you’re interested in what the talented people around me get up to please visit www.getelevate.com.

Posted 11 months ago

Tags: startups, recruiting,

Your Employees Control Your Brand

(originally posted at getelevate.tumblr.com)

A brand is a company’s essence.

In addition to a logo, a color scheme and a tagline, a brand represents what people think and feel about a company. It contains the aggregate sentiment, values and goodwill that a company builds up over its lifetime and should be considered central to any marketing efforts.

The rise of LinkedIn and Twitter poses a new challenge for brand managers and marketers. Because all Twitter profiles and many parts of LinkedIn profiles are public, an employee’s online presence now represents a further extension of your brand - one that puts a human face (or faces) to it. Anywhere online where your employees list and speak about who they are while at the same time associating themselves with their company is now crucial to branding efforts.

Simply put, it’s bad business to disregard the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles of your employees. It’s also presents a new challenge because unlike most company branding efforts, your employees’ online presences combine who they are and what they do with the company’s brand.

For those new to the digital world this might sound like an overwhelming issue. How can a company, in addition to managing its own branding efforts, manage its employees’ online brands as well?

The short answer is that it can’t be fully controlled. But it does give the company an incredible opportunity to extend their brand reach and amplify their marketing efforts if their employees present a positive, knowledgeable and professional presence on these social networks.

Think about it - you have the opportunity to add the total size of your employees’ personal and professional networks to your company’s existing brand reach.

For all the CEOs, branding and marketing directors - make sure you help your employees understand how to best represent themselves on Twitter and LinkedIn using complete profiles, recent photos and intelligent profile updates - because your brand is now controlled by their brand.

——-

Want to improve your employee brand awareness? Contact us at www.getelevate.com.