Spotify engineering culture (part 1) http://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/ Etsy: Web Experimentation with New Visitors http://codeascraft.com/2014/04/03/web-experimentation-with-new-visitors/ TED: What motivates us at work? 7 fascinating studies that give insights http://blog.ted.com/2013/04/10/what-motivates-us-at-work-7-fascinating-studies-that-give-insights/
I just finished converting the bikesoup search to use the sphinx search engine instead of a simple doctrine fulltext search with filters. One thing I found helpful are sphinx config scripts. Instead of hard-coding the configuration you can use any scripting language to produce the sphinx configuration. They just have to start with #! and sphinx will execute them and use the output as the configuration. This is the simplified version of my main config file /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf: ...
Another brand new toy. After my last trip to the UK for bikesoup I decided that it was about time to get a proper laptop. So far I only have a netbook, which is very convenient when size and weight matter. But for getting work done it is just to small, the main problem is the screen size and resolution. I had a look around for good full sized laptops and the only brands producing something with the quality I had in mind were Apple and Lenovo. The advantages of the Apple over Lenovo are better built quality, battery life and easy to buy locally. I choose the Lenovo, because you can order it with more gadgets, swappable batteries and mostly because it isn’t an Apple as I despise where the company is going and I already had bad experiences with Linux and iPods. This is the configuration I finally got. ...
I have been one of the many converts to git and try to use it whenever possible. So far this has been mostly for smaller project, open source projects, Fedora and a little bit at work. bikesoup is my first bigger project using git. I started with initial development on the master branch and created feature branches which got merged back into master. Before going live for the first time I created a live branch. This is pretty much what you would do in subversion too, maybe with the exception of any feature branches. ...
Yesterday one of my side projects went live: www.bikesoup.co.uk . Last December Anthony approached me about doing the site and I agreed to work on it in my free time. It took a while, but this included finding a designer ( d2tstudio ), going through the process of finding a feature set for the launch and the programming. And all of this while I started my new proper job at Softonic, which means I didn’t really have as much time to invest in it as I would have liked. ...