Here’s one of the disadvantage of having all programmer friends: I don’t know any graphics designers. I’m thinking whether I should ATTEMPT to design the product’s UI myself and then hire once I get some investors interested in the project or just hire one right now and pay out of pocket.
I’ve been meaning to try Rails since the first version got released, but didn’t really found any reason to completely switch from Symfony/PHP. So now with a new project, I needed something faster (development wise for my new startup), and I was completely blown away with the ease of use of Rails even for a Ruby newbie like me (Java and PHP background). While the language itself is pretty awesome, the really great thing about Rails is that when you want to override the defaults (convention) its pretty easy without hacking too much, i’m not sure if it was always like this but having tried the latest version (3.1) that’s the primary thing I can appreciate.
The Q&A market is pretty saturated now for the consumer side, but for the enterprise side there are still problems that needs to be solved. There are 2 key issues that needs to solved: information silos (security) and how your solution integrates with the rest of the company’s systems.
So I finally taken the plunge to start my own company. First things first is to have a product and that’s what i’ve been doing for the past few days. This is actually quite exciting, i’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.
Although I have several concerns, like:
I guess, i’ll worry about those when I get my first beta version out.
Its hard to believe that out of all the PHP ORM’s not one of them can handle Postgres’ case sensitive double quotes. The closest ORM framework that got around to making it work was Doctrine 2.1. While it worked for the @Column annotation, they oddly decided that they wouldn’t implement that feature for @JoinColumn, which makes it very frustrating.
So with that in mind, and after spending the entire day finding and testing different ORM frameworks (Doctrine, Propel, php.activerecord), that I decided to write my own instead. Don’t know what to call it yet, nor have I decided whether to opensource it via github. Its basically, at its core, very similar to how rails does it (well that’s the holy grail of awesome implementation). Still have a lot more work to be done though, for the time being it will remain as a postgres only ActiveRecord implementation, but I will, hopefully when time allows, have it refactored to use different types of RDBMS.
I’m a laptop bag addict, I swear I have like 4 right now: 2 messenger, 1 for traveling abroad, and 1 for when I only need to bring my laptop and nothing else. So I added another one to my “collection”, I just bought Incase’s Compact Backpack, and I feel like i’ve just bought the holy grail of laptop backpacks. I’ve been using it for less than a week and my shoulders and back are thanking me right now.
I’ve always been a messenger bag kind of guy for the past few years, but shoulder problems can be really painful specially if you’re walking around Singapore/Philippines for hours on end. So I did my research and found one of the best selling bags for 15/13 inch macbook pro’s. I love that it has a lot of space inside without looking like a turtle outside, and the fact that it doesn’t feel like you’re carrying a 15 inch macbook pro + an ipad helps specially on those long walks.
Incase Compact Backpack
Hiring programmers is hard. Hiring good programmers is almost next to impossible. You would think that out of a few thousand computer science graduates every year it would be relatively easy finding at least a decent one. Unfortunately that’s not the case; with so many resumes passing through my desk, sifting through them, reading their experiences, their projects and the number of years that they’ve been working in their chosen specialization and finding out in the interview that they can’t answer basic programming questions, it’s a little sad.
I’ve never been a fan of puzzle questions during interviews, it defeats the purpose of the interview itself since the questions doesn’t relate to the what he will be actually doing. So i’ve been using FizzBuzz to filter out our candidates and choose between those that have successfully answered the question. The question goes like this:
Create a program that will loop 1 to 100. Print “Fizz” if it’s a multiple of 3, print “Buzz” if it’s a multiple of 5, print “FizzBuzz” if its a multiple of 3 and 5, otherwise just print the number.
At first I was a little skeptical about using this question because of its sheer simplicity, but the sad part is it actually works. I usually just ask the candidates to use pseudo code or whatever programming language that they’re most comfortable using. I sometimes wonder how they did their task in their previous job or how they got a computer science degree without being able to pass such a simple programming question.
I’ve decided to reboot this blog to my own personal space. So welcome! Hopefully I can post more entries compared to the last iteration of my blog which was a weird amalgamation of personal, highly technical and gadgety stuff, which was a direct violation of how to blog properly (read: focused topics!). They also say that keeping a blog is therapeutic to oneself, and hell have I got a lot to unload!