Author Archives: Montana Flynn

growth-hacker-venn-diagram

Remember the eight-second rule. Consumers have eight seconds worth of patience while waiting for your pages to load. This is especially true for home pages. It’s like the restaurant business mantra: Don’t keep them waiting, or they’ll leave and never return.

Remove all .git files, recursively.

If your using composer or another package management system, it’s great isn’t it? But it comes with a lot of junk in the form of hidden .git repos that keep a record of every change the project has committed. You don’t want to send all that over the wire every time you deploy to staging or production. This is especially important if your using your own internal packages making it ready for anyone to come steal, accessing the full source code of your project.

Either way this shell command will remove them. I put it in a chef cookbook, you can use it however you want.

find . | grep .git | xargs rm -rf

Source: http://davidwalsh.name/delete-svn#comment-23147

Startup Name Generator Webapp

Giving Advice

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One of the biggest mistakes I think people make in business is witholding information for fear of “rocking the boat” or disturbing the status quo. Luckily I’ve had family and friends commit their insight no matter if it would be well received or not. In that spirit here is some advice I have for some well know web apps.

Google:

  • Fix (IE. Monetize) your 404 page. WTF is wrong with you, I just made you millions.

Twitter:

  • Make it so when you tag someone the casing doesn’t convert to lowercase. That’s annoying.
  • Wish I could copy and paste the username from the header of the direct message modal window.

HackPad:

  • Why can’t I change the name of the url manually, using the top line is a bad idea for a few reasons.
  • Add optional markdown support for those of us who want it, I can’t be the only one.
  • Let me add notes to specific people from within the pad which sends them an email, like so:


# @email@example.com check this out blah blah blah
 
Normal hackpad area something important etc...
 
/* @email@example.com @other@example.com
etc...
*/

Your welcome.

Update #1

Hackpad hit me up on twitter right away!

Update #2

Twitter fixed the issue, now fixing the capitalization of usernames wont waste precious seconds of my time. I’m not saying it’s cus of this post, but I did follow and tweet a bunch of the engineers.

Update #3

Google? Google? Google? Hire me and I’ll spend more time on google plus.

Super Useful PHP Helper Function

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If you use PHP, especially when dealing with an API, you might want to see everything inside a variable. Normally you’d use print_r(); but that would normally return a big long line of unreadable text. Since PHP included formatting as whitespace if you wrapped the output in a <pre> tag you get a nicely indented view that is much more readable.

Here’s how you can do it super easy style, just add this function to your project:

function pretty_print($arg) {
  echo '<pre>';
  print_r($arg);
  echo '</pre>';
}

Then you can do something like:

$var = $_SERVER;
pretty_print($var);

desk.com api is awesome

Shut up and take my money!

Analytics.js

The hassle-free way to integrate analytics into any web application. Works with google analytics and KISSmetrics, amongst others.

Silicon Valley startups spend our brightest intellectual resources on photo sharing and social-whatever, while industries that affect the quality of living for millions are left with bureaucrats.
Jeff Lindsay

The most important thing is to build a prototype and get to market, not writing a plan, making a forecast, or creating a PPT pitch. Always be prototyping.
Guy Kawasaki Reddit AMA

Couldn’t be more proud…

Screen shot 2012-12-04 at 12.15.32 AM

Upgrading My Dev Box To PHP 5.4

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First I tried recompiling, which I had done in the past to install mcrypt but this time it didn’t turn out pretty. I had all types of issues and after going down the google brick road for a few hours I resorted to MacPorts. That turned out better, but certain things we’re acting up (PDO socket connection to remote hosts via Laravel, if your curious).

So I partitioned a section of my harddrive, called it MAMP, and reinstalled snow leopard. Then I added xcode and MAMP PRO and now I’m golden! Not only can I choose between PHP 5.3 and 5.4 it also comes with a shiny control panel! I feel like the kid who’s never been to a restaurant and goes out to a steakhouse.

Installing xcode and mamp pro on snow leopard partition

Online Payment Systems

My comparison of online payment credit card processor based on my experience with PayPal, Authorize.net, Google Checkout and Stripe. Here’s the punchline: Stripe kicks ass

Cutting Edge CSS3 Animation

Here is one of my first attempts at learning CSS3 transitions, it’s pretty cool because I used transparent images to achieve a unique effect.

My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people. Steve Jobs

Couldn’t resist adding some commentary…

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Mac OSX Snow Leopard

Adobe Photoshop CS6 Mac OSX “Snow Leopard”

Installing Homebrew for all your OSX command line goods

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Getting your source on is a whole lot easier when using a package manager, for linux you might use Yum or APT, but on OSX Homebrew is my goto. It’s super easy to install, but to get full benefits and access to more software you will need to have an install disc or have the developer tools already installed. If you don’t you can download it from apple. Google it or comment if you need to know what I’m talking about.

Installing Homebrew on OSX in the Terminal

Installing Homebrew takes 5 seconds

Here’s how you install Homebrew:

ruby <(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)

of course using ruby is awesome, because it's installed by default on everyone's machine and has read write. Also notice that it's not using wget, which you won't have on a clean install w/out the dev tools. Underneath brew is pretty much an alias to GIT with some cool ruby helpers.

Once you have brew installed you can do things like:

brew install mongodb