In January I started helping my friend Aamir with his new startup, Hopps. Hopps is an on-demand service for real-time help. Hopps customers want to tackle their engineering or marketing problem instantly. Hopps experts provide the solutions Hopps customers seek. This blogpost is going to focus on the technology that powers Hopps and the content is best suited for web application developers. If you want to learn more about the product itself visit hopps.io.

Infrastructure

One of the first questions to tackle is how to get code changes into and out of production in minutes. Most users won’t notice bugs you ship if you can fix them quickly. A fast deployment pipeline is like a Command+Z (Undo) shortcut for your product. It gives you the freedom to experiment with the ability to roll-back changes quickly. Get your product out as fast as possible and start using it. The day we shipped the...

Watching the sun rise above Palm Springs

One of my goals for 2019 was hiking Mt. San Jacinto Peak starting from its base. The challenge is to ascend close to two vertical miles (10000’) in a single push. The difficulty of hikes is often gauged by total elevation gain and ten thousand feet is close to the upper limit of what’s topographically possible in the US. Though many peaks in the US are taller than San Jacinto, their trailheads also start at a higher elevation.

Adding to the mystique of the hike were remarks from climbing friends centering around “stupid” and “never again”. In April I also met someone who had survived a frigid December night in an outhouse near the summit after getting lost in snow during the descent. As the lease end date on my Los Angeles apartment loomed, I asked Ilona if she would be down for giving it a shot.

The crew: Ted, Ilona, Amy and Seila

We set...

Honda PCX150. Yes, it’s considered a motorcycle in CA. You need a license.

Public transport in Los Angeles has been decent, but I got a bit tired of constantly looking up bus schedules and adjusting my life around timetables. I tried an electric scooter last year, but it lacked both the speed and the range to make it of much practical value. So I decided that the next most convenient and least expensive option for getting around was a motorbike. I’m now riding a Honda PCX150 around town and it’s a blast. Here’s a quick rundown of what it took to make it happen. (tl;dr;: Around 3 weeks and $2200)

Achievement unlocked: babe on back. Hi mom!

California Motorcyclist Safety Program

I took the CMSP from Westside Motorcycle Academy. Cost was $258. It’s 2 x 2 hours in a classroom going over the Motorcycling Training Course Student Handbook and another 2 x 3 hours riding around an empty...

Snake Dike route (red section was roped, blue was unroped)

We woke up just after 3am. Trying to stay quiet, we put on our packs and made our way out of the sleepy campground. After a mile on flat ground we started the 2000 foot ascent to Nevada Falls. The darkness revealed no other headlamps which meant that we were the first climbers on the trail. With snow forecast in the late afternoon, we wanted to avoid waiting in line at the base of the route. In the darkness, my maps.me app forced us to turn off the John Muir trail a bit too early (on the way back we spotted a cairn about half a mile up the trail) and we made a roundabout way across the lower slabs of Liberty Cap, finally descending to Lost Lake via a steep gully. A few minutes later, the nearly vertical SE face of Half Dome appeared towering above our heads.

Quick break while ascending the base slabs

Making our way up the...

Looking at the route from the parking lot

This past weekend I completed my first “long” trad climb. Six pitches and 800 feet of climbing is more lead time than I’ve ever completed in a single day, so let’s celebrate 🎉Rated as 5.4 overall with some brief 5.6 moves, White Maiden’s Walkway is one of the easier climbs in Tahquitz. Most of the challenge comes from route finding and dealing with a bit of exposure on the upper pitches.

Sorting gear. Love peanut M&M’s.

Ilona and I drove up the night before and found all the campsites in Idyllwild booked out. Luckily, we managed to find a forest service road just outside of town that led to a great camping spot. I woke up at 5:30 am to cook breakfast and Ilona was up by 6. We packed up camp and arrived at the trailhead at 7:15. I’d done part of the approach with Rav a few weekends back and the buttress where the route starts was hard to miss.

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash

Recently I’ve been thinking about running an engineering team and what practices it should discourage. Most of these ideas are rooted in past experiences I’d like to avoid.

One I especially dislike I call guarding. I’ve seen this behavior at almost all the companies I’ve worked with, some especially bad. Guarding is when someone suggests an idea with no intention of implementing it and then refers to this suggestion at some later time to gloat. An example:

Engineer: “We should change that password from Password123 to something more secure.”


(Engineer does nothing. Company gets hacked 2 weeks later)

Engineer: “I told you guys we needed to change the password. If only people had listened.”

Of course, changing a password is relatively trivial. A more realistic example might be: “We shouldn’t store passwords in plaintext. They should be salted and...

FYI: Transport Layer Security (TLS) keeps hackers from seeing your internet traffic including the contents of the emails you send, your account passwords and the websites you read.

I aimed to keep costs low when building Steep and Cheap alerts because revenue was $0. I configured my own Postfix mail server instead of paying for services like Twilio, Mailgun and Sendgrid. My $20/month Linode server can easily host the website and handle several thousand outgoing emails per day. One downside of self hosting is having to tweak the mail server occasionally as best practices change. This happened recently when I noticed that Gmail was putting a scary broken red lock on SAC Alerts emails because the transmission was unencrypted.

The fix

Unfortunately, I didn’t tackle this issue for a few months because I’m not an email expert. There was a risk of unintentionally breaking the alert...

While interviewing for a new role I encountered the dreaded take home project. Just to clarify, I found the experience very enjoyable, however, I must acknowledge that some engineers have called it “working for free”. The requirement for this take home project was building a multiplayer network game. Players connecting to the server are automatically matched with another anonymous player and proceed to duel it out in a game of Connect 4.

Back when I used to conduct interviews at Atlassian, I had misgivings about the ability of a 90 minute pair coding session to expose the traits of a mature developer. My current belief is that good developers are ones that demonstrate an ability to manage complexity. Meanwhile, most coding interviews still test a developers ability to codify an algorithm within a certain time limit. My ideal interview at Atlassian would be to provide the candidate...

I made React Native game over the weekend. It’s a simple clone of Stacker and you can play it by installing Expo Client on your phone and following this link.

If you don’t want to install the app, you can play the text based browser version here (warning: it’s not pretty). Here is the source.

The goal of the game is to stack boxes on top of each other. Each time you tap the screen the currently moving box stops and another box above it starts moving. Wait until the moving box is on top of the stack and tap the screen. If the boxes don’t align over the top of each other you lose. Get to the top of the screen and you win. Here is a video:

How I built it

I found an amazing tutorial at http://www.reactnativeexpress.com/. It takes about a day to complete and covers sufficient material to create advanced phone applications. I especially liked the intro section where you actually get a...

I just completed the two week 3D printing revolution course. Week one was a good overview of what 3D printing is, while week two highlighted applications of 3D printing. I took a 3D printing class at Duluth Maker Space two years ago and completed a small project. My opinion at the time was that it is a crude tool suited for hobbyists and incapable of manufacturing retail products. I must admit that the course altered my opinion significantly and now I believe that 3D printing is indeed revolutionary.

The first thing that swayed my opinion is that there are many different methods of printing, some of which can produce well polished products. Previously I was only aware of Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) which is analogous to squeezing plastic toothpaste out of a small tube in progressive layers to create a 3D object. This leaves a crude layered finish on a product. However...