Technology

Delivery Service

About 6 months ago I decided to take on the task of building a delivery app for the cannabis industry. Here are a few notes from the journey so far.

Why?

I had just come off building software for Methadone suppliers. It tracked people coming off of harder opiates. As we all know here there is a very strong opiate problem in the United States. It has even caused the redefined CDC Guidelines on Prescribing Opioids for Pain. When the CDC has to step in and scold a country full of doctors we know we have a problem.

How To Get Rich Effects On My Website

I posted a link to Slack once and it loaded up all this cool information. I couldn’t figure out what was going on but was sure that it just ripped a ton of stuff out of the HTML headers. The METADATA.

If you are a relative novice you might not know about all that junk-in-the-trunk that is stuffed into the HTML. It’s pretty bloated. And getting more so.

Test Drive: Mail In A Box

TL;DR

I set up Mail-in-a-Box and it was a quick and painless experience.

Preface

I am tired of managing so many gmail and outlook accounts. Those $5/mo bills really eat at me. So I wanted to try something simple. I got goosebumps when I saw this and had to try it.

I’ll also preface that I was a professional email list manager and built an email service platform that was sending/receiving greater than 20 million emails a day. This is obviously much different, but it’s cool to work in low volume transactional environments. I also hate HATE managing email.

Django And eCommerce

TL;DR

I setup Oscar as a demo ecommerce project in the previous post.

Preface

Backstory

I just finished a post about setting up eCommerce with Python Django and wasn’t totally pleased with the process. Also I don’t think it is fair to only demo a single application. I decided to give Saleor my second slot after talking with several people online and looking through its source. The parent company has a number of nice products which was confidence building.

Django And eCommerce

TL;DR

I like Python and want to use it for eCommerce, so I went through the well known products and settled on Oscar as my demo. It took a while to set up, but was pretty full featured. Python and Django still have to compete with short busses like wordpress and dump trucks like Magento, but I think these tools are ready for me to start pushing.

Preface

Let me say this took me almost 2 days to get through and evaluate, which I’m used to having a demo site up in minutes. After having gone through, I think this could be launched in half an hour. Below are my notes of the process.

Why I Prefer Female Engineers

Preface: This isn’t how it always was. I’ll be honest, I am a 2 part chauvinist, but I am also pragmatic. I also deeply care about the personal and professional outcomes of my team.

Now We Have Engineers

How To Install MapR Test Cluster

This document covers my installation of MapR Converged Platform on an Ubuntu 14.04 cluster.

We are running on the DTAC private cloud so some of the screenshots will show our internal interface. All instances are running in a VM.

Most of this follows the suggested flow given in the lab manual from MapR. Initially I launched the cluster on CentOS 7.3 but that wasn’t supported and it failed. The same with Ubuntu 16.

Why It Needs Help - My Letter

This is an open letter to the Covered California website designer, administrators, bureaucrats and contractors.

Website Design and Usability

I have several things listed below. Things I find to be of poor design or just plain broken.

You Don’t Got Mail!

• “Secure Mailbox (2)” even though nothing was in my mail box.

• It randomly logged me out.

GO’ON CLICK ME IF YA CAN

• I am low on time for open enrollment and it gave me a “Pay Now” button in order to do it faster, but the button was broken. It would pop up and then if I tried to pay it would throw a JavaScript error in my console and close out. Now I can’t pay. It’s weird when people don’t want my money.

The Waves of Technology Professional

I like to consider 2001 the tail edge of the Internet bubble. It was a brutal time to be in a computer science field. There weren’t many jobs. The jobs that were being squatted on were jealously guarded. I needed the one thing that nobody would provide. Experience. So instead I grinded projects and studied unceasingly.

In 2001 I had to take a job as an “integration specialist”. That is basically a programmer job with a crappy title, so they didn’t have to pay me much. I was making $12.50/hr, and it was business casual dress code. Meaning I worked for barely enough to pay my bills, but I had to wear a tie to work. This Internet revolution was starting to look like a failed promise. I should have realized then.

Binding Multiple Terminals

I am running on multiple servers all the time. And with DTAC doing testing of big data I obviously need to play with many servers at once. I used to do a lot of work on linux and loved the broadcast ability of the terminals. So when I moved onto mac I expected more.

I tried a few other terminal apps. Particularly iTerm2 that has some nice broadcasting. But I didn’t like having to deal with the tabs and keystrokes. I kinda liked having multiple windows and the ease of launching with csshX