Ruby Fight Club
By Greg Davidson
August 31, 2016
Photo by Peter Gordon
First Rule: Do Not Talk About Ruby Fight Club
This post may get me kicked out for talking about the club, but…I was asked to share a few thoughts about something we tried out earlier this year at End Point. We ran an internal meetup dubbed Ruby Fight Club to read and discuss Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) by Sandi Metz.
In the past we’ve met together as a company and in smaller team or project focused groups but this was first time we used a book as the guiding, recurring topic with a smaller, committed group who made time for it. Attendance was optional and we did have some folks who opted out even though they loved the subject matter and the idea, because they knew they couldn’t make it most of the time. I think this made the group tighter-knit.
Our group of six remote engineers met weekly for one hour to discuss one chapter from the book. We worked through each chapter together which often led to Q&A sessions and deeper discussions about Ruby and computer science theory in general. Each week, one member of the team would lead the discussion. It required some preparation in advance and gave us all a chance to work on our presenting and …
books community company remote-work ruby
Surviving the Framework Hype Cycle (MWRC 2016)
By Jon Jensen
August 31, 2016
Back in March, I attended MountainWest RubyConf with my co-workers Phunk and Phin. Shortly thereafter, Phin wrote about a couple of his favorite talks: Writing a Test Framework from Scratch and How to Build a Skyscraper.
I’ve found that another talk from the conference has stuck with me and I’ve referred to it several times in conversations. It is “Surviving the Framework Hype Cycle” by Brandon Hays. It is funny, engaging, insightful, and especially cathartic given the rapid pace of change in frameworks these days.
It can be tough to set aside the time to focus on a conference talk video, but I think this one is well worth it for programmers!
The 5 phases of the framework hype cycle that he identifies and elaborates on are:
- Technology Trigger
- Peak of Inflated Expectations
- Trough of Disillusionment
- Slope of Enlightenment
- Plateau of Productivity
And he shows how different groups of people with different needs can benefit at different stages, akin to settling new land:
- Pioneers
- Settlers
- Town Planners
The ebb and flow of technology fads can be a lot easier to navigate when we realize there isn’t an absolute right and wrong to technology choices, and we must consider the project …
conference frameworks
Reach customers and drive sales with MailChimp
By Josh Lavin
August 22, 2016
It’s a good idea for ecommerce stores to regularly contact their customers. This not only reminds customers that your business exists, but also allows the sharing of new products and resources that can enrich the lives of your customers and clients. One of the easiest ways to stay in touch is by using an email newsletter service, such as MailChimp.
<img alt="" border="0" height="200" src="/blog/2016/08/reach-customers-and-drive-sales-with/image-0.png" title="Freddie, the MailChimp mascot" width="191"/>
MailChimp offers the regular suite of email newsletter services: lists, campaigns, and reports—but in addition, they allow an ecommerce store to integrate sales data back into MailChimp. When you have detailed shopping statistics for each subscriber, it opens new possibilities for customized marketing campaigns.
Endless possibilities
For example, imagine you have an email mailing list with 1,000 recipients. Instead of mailing the same generic newsletter to each subscriber, what if you could segment the list to identify your 100 best customers, and email them a special campaign?
Additional ideas could include:
- Reach …
ecommerce email interchange perl magento
Create categories in Virtuemart 3 with Joomla 2.5 and 3.5 programmatically
By Piotr Hankiewicz
August 18, 2016
Introduction
Code that I’m going to show you is ready to download here: https://github.com/peter-hank/com_morevirtuemart
Virtuemart is an open-source e-commerce application written in PHP. It’s pretty popular with a 4% share of the whole e-commerce market (https://blog.aheadworks.com/2015/05/ecommerce-platforms-popularity-may-2015-two-platforms-take-half/). Today I will show you how to extend it and use its functionality from an external Joomla (free and open-source content management system) component.
Creating a component
We are going to create a new component to show the code in a nice and clear form. I’m using a component generator from here: https://www.component-creator.com. We don’t need any tables, models and views for the purpose of this blog post. Plain and simple component is what we need. After creating the component download it and install in a Joomla administration interface.
Component overview
The component structure looks like this:
# tree components/com_morevirtuemart
components/com_morevirtuemart
├── controller.php
├── controllers
│ └── index.html
├── helpers
│ ├── index.html
│ └── morevirtuemart.php
├── index.html
├── models
│ ├── fields
│ │ ├── …php ecommerce
Creating a recent activity feed for Thredded
By Piotr Hankiewicz
August 2, 2016
Introduction
Thredded is open source forum/message board software for Rails 4.2+. The project is still alive and maintained by its author actively. For a new Rails project for a client in End Point we used Thredded as a part of an application stack. It works pretty well, but sometimes it lacks some important features. Fortunately, it’s coded very nice and easy to extend its core functionality. This time we wanted to create a recent activity feed for a current user. I wanted to share this with you because I think that it’s a popular widget in many social community sites.
Plan
We decided to put two main data sources for the feed:
- user personal message notifications,
- user forum message notifications (you may want to put some extra features here to show posts only from topics where the user is directly involved in by writing a message, for our needs it was enough to show every new post that the user was able to see).
Getting data
Let’s say that we created a WidgetController controller. How to get data that we are interested in? It’s not so difficult. First, this is how we are getting the latest 5 private messages for a user:
private_messages = Thredded::PrivateTopic
.distinct …rails ruby
Showing Your Client Measurable Progress with Video Updates
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
July 28, 2016
I’ve recently started working on a big new fancy project—the kind everyone dreams of—a nice budget, a great client, and lots of fun stuff to dig into. I happened to stumble on a fun and easy way to get a client a weekly update on progress, Videos!
I used Google Chrome’s Screencastify app to capture my screen along with a vocal narrative to give the client a visual update of what we have accomplished so far this week. I have been using Screencastify Lite and was really happy with the end product. Combined with Google’s developer tools device mode you can toggle between the site’s full screen or mobile view.
This is a great tool to show a client some measurable progress without going through the pain of showing them an unfinished site, letting them dig into lots of broken links, and having them inevitably stumble on more questions than answers. Plus, your client can digest the content you’ve shown them, avoid the hassle of scheduling a face to face demo, and allow them some time to compose their feedback.
Next time you need an easy fast way to show progress on a project, try a video!
clients video
Report on The Perl Conference 2016
By Josh Lavin
July 27, 2016
In June, I traveled to Orlando, Florida to attend the event formerly known as Yet Another Perl Conference (or YAPC::NA), now known as The Perl Conference. This was my second time in a row to attend this conference (after my first attendance back in 2007).
Conferences are a great place to learn how others are using various tools, hear about new features, and interact with the community. If you are speaking, it’s a great opportunity to brush up on your subject, which was true for me in the extreme, as I was able to give a talk on the PostgreSQL database, which I hadn’t used in a long time (more on that later).
The conference name
The event organizers were able to license the name The Perl Conference from O’Reilly Media, as O’Reilly doesn’t hold conferences by this name anymore. This name is now preferred over “YAPC” as it is more friendly to newcomers and more accurately describes the conference. More on the name change.
Notes from the conference
Over the three days of the conference, I was able to take in many talks. Here are some of my more interesting notes from various sessions:
Yes, this is happening @YAPCNA
— Jason Hall (@JayceHall) …
conference perl vim
Case Study: Responsive Design Return on Investment
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
July 21, 2016
Responsive design has been a hot topic in the e-commerce world for several years now. End Point has worked on many sites over the last few years to transition clients to a responsive design website model. While many large sized retailers have already transitioned to a responsive design, there are many smaller e-commerce sites that are still on an older design model and I would like to show that the return on investment for those stores is still noteworthy.
The lead of our Interchange team, Greg Hanson, led a responsive design project and I’d like to summarize that work on our blog. For confidentiality, I am leaving out the client’s name in this case.
Why Go Responsive?
There are two main reasons every e-commerce website, even a small one, needs to become responsive:
- Your customers
The march toward mobile sales at this point is undeniable and unstoppable. As more and more people become comfortable using their phones and tablets to purchase things, the bigger this market share will become. Also, Google has begun de-prioritizing websites that do not cater to mobile users. If you are waiting to go responsive because of budget, you might surprised to learn how dramatically the …
clients design mobile case-study