Category: Uncategorized

Okay, now I’m ready to hit the streets.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Robert Morris was the cryptographer’s cryptographer. A compiler developer and contributor to Unix at Bell Labs, he developed the password encryption scheme for authenticating users, the direct descendants of which are still in use today. He also wrote the program we know and love as crypt as well as the math library. He went on to work for the government, including decoding encrypted evidence for the FBI and planning cyberattacks on Iraq’s command-and-control systems in the first Gulf War.

You may be forgiven for mistaking him for his similarly-named son, Robert Tappan Morris, who gained notoriety for accidentally creating the Morris Worm. He’s since received a Ph.D. at Harvard, became a member of the faculty at M.I.T. and is often one of the people who vets Paul “Y Combinator” Graham’s essays before he posts them online.

Morris strikes me as the sort of character whom you might read about in a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel. He even has a quote worthy of appearing in a book written by either novelist:

The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it.

Morris died last Sunday at home in Lebanon, New Hampshire at the age of 78. Requiescat in pace, Mr. Morris; I’ll be toasting you at the pub later this afternoon.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

I thought that parodies of the movie Der Untergang (re-titled Downfall in English-speaking markets), in which Hitler’s nervous breakdown in the bunker were re-subtitled in all sorts of crazy ways, were played out, but Hitler Finds Out About Final Cut Pro X made me laugh out loud.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

While the Shopify platform covers most of the needs of people who want to sell stuff online, it can’t cover them all. That’s why we built an API and have the concept of apps: programs that third-party developers can write — and as an added bonus, sell — to add features to Shopify. The API allows programs to take almost any action that a Shopify shopowner can take using his/her shop’s admin panel and make use of a lot of the information that Shopify has about a shopowner’s shop. You can write apps that make a shop’s customers’ experience more pleasant, make a shopowner’s life easier or provide shopowners with information to help them make better business decisions. You can also sell your apps in Shopify’s App Store, and we’ll soon introduce a matchmaking service that pairs shopowners who need developers to build apps for them with developers who need shopowners to build apps for.

If you’re interested in building a Shopify app — perhaps you’ve got a client that you’re building online stores for, or maybe you’d like to write something for the almost 15,000 Shopify stores out there — you should check out the Shopify App Development page on our wiki as well as our API Documentation.

If you’re short on ideas, wondering what kind of Shopify app to build, you’re in luck! We maintain the App Wishlist, a wiki page containing ideas for apps that we’ve received from our customers and developer partners. We maintain it as an "ideas warehouse" for apps we’d like to see as well as a place to track their progress as they make the journey from idea to working software. Check it out — if you have ideas for apps, add them to the page, and if you’d like to turn one of these ideas into working software, let me know!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Creative Commons photo by Endlisnis.

You should think of DemoCamp as a grown-up version of “Show and Tell” for techies and creatives. Started by Canada’s very own David Crow as a way to bring Toronto’s then-hidden-away tech community out of the woodwork and talking to each other about what they’re working on, DemoCamp has spread to cities all over the world. I’ve seen firsthand the effect of holding DemoCamps: people have made friends, found work, discovered interesting projects, started collaborations and even landed VC funding. Great things happen when you gather bright, creative minds into a room to talk!

The 16th DemoCamp Ottawa takes place tonight! Here are the quick details:

• When: Wednesday, June 29th, 2011, from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. or when the beer runs out
• Where: Mercury Grove / Network Hippo, 738A Bank Street (at Second Ave.)
• How much? Free!
• How to register: Do it on their Guestlist page…and soon!

I’ll be attending tonight – hope to see you there!

The Demos

The DemoCamp philosophy is simple: show us your project in action! Whether it’s complete or on the way there, we want to see a working application or device and be shown how it works, why you build it and what you hope to do with it. This is a technology demo, so it means no marketing – and especially no slides – are allowed. We just want to see your project in action.

There will be 5 demos at tonight’s DemoCamp, and they’ll all follow this format:

• 2 minute introduction
• 8 minute demo
• 5 minutes for Q&A and discussion

Tonight’s demos are:

HIVE-secure – Human Intelligence Verification Engine

Presenters: Chris Ivey and Pierre-Olivier Charlebois

Forget CAPTCHAs.  Choose HIVE instead, and make your customer happy. 

Time Doctor

Presenter: Liam Martin (liam@timedoctor.com)

Time Doctor is a collaborative to-do list to make you and your employees more productive. We are in open beta and would love to show everyone where we are and get suggestions on where we should go next.

JetStreamHD

Presenter: Grant Hall (grant.hall@nuvyyo.com)

JetStreamHD brings all your home based media  (Movies, TV Shows, Home Video, Songs, Photos) to your iPad instantly over any 3G or WiFi wireless network.  We launched the app at Demo 2011 in California and are now ready to open our web store to ship the first production run to our customers.  This will be our final release candidate and we are looking for feedback and suggestions for new or missing features.

iWatchLife – Smart Video Security

Presenter: TBD

iWatchLife is a smart video security system that helps people watch their family, pets and property from any web-enabled device.  We launched officially in May 2011

Coin Collector

Presenter: Kyle McInnes (kyle@pretzil.com)

Coin Collector is a demo version of a tablet-based showcasing tool we’re working on. Whether your customer is at a conference or in their livingroom, we provide a platform for you to showcase to them.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Hello from Seattle! I’m here to attend BarCamp Seattle as Shopify’s representative on the BarCamp Tour, and as always, I’m having a good time here thanks to the surroundings, people and rich tech scene. I’m going to spend Saturday and Sunday in a corner of geek heaven: the Adobe Conference Center in Seattle’s Fremont neighbourhood, surrounded by some of the bright lights from the area, including Amazon, Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as the people from the endless array of local startups and indies.

I’m not the only Shopifolk getting a good geek fix today. Back in Ottawa, the Shopify office, which is two-thirds developers, is awfully quiet because they’re not there! They’re a few blocks away at the National Arts Centre, where they’re getting yet another perk of the job: a CodeRetreat with Corey Haines!

One of the biggest challenges that developers face today is “sharpening the saw”. Typically, they’ve got a lot of work to do and precious little time in which to do it — and that’s when things are running smoothly. Often, it gets much worse, with requirements as slippery as eels in vaseline and deadlines that have come and long since gone, and even the most agile of processes is helping them fail to keep up. As a result, they’re so bogged down with getting their projects up and running that they don’t get much chance to step back and work on their own skills. I’ve seen this firsthand, especially in the enterprise world, back when I was a Microsoft developer evangelist — many of them told me that between rapidly reorganizing business processes, ever-changing tech and just plain old just-not-enough-hours-in-the-day, they were worried that their development skills were atrophying.

Corey Haines’ CodeRetreats are all about addressing this problem. Here’s a description of the event, straight from their site:

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of ‘getting things done’, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

It sounds like fun, and were I not doing my thing over here on the Left Coast, I’d be at the CodeRetreat with bells on. It’s this sort of opportunity that Shopify regularly provides to the Shopifolks that make me so glad that I joined the company.

Since I’m on the other side of the continent and three time zones away, I have no clue what’s happening at the CodeRetreat. I’ll have to make do with these photos that a couple of people on our development team have been Tweeting and ask them for more details when I get back (and you can be sure I’ll try to turn that into an article for this blog).

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.