Category: Uncategorized

The Quick ‘N’ Dirty Details

• When? Thursday, June 9, 2011, from 6:30 to 9:00 Eastern
• Where? Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 55 Dundas Street West, Toronto
• Keynote? Howard Lindzon, cofounder and CEO of StockTwits
• Can you still register? Yes! Register here and pay the “late bloomer” price of $20

DemoCamp?

DemoCamp is my friend and former coworker David Crow’s creation and it’s pretty simple: it’s show and tell for the high-tech community. The original concept was to stand in front of your peers and present your current project – without slides. The only thing you were allowed to project on the big screen was your project in action. Since then, it’s grown to include Ignite presentations as well as keynotes from notable speakers.

DemoCamp is a community-building activity. It’s a chance for techies, creatives and businesspeople working in high tech, social media and related fields to get together, see what everyone’s up to, learn and make connections. Many presenters and attendees have benefited in all sorts of ways from going to DemoCamp: they’ve landed job offers, scored VC funding, found new employees, made new friends and discovered things they would’ve otherwise missed. If you haven’t been to DemoCamp yet, you should register and find out what it’s all about!

Howard Lindzon

Howard Lindzon [ @howardlindzon | blog | LinkedIn ] is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by FastCompany and one of the “50 best websites” by Time magazine.

Howard appeared at Startup Empire in Toronto in 2008. He is a charismatic, engaging and funny guy – I [David Crow, but hey, me too!] would love to have him on my board. But more importantly, he has a unique vision for for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. He continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998.

He has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a knack for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he’s the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses.

Howard also created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). His new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck.

Howard received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management.

Want to catch this DemoCamp? Register here!

Want to Demo?

DemoCamp is always looking for people to demo their current project. If you think you’ve got something worthy, you should apply to demo!

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

I think that when the folks at Microsoft Canada look at this picture, they sometimes breathe a sigh of relief.

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

SMSified

SMSified is a service that makes it easy for you to build SMS-enabled applications. They provide a straightforward API that you can call RESTfully to send and retrieve text messages to and from phone numbers and short codes. Using SMSified opens you to the huge user base of SMS, which Wikipedia calls “the most widely used data application in the world, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers”.

The diagram below shows how SMSified works:

If you’re building an application that needs to reach the widest possible range of mobile phone users – no app required to send or receive messages, and it works even those on plain old “feature phones” – you should take a look at SMSified. They make integrating SMS into your software or service as simple as an API call, freeing you to work on what sets you application apart.

SMSified + Shopify

Shopify is a service developed in the same spirit (and company name and colour scheme!) as SMSified: we take care of the tedious parts of setting up an online store so you can concentrate on what sets you apart. Also, like SMSified, we also provide an API that lets you build applications to enhance your online store or the behind-the-scenes business of running that store (we even have a place for you to sell your apps to Shopify merchants).

There are all sorts of ways you can use SMS with a Shopify store:

• Notifying customers of a special limited-time deal or if their order has shipped
• As another way for customers to reach customer support or for repeat customers to place a quick order
• Pinging you, the store owner, when some major happens, such as a customer making a king-size order or requiring special attention

Mark Headd of SMSified put together this video showing how you can put SMSified to work in your Shopify store. In this example application, all customers with a known mobile number are sent a simple text message about an upcoming sale:

You can find out more about Shopify/SMSified integration in Mark’s post on the SMSified blog. Check it out and see how you can integrate SMS message with your Shopify store!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

If you’re a techie, creative or business in the Ottawa area and you’re looking to do something fun in the ByWard Market area (the home of Shopify — we believe that great companies belong in great locations) next Tuesday night, we’d like to invite you to our upcoming Shopify Pub Night! It’s a chance for you to get to know us, meet some new people, have a nice dinner and enjoy the vibe of the Market on what’s shaping up to be a lovely summer.

Shopify Pub Night will take place next Tuesday, June 14th at the Heart and Crown pub in ByWard Market (67 Clarence Street) from 6:00 p.m. until about 10:00, later if warranted. It’s an informal affair, and while we’re always ready to talk about ecommerce, software and design, you don’t have to be a geek, ponytail or suit to come, because this event’s about getting to know you and for you to get to know us. Come on down and join us for good conversation, good food and drink and hopefully, good weather!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja is an upcoming book from Manning Publications written by John “jQuery” Resig and Bear Bibeault, author of a number of JavaScript-related books including Ajax in Practice, Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action and both editions of jQuery in Action. It’s a MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) book, meaning that it’s a work in progress that you can purchase in advance; you can download drafts as they are submitted and depending on what you ordered, you get either the final ebook or dead-tree edition when it’s done.

The book’s been a work in progress since 2008 and it looks as though Bibeault was added as an author to get the thing done by the August 2011 target release date. There’s no shame in this; Resig’s a busy guy, and while I’d love to see this book finished, given the choice between a finished jQuery book and continued work on jQuery and all the related projects, I’d always rather have the latter. As of this writing, 14 out of the 17 chapters are done and my guess is that the book looks to be on track for an on-time release.

Although currently incomplete, the drafts of the book have served me well over the past three years. The book starts where few do, with a chapter on testing, covering both the general principles of unit testing as well as an overview of some of the more popular test suites. From there, the book covers the functional programming aspects of JavaScript with chapters on functions and closures and then the object-oriented aspects with a chapter on function prototypes. There’s a block of chapters that cover misunderstood aspects of JavaScript: timers, regular expressions, the with statement, the eval statement and writing code that works across browsers. And finally, there are the chapters that deal with web pages: CSS selectors, the dreaded DOM, attributes and CSS and event handling. All these chapters are chock-full of good code examples.

My recommendation? Start with Eloquent JavaScript (covered in an earlier article), and then follow it up with Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.

A little aside: The book uses ninja in the title, but there’s a samurai on the cover. What gives?!

JavaScript: The Good Parts (and a bonus history lesson)

Before Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts came out, the JavaScript book landscape was pretty bleak. Many of these books treated JavaScript as Java’s poor cousin, but who could blame them? Netscape itself did the same, according to this explanation by JavaScript creator Brendan Eich (written in response to Jamie Zawinski blog post “Every day I learn something new…and stupid”, in which he talked about the wacky way all JavaScript numbers are double floats):

JS had to “look like Java” only less so, be Java’s dumb kid brother or boy-hostage sidekick. Plus, I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened.

In spite of its being hidden under a clunky, inelegant and quickly hacked-together syntax, Crockford saw the powerful object-oriented and functional language beneath and wrote the seminal 2001 piece JavaScript: The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language and a series of articles that showed the power, capabilities and quirks of what is now called “the most important programming language in the world”. He also popularized the JSON data format, freeing many of us from XML Hell.

I consider JavaScript: The Good Parts to be the first of the really good JavaScript books, and its chapters on objects and functions are still required reading. However, with the recent release of Eloquent JavaScript and upcoming release of Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, it’s no longer the first book I’d recommend (it’s still one of the better ones, though).

DailyJS

DailyJS is the most regularly updated blog on JavaScript out there. As its name suggests, it’s a blog that features a new story about JavaScript or a JavaScript framework or library every day (or almost every day, anyway). There’s a lot going on here: a tutorial series called Let’s Make a Framework (where you do just that), another series called Code Review in which they examine the code of many popular JavaScript frameworks and libraries to see what makes them tick and see how the established projects are written, and various articles on all things JavaScript. If you’re developing in JavaScript, you should bookmark this site.

Next: Introducing CoffeeScript

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

JavaScript Garden

JavaScript, a.k.a. ECMAScript, but originally named Mocha, then LiveScript, is many things at once, making it a confusing, messy beast. It’s ubiquitous, useful, powerful and even after all this time, has some goodies in its bag of tricks that will surprise you. It’s also clunky and confusing; and to make matters worse, misinformation in the form of dead-wrong documentation and bad JavaScript code examples abound. I’m going to borrow a backhanded compliment from my friend and former co-worker Adam “Adam Bomb” Carter and call JavaScript a “hot mess”. And I do mean it in the nicest sense of the phrase.

One of the attempts to help alleviate the confusion is JavaScript Garden, a site created by Ivo Wetzel and Zhang Yi Jiang. Written for the benefit of both new JavaScript developers who want to get it right the first time as well as long-time JavaScripters who are wondering if there are better ways to do things.

Devon Govett of Badass JavaScript has this to say about JavaScript Garden:

…it covers common misconceptions and bugs related to objects, prototypes, functions, this, closures, the arguments object, scoping, equality and comparisons, typeof and instanceof, and much more. The site is very nicely written and designed, and I recommend that you check it out!

…

It’s awesome to have great JavaScript documentation, and to have a community that takes the time to write it. If you are interested in contributing, or you find errors, JS Garden is hosted on Github, so just file issues and send them pull requests to help make this resource even better.

JavaScript is the most important programming language today, and JavaScript Garden is one of the most important JavaScript sites today. Make sure it’s in your bookmarks!

W3Fools: A W3Schools Intervention

When searching for information about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, W3Schools (no link, let’s not give them any more search engine juice) often shows up in the results, thanks to its longevity and some good hard SEO work on their part. The problem is that the site is all kinds of wrong, from its inaccurate and out-of-date information, to its name that falsely implies an association with the W3C to the certifications of dubious value that they offer. Among the erroneous or outdated info on this site is their JavaScript reference material.

W3Fools, a site created by “members of the front-end dev community”, explains why W3Schools is best avoided. Give it a read, and after that, you’ll know why you should generally avoid W3Schools.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.