Blog · Avand Amiri

Write Less JavaScript

How many lines of JavaScript code were used to create the following interface? At Mystery Science, we recently released this feature to capture feedback after a teacher has taught a lesson. There are four possible screens or states: Prompt (did you teach?) Rating (stars) Comments (open-ended feedback) Done Each state...

Calculated Attribute Pattern for Ruby Models

Sometimes in a Rails application a model has attributes whose values need to be computed. For example, at Mystery Science, we have a Viewing model that is created when a lesson has been viewed. This model is associated with actions that a teacher took with a lesson (e.g., playing a...

Spinners are really easy to implement with animated GIFs. However, they don’t look great when overlayed on top of another image because GIFs only support index transparency. If they’re on a solid background, you can match colors and they’ll look fine. Services like ajaxload.info make it easy to generate the...

The here and the now are compelling destinations. People want to feel like they’re part of what’s happening now. They want to feel like now is happening where they are. Stripe Checkout features animations to communicate what the product is doing. They’re subtle but the product feels incomplete without them....

Startups move fast. They’re young, loud, and disruptive—a room full of excited twenty-somethings willing to burn the midnight oil to get a release out the door. Startups are enticing playgrounds with more Apple hardware and beer on tap than you can handle. When you’re tired, don’t go home. Stay. There’s...

The last product I built, Sqoot, had a lot of moving parts. We had three databases, a search server, an API, website, and a deal importing system. It’s a marvel that it worked at all! The truth is that it went down pretty frequently. Sadly, our customers were often the...

Getting Close to Your Customers

Play Strength, a Rdio Feature Concept

Music can make or break a party. And picking good music to play is hard. I think it should be easy. Here, I take a closer look at creating a great setlist with Rdio. I start with some back story about why I started thinking about this problem and why...

Create Great Technical Interviews

A technical interview or screening is a crucial part of reviewing a candidate for an engineering position. It’s usually the second step in the review process and is a prerequisite to an in-person interview. Here are some lessons I’ve learned in the last few years of taking and giving a...

Snappy Dashboards with Redis

It seems that almost every application I’ve worked on has some sort of dashboard component. It’s not usually the first feature but it often becomes the most useful. But dashboards are hard to build. They break resource-oriented design patterns and often rely on complicated one-off SQL queries. Dashboards also usually...

Track Expenses in Google Docs via SMS

Tracking expenses is a pain in the butt. At Sqoot, we use Google Docs for almost everything, including expenses, but entering anything on the go is cumbersome. Today, I got frusted and decided to take an hour and hack something together. I wanted to be able to text something like...

Five Ways to Evaluate New Ideas

It took six years for the novelty of building stuff to wear off. I’ve worked on huge failing corporate projects, cool weekend hacks, and successful startups. At a certain point, you’ve proved to yourself that you can build it. Now, what you’re building matters. So how do you become selective...

Serving Different Robots.txt Using Rack

While doing an SEO audit for the daily deal API I’m working on, the subject of the robots.txt came up. In addition to our production environment (what you and everyone else see), we also use an “edge” environment. It’s a place we can push the latest and greatest changes and...

Make a 60 Sec Video Pitch in 500 Photos, $2 and 1 Day

Often the hardest part of building a product is explaining it to people. If it seems complicated, most people just move along. A popular way to grab people’s attention is with a short video. They come in a bunch of flavors but the popular ones include 2D & 3D animations,...

Building an App to Monitor Your App

Keeping a web application up and running usually requires lots of moving parts. Since these parts are all codependent, when the whole app goes down, the immediate question is: what broke? I want to share with you the solution we came up with at Sqoot. Let’s dive right into the...

Tests Pass. You Fail.

Shit breaks. It’d be so much cooler if things just worked the way we expected, but they don’t. For better or worse, we live in a world where everything eventually fails. And software is definitely not an exception. So we write tests. If 1 + 1 should be 2, we...

Managing Styles with Sass on Heroku

I’ve generally found stylesheets to be the messiest part of any website. And I’m not surprised: Cross browser support means kludgy code Functionality usually takes the drivers seat to well thought out styles It’s someone else’s job But organizing styles doesn’t have to be a mess and here’s one strategy...

The Four Hour Sprint

If you want to talk about themes that have dominated the last year of my life, “agile” has got to be one of the most popular. It seems that everyone wants to be agile, and there’s a lot of debate about what that means, if anything. Agile software development is...

School's Out Forever

Growing up, I was told that the most important ingredient for my future was an education. Do your homework, study hard and the road ahead will lead to a satisfying career and financial security. That was the promise, anyway. But as it turns out, in the kitchen of education, I...

Getting It: What Makes a Great Software Engineer

Introduction I’ve been writing code for a while now and for about the last 2 years there’s been a nagging question in the back of my head: What makes a great software engineer? Call them “rockstars”, “ninjas”, “submarine pilots” or any other catchy title you’d like. They exist, and they’re...

Integrating Twitter Authentication with Rails

I’m working on a project called Piggy Back, a simple service where friends can keep track of debts between one another. To encourage user registration, I’m lowering the barriers, allowing users to sign up their Twitter and Facebook accounts. I’d like share with you how I got this functionality into...

Instantly Losing a Customer

A while ago, I wrote a post about great customer service, where it’s coming from and where to find more of it. Today, I’d like to take a look in the other direction and talk about the biggest mistake a business can make: losing a customer. I’ve used 1-800-flowers.com for...

The Big Bang Rewrite (Part 3): Authentication, Authorization, and Tests

One of the biggest deficiencies in the old application was being able to lock down access to the site based on users. Originally, there were two special users, Admin and Guest. The former had complete control, the later had none. Anyone else was a normal user and had the same...

The Big Bang Rewrite (Part 2): API First

As I discussed in my previous post, rebuilding Fave was motivated entirely by the desire for better data. The core focus was not rapid front facing development, but almost entirely back end work. In essence, we started with our API. One of the features Rails boasts as an application framework...

The Big Bang Rewrite (Part 1): First Ask Why

When it comes to building something, be it a building, a car, or software, there are always imperfections. The first iteration is usually something simple, but eventually as features are added and requirements made more complex, the system starts to become bloated. Even with great agility and the most stubborn...

Rebuilding a Brand. Avand.

Once again, it’s been months since my last post. I’ve been taking some good and some bad classes at DePaul for the last 10 weeks and as a result haven’t really had much time to invest in myself. Even Piggy Back has taken the back burner. The one personal priority...

The Race to a Beta Launch: The Trials and Tribulations of Piggy Back

I haven’t posted in a while, and here’s why: Piggy Back;. If you follow me on Twitter, or are friends with me on Facebook, you’ve probably seen the updates crawling by. Piggy Back is a web site that helps users manage debts between each other. It was inspired while I was...

Outstanding Customer Service and Where It's Coming From

For best results, read while on hold with your favorite ISP. Is anyone else seeing what’s happening here? I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but companies are becoming obsessed with excellent customer service. I witnessed it a little here and a little there at first, but then, after reading...

The New York Subway System. Holy Crap.

I was recently in New York to visit a friend. Flew into La Guardia and called him up to tell him I was taking public transportation into Manhattan. He sounded puzzled but I didn’t really feel like spending $60.00 getting to West Village. Plus, there’s something to be said for...

Adventures with Ad Delivery in Rails

It’s always hard to find the line between buy vs. build - or as it’s known in the open-source world, buy vs. “borrow.” I find this to be more true in Rails than in any other application framework. You want authentication, you got it; you need paging, done. Before you...

Data Driven Development (DDD)

In the world of software, methodologies rule. It isn’t about the code, it’s all about the process. And when it comes to processes, there’s a lot to choose from; developers have a habit of over thinking this stuff. So as one, I figured I’d throw in my two cents, too. Test...

In-n-Out Burger: Consistency, Animal Style

I recently took a trip out to California and had my first dinning experience with In-n-Out Burger. I really reveled in the experience, because they’ve really nailed, what in my mind, makes a great product. Immediately In-n-Out Burger’s menu jumped out at me. In my day to day operations I’m often tasked with conveying...

CSS Tricks (2 of 2): Using Rails to Manage Styles

For the second half of my CSS “tips n’ tricks” tutorial, I’d like to take some time and discuss how Rails can help manage stylesheets. As you start out any Rails application, there are some huge conventions you follow within the ‘app’ folder. I think these conventions make it much...

CSS Tricks (1 of 2): First, Get Down with the OOP

##Introduction## I recently stumbled upon an interesting web design blog that featured an article about some CSS “essentials” and commonly used CSS code snippets. I read it with a great amount of interest and found that I had a few tricks and tips up my sleeve that I’d like to...

People and Process

Over the last couple of days I’ve come to an astounding realization. While I had always considered that the culture of a company - its people and practices - made a difference in its day-to-day operations, the scope had eluded me. This month’s issue of Inc. magazine featured an article about a...

Bravo 37Signals for Phasing out IE 6!

It’s been a long time coming… Too much time has gone by with developers forced to limit their imaginations, creativity and ability to support the rusty weight of IE 6. But most websites have been afraid to stick their neck out. So, kudos to you, 37Signals, for doing your part...

Enigmo: A Shower of Entropy

Since I got my iPhone 3G, I’ve downloaded, that is paid, for exactly 3 games. The best - by a long shot - is Enigmo, from Pangea Software. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s basically a puzzle game where you have a certain set of tools on...

Computer 1, Andy 0 and I Couldn't Be Happier

In my own time, I’ve been dabbling with some pretty hardcore machine learning. Trying to answer the question of how a computer can create a relationship between two things, blocks of text in this case. Turns out with a few matrix transpositions, single value decompositions, cosine similiarities, latent semantic index,...

target="_blank" Convention

I’ve been building websites for a while now, and each time I do it, I run into a couple areas where I sit back in my chair for a second, scratch my head, and ponder conventions. One great thing about Ruby on Rails is the way it enforces convention in...

Deploying a Site via DNS - "That was Easy!"

I launched a site today for Northpoint Horizons, and it was seriously one of the simplest deployments I’ve ever experienced. We’ve been working on the site for months on the future (now current) production server. We’ve used it for the client to review the site, to perform testing, everything you’d...

AJAX Form Validation for Rails

Last Saturday at the Chicago Ruby User Group I gave a short presentation on Rails and AJAX. For part of the presentation I decided to solve a problem that’s haunted me as a web developer for some time – form validation. Here’s the dilemma: You start with server side validation,...

I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but drop shadows and rounded corners struck the web with a vengeance. Then it was the reflections. It seems like those persnickety designers are looking for anyway to make our lives as developers harder. But they have a fairly noble goal, anyway -...

Skepticism Happens {Here}

I attended Microsoft’s 2008 Product Launch Event, Heroes Happen {Here}, today and I think my suspicions have been officially confirmed. My interest in Microsoft products has been waning as of late. Nevertheless, attending a Microsoft launch event is a good reason to get free schwag, and they do a decent...

Best Tool for the Job

The religious wars go on. Microsoft vs. the rest of the world, it seems. On and on, ad infinitum. But does it ever really matter? Is there definitively a platform of choice? Or more to the point, is that question even valid? Can there be a definite? As Jeff Atwood...

A Look Back at Windows Mobile 6.0 and ActiveSync

While I was walking home from work today, checking my email on my iPhone, something very strange occurred to me. Once upon a time, I was a Windows Mobile junkie. Not just a standard user but an all out fan boy. I would talk to whoever was willing to listen...

Introduction to this Blog

Throughout my life, I’ve always had a knack for design. As a kid, I grew up in a house surrounded by fine art and lots of art classes. In my teens, I spent my Saturdays at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. However, along the way, I also feel...