Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! I can’t believe 2012 is already wrapping up and with New Years just around the corner I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

I’ll have a “Year in Review” post up in the first week of 2013 and I’m looking forward to writing a number of great technical posts next year.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in 2013!

Hopefully by writing them down here and keeping track of their progress I’ll be more motivated to complete everything on the list.

Professional Goals

Work for a Startup: I think there’s something rewarding about working with a small team building a product from scratch. Both the rewards and challenges that come from a startup are something I want to experience in my life time.

Become a Manager: I love programming. It’s challenging, fun and interesting. One thing I don’t want to do is be sitting at a desk when I’m 50 churning out code that doesn’t mean anything. As part of my goal to work at a startup I also want to manage a good team of developers. I can’t see a greater calling than mentoring people in the field and helping create something unique and useful.

Completed July 2nd, 2013.

Become a Chief Technical Officer (Added 2013-04-13): At some point in my life I want to become a CTO. I love programming, I love working with people but I think being able to lead a companies technical strategy and drive a team of developers, managers and potentially VP’s would be amazing. I realize this is a very long term goal, but I wanted to write it down to get it on paper (or screens?).

Frontpage of Hacker News: I’ve always wanted to write something that made it onto the front page of Hacker News. When I was writing this article it hadn’t happened yet. My article on Django 1.5’s User Models made it onto the front page of Hacker News bringing thousands of visitors to my site.

Completed November 30th, 2012.

Launch a Popular Application (Added 2013-04-13): I want to create a popular website/application and launch it. This is rather vague, and I’m not 100% sure how to define “popular” but I really want to launch something that other people find useful. I always have a number of ideas but executing them to completion has been a problem.

Completed July 31st, 2013.

Personal Goals

Get Married: When I started writing this post I wasn’t married. As I know finish it I’ve already completed this goal and married the love of my life.

Completed October 20th, 2012.

Become a Dad: I’m still young but I know at some point in my life I want to become a dad. I can’t think of any greater calling than to raise someone.

Snowboard the Andes: Fairly self-explanatory.

Travel to each Continent: I’ve already hit 3 continents and I want to get to all 7 before I die. I’ve already gotten North America, South America and Australia so I only have 4 left. Obviously Antarctica will be the hardest to get but I’m hoping to go there some day.

Write 52 Blog Posts in a Year: Writing brings me peace and satisfaction. I always seem to procrastinate writing but whenever I do I enjoy myself. I want to be able to say that I wrote an article a week for at least a year (hopefully more).

Skydive: The rush from skydiving is almost irresistible to me. I want to jump out of a plane at some point before I die.

Obviously this is a short list of my goals and I plan on adding to it as I think of them.

After the presentations we started programming. We had 7 hours to build something that worked and used at least one of the available APIs. Lunch came way too quickly and consisted of lasagna and garlic bread. We continued hacking away through lunch and into the afternoon.

At 3:30 Terence had to leave to catch a flight and left me with 2 hours to finish up connecting Twilio to our application. At 5pm we stopped programming and presentations started. 23 applications were built and presented and the day ended with the judges revealing the 3 winners.

Our Application
A few days before HackTO we came up with the idea to create a hyper-local application to help people interact with their neighbourhood. Our use case was that if someone moved into a new neighbourhood they need to know what’s around them. We used Twitter’s Bootstrap for our design.

We used YellowAPI and Twilio
Results as our APIs and Google Maps to plot the different businesses. When a user visits the site, they enter their postal code and then wait for YellowAPI to return a long list of different businesses in different categories. We then map these companies to where the user is. Finally, if a user wants to get directions to a given business we used Twilio to send an SMS with the company name and the address to the user’s phone.

Wrap-Up
After all was said and done we didn’t place in the top 3 applications but we did win the Yellow API prize. While the prize money would have been nice I think the real value in events like this are interacting with other local developers and learning/experimenting with new tools.

I had a great time and can’t wait for the next one.

HackTO is a hackathon in Toronto where developers are given 7 hours to make something built off of the provided APIs. The first HackTO was hosted at Tineye’s headquarters and my team, @ashchristopher, @terencelo and myself won it using YellowAPI. This time around I’m hoping to make something that’s both useful and creative.

Here are the details for HackTO #2

Details:

• Saturday April 14, 2012 from 9 AM to 8 PM
• The new Freshbooks HQ: 35 Golden Avenue, Suite 105

Prizes:

One of the best parts about HackTO (other than learning new things and meeting new people) is the prizes. HackTO #1 had fantastic prizes and this time around it’s no different.

• First place: $2,000
• Second place: $1,500
• Third place: $500

Sponsors:

• YellowAPI
• Klick Health
• Freshbooks
• TinEye
• ContextIO
• SoundCloud
• AtomicReach

HackTO is always a great event and if you’re thinking about going you should sign up soon.

After thinking of this problem for a few days I came to a solution that I think works well. I’m going to create talks on the most popular content from this blog. Here are a few reasons why I’m going to do this.

People are Interested in it
If a specific post is getting thousands of visitors from different websites, links and searches I know that people are interested in the topic I wrote about. This solves the problem where I would second guess myself on whether the content was interesting. I now have specific metrics (visits and comments) to judge whether I should talk about a certain subject.

I’m Lazy
Because I’ve already spent the time researching for the post that I wrote I don’t have to spend this time on the talk. I’m still going to do more research and go into more detail with the talk than I could with a blog post but the base content has already been written.

I Don’t Have to Choose
Like I said before, I now have specific metrics to choose whether I should talk about a certain subject. I don’t have to base my decision off of what I think would be interesting. Any time I can limit the decisions I have to make I count that as a win.

Going forward I’m going to craft my talks on the most popular blog posts. I’ll see how this works out for me and report back soon.

Since I started writing again this month I’ve noticed a large increase in readers, comments and discussions with other developers. As I said in my last monthly re-cap I plan on doing these more often. This time I promise I won’t procrastinate like I did last time.

Here are the statistics for March:

Number of Articles: 8
Number of Comments: 11
Visitors: 4,031 visitors
Page Views: 4,982 pageviews (1.24 pages/visit)
Average Time: 0:35 min. avg time on site
Bounce Rate: 88.54%
RSS Subscribers: 26

Top Sources:

Reddit – 1,183 visits (30.26%)
Direct – 901 visits (23.05%)
Feedburner – 439 visits (11.23%)
Google (Search) – 437 visits (11.18%)
YCombinator – 361 visits (9.24%)

 Top Content:

Most Important Changes in Django 1.4
Make It Easy to Unsubscribe from your Email List
Southern Tier Unearthly Review
Djangocon 2011 – Building APIs in Django with Tastypie
Properly Handling Failures
Django

A couple days before Django 1.4 was released I posted about the changes I thought were most important. This went to the front page of the Django sub-reddit as well as the planet Django rss feed. As this post gained traction more and more people started linking to it and Google ranked it on the first page for the term “Django 1.4”.

As a Django developer I have a few in-depth posts on different aspects of Django that I hope will help other developers. I’m also planning a “Getting Started with Django” series for those who are trying to learn Python and Django.

Final Thoughts

Obviously if I want more traffic I need to continue posting. My initial plan was to post every M-W-F but I quickly found this just isn’t sustainable. I’m going to continue writing when I can and posting about technology related, food and drink. Feel free to drop a comment or message me if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to read about.

Every few months I have to go through and cull these lists, unsubscribing from sites I no longer want to receive mail from. This brings me to an important tip for web developers out there: Make your email lists easy to unsubscribe from.

Here are a few reasons why:

I May Consider Subscribing in the Future

I unsubscribe for three reasons: too many updates, irrelevant content or spammy content. If this is a service I like I’ll often come back after a few months to see if reasons 1 or 2 have been fixed. If you make it hard for me to unsubscribe I get frustrated, when I get frustrated I can promise that I’ll never subscribe again.

Making it easy for me to unsubscribe allows me to potentially subscribe in the future without worrying about a tedious unsubscribe.

I Won’t Complain to my Friends

If you make me jump through hoops to simply unsubscribe from your emails I will almost always talk about it to at least one other developer. I’ll be saying things such as “This is so frustrating.” or “I definitely will never use again.” If you make it easy, I unsubscribe and forget about it.

I’m Less Likely to Mark it as Spam

Of all the points above I think this is the most important. For most of my emails addresses I use Gmail. When users start marking messages as spam Gmail listens and will start filtering out similar messages.

This means if you make it hard enough for me to unsubscribe I’ll start marking all of your messages as spam. If enough users start doing this you could potentially be blacklisted, hurting your chances of other people seeing your messages.

Conclusion

I understand why some companies make it hard for their users to unsubscribe. More emails sent out equals more money in the bank. Unfortunately there are a lot of downsides to making it difficult for your users and I think those downsides greatly out weigh the small possibility of making money off of the disgruntled user.

As you can see above, WagJag went out of their way to make happy. They responded extremely quickly and they could have just said “those are the rules” or “Sorry, nothing we can do about it” but they didn’t. They realized their brand is more important and took the extra time to make me happy (this all took place past 10pm).

Many companies (Dell, Rogers, Banks) should really take note. Sometimes lap it takes is a couple tweets to make your customers happy.

Working for a Small Company

While there’s nothing wrong working for a large software company, you often don’t have the same freedoms as you would when your team is smaller. At Gap Adventures my team has two programmers, myself and one other. Whenever we need to make decisions on which way to go we turn around, talk about it for a few minutes and then carry out what we decided. In a large company you often have to go through multiple layers of management before you can ever come to a decision.

Working in a smaller company also always you to use the latest technologies. You’re not stuck with ancient DB2 databases running on archaic servers. When I want to test out a new server stack I fire up a virtual machine, test it out and then if I like it I can quickly push that into production. As long as it works better for the company I have total control.

I wouldn’t have been able to pull off the page for Wiz so quickly if I had to go through many layers of management to get the go ahead.

Django

Django makes it incredibly easy to prototype and then push to production. Need a new application? Fire up a new VM, build your environment, setup a new project and you’re ready to go. If you have the build scripts you can have a totally fresh environment in under 15 minutes. Django handles all the database connections, URL routing and template generating stuff so you can worry about the functionality you want to build.

I built the entire app, including the design in under 4 hours. I just wouldn’t have been able to do this as quickly without a framework.

Open Source Software

Open Source is fantastic. It makes building stuff incredibly easy when you can use something someone else has written and you don’t have start from scratch for absolutely everything. I’m by no means a designer and for Wiz’s project I knew I would need a relatively good design. I started with Twitters Bootstrap framework. I had a decent page going in under 30 minutes because of it. I didn’t have to waste time defining my own CSS classes or anything of the like.

Here’s a few of the reasons I chose to commute instead of live in the big city:

Forced Downtime

I’m on a train for 50 minutes to and from work. This forces me to be away from a computer and gives me time to catch up on some sleep, finish reading a book of mine or just take some time to rest. While some people don’t like a lot of rest it’s something that I need. I always think better after resting and it helps me program better

Affordable Living

Probably the biggest reason I chose to commute was because I could actually afford to buy a condo outside of the city. Without getting into the Buy or Rent argument (I’ll touch on this later) I just couldn’t afford anything in the city. My condo (680 sq. feet) was almost double the cost if I had bought downtown. Even renting a smaller apartment would have cost more than what I pay for.

Friends and Mobility

Having grown up in the suburbs most of my friends and responsibilities outside of work are here. If I had chosen to live downtown, getting back to the suburbs weekly or even monthly would have added a lot to my monthly costs.

I also like the freedom of owning a car. While it does add a lot of cost each month, there’s nothing better than being able to drive anywhere on a whim.

Final Thoughts

The suburbs definitely aren’t for everyone. It’s harder to get around (you need a car), there’s not always as much happening, there aren’t as many food choices and it takes longer to get to work. Despite these short-comings I would always chose it over living downtown.