May 2012
5 posts
“Spent the last 24 hours battling xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx and another weird bug I...”
–
Email update from our beloved CTO. (via reecepacheco)
Is it weird/narcissistic/conceited/self-centered to reblog a quote of yourself? Doesn’t matter, I’ll always do it. Bitch.
4 tags
Fuck Inbox Zero
Maker’s don’t use inbox zero. We don’t have time for that. Each email in my inbox represents some claim against me. Maybe it’s a bug I have to fix, an issue that needs my input, a blog post that you’ve already read and want my opinion on… see a problem here? I care about me. But when I’m doing shit for you, I’m not doing shit for me. I shoot...
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DRY Rails App Settings
We’ve starting using settingslogic here at Shelby for the rebuild of our API and I must say, it’s pretty fine. It’s simple to define constants in yaml and have them available in a namespaced, settings specific manner.
The simple and direct way to use setingslogic is to put all of your settings into a single .yml file and just nest the crap out of them. Well, if we did that,...
April 2012
4 posts
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Do you know why I pulled you over, hacker?
Or: Slow Down to Speed Up
When it comes to programming languages, I haven’t lived in the same place for more than a few years. This is good, fun, and keeps me sharp. But I means I’ve never *really* mastered any particular language.
So, when I code, I tend to write it like an author writing prose. That is, I rewrite my draft a couple of times. After the code (including tests,...
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“Bottom of the barrel? I’d rather be at the bottom of the empty barrel...”
March 2012
2 posts
NASDAQ on Tumblr: SXSW Guest Blog: Shelby.Tv Brand... →
Vincent van Goat was eating Goatsy’s shirt. She had to be corrected. This hurt me more than it hurt her.
nasdaq:
Lauren Appelwick is Brand Director at Shelby.tv.
When we began thinking about SXSW a few months ago, we realized that many people seemed to think that the proper (if not only) way to “do” SX is to plaster a huge space with banners and logos, give out a lot of swag and...
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Watchhey look, it’s mark! “3/3 Video-Per-Day Experiment” on http://shel.tv/zCTY3t via @markerrj
February 2012
2 posts
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GMail can handle MAILTO links, it's simple
It’s extremely frustrating when I click a mailto link and Mail.app starts to open. This is one of the most annoying things on my Mac (which I otherwise adore).
But I just found a way to make GMail in Chrome handle mail links…
Open a GMail tab
[from that GMail tab] Open a javascript console with CMD-OPTION-J and paste in the following:
...
1 tag
January 2012
3 posts
“[8:26pm] • doyleRules this is the part of the day where we communicate by...”
– I love this team. Was going to write a longer post about our launch of TouchPlay today and how awesome the team is that put it together. Instead, you get a little glimpse into our IRC.
If you find that snippet funny and want to code and/or design Shelby.tv, please get in touch. If you...
4 tags
Getting Rails SSL right on Nginx w/ Passenger
400 Bad Request
The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port
It bugged me for an entire day. ”Please send HTTPS stuff to HTTPS and I’ll be perfectly happy,” said nginx. ”Fuck you, I do what I want,” said the oAuth callback from Twitter. So I started digging…
Maybe I could just tell nginx to re-direct the request. It knows what it wants; it should be...
December 2011
2 posts
An Engineers Laptop
I’m bringing a new lappy online completely fresh (as my last one was stolen) and setting up my dev environment. It’s nice to get a clean start, a blank system, without all the crud that builds up around apps you’ve stopped using. So, here’s a running list of the bigger things I set up:
Chrome Dev Channel - I’m not stable, why would I want a browser that is?
XCode...
November 2011
3 posts
“I don’t often fight the status quo, but I always ignore it.”
– Spinoza
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WatchThe Count on #censoredshelby is amazing… /via onshelby Nick Ruffilo http://shel.tv/tN2GCz
4 tags
There are 10 types of people: those who understand...
thelaurenproject:
And Lo, it was at 10:10am on 11/10/11 that Lauren found herself on the 10th floor of a building marked 110 in New York City (10010). It was noted that this was, like, so totally binary, and the brogrammers of Shelby.tv smiled upon her and saw that this was good.
October 2011
4 posts
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Welcome, Mark Johnson
Hiring is straightforward; you need to find a great person who is passionate about building your company, fairly smart, and meshes well with the team (then let them loose!). But hiring is difficult; finding these people (at the right time) is not often easy.
It took me 6 years to hire Mark Johnson. While that’s a bit of hyperbole, I have known since graduating with Mark as Computer...
September 2011
3 posts
5 tags
FAIL: Your name is invalid. (Ruby UTF-8 regex)
Often times you’ll want to validate users’ names (or nicknames) in your web applications. Although I’m not fundamentally opposed to using all the wonderful Unicode (UTF-8 in particular) characters under the sun, it does make it easier to use and understand an app when user names are at least recognizable to you. If an app is global (like twitter) this may not be the case. But...
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“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The...”
– -Steve Jobs in Wired, Feb 1996
Networks pander to the lowest *common* denominator. Video is asynchronously social (watch now, discuss later) and information dense, which makes it a very interesting form of communication. One that has been largely unexplored by people like you and me. The...
August 2011
4 posts
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Shelby does Fullscreen with a side of AirPlay
We launched a pretty big UI update today and people seemed to generally enjoy it. But we also launched a little gem that probably went under the radar: full screen mode (without Flash!). If you’re running Safari 5.1 (on Mac OS X Lion) the “expand” button in our player controls will bring you into true full screen mode with our full UI.
This functionality is supported in Lion...
3 tags
Spinosa + TechStars + Reality TV + Tumblr = this...
Dear <you>,
Between canadian pharmacies and facebook, you receive so much SPAM everyday I figured another piece from your old pal Spinosa wouldn’t clog the inbox…
In 2008 I started bootstrapping HomeField, then raised an angel round in 2010. We got into TechStars NYC inaugural class this past winter, started Shelby.tv during that program, then raised a $1.5MM seed round for...
July 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Make it rain for days
Who has time to blog? With all the code that needs to be written, engineers that need to be hired, servers that need to be cared for and email that’s piling up, I often fall behind on my blogging. But not today! We just raising $1.5MM so I have all the time in the world to fuck around…
That’s absurd, obviously. And as Reece points out, this round is but a stepping stone; not...
“It’s either insanely great, or crap.”
– Spinoza
“If everyone understands what you’re doing, you’re not building the future.”
– Spinoza
henry sztul: The importance of feeling challenged,... →
In building Shelby, we must continually ask ourselves if we’re taking enough chances, crossing enough lines, and pushing ourselves beyond our current capabilities. We’ve started, but we need to reach further.
If everyone understands what you’re doing, you’re not building the future.
henrysztul:
For as long as I can remember (or maybe just since 1995) I have worked...
June 2011
6 posts
3 tags
Better Recommendations (or: set your Noise Dial to...
Recommendation Fail
There’s been a lot of noise about recommendations and relevance as of late. Recommendation-fail happens in two major ways. Your “Filter Bubble” - pioneered and explained well by Eli Pariser (founder moveon.org) in his TED talk - is algorithmically created by the services you use, tailoring what you see and preventing you from even knowing what you’re...
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I Want More Nature
@nevspins and I are heading down to VA for her cousins graduation today. So I woke up at 5am to get in a run and get some shit done before hitting the road for 7 hours. Getting out of the shower after my run I heard Nev playing Angry Birds in the other room. This got me thinking how much I miss the sounds of *actual* birds chirping.
Then I discovered that she was still asleep. I was hearing...
5 tags
shelby.tv: Want to Have a Huge Impact & Build... →
shelbytv:
We’re hiring at Shelby.tv, like lots of other companies. So why come work for us? Because you want to put a dent in the universe.
1 tag
Product Company vs. Idea Company
Products are tangible, testable, fun to build and fun to break. This is what drew me, and I’m sure many others, to the world of computer engineering (I find “computer engineers” to be a good more-encompassing term for all those who build executable digital products). So we naturally build products for others and build companies around those products to keep them alive and...
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The MongoDB NoSQL Database Blog: How Journaling... →
It’s always good to know what’s really doing on under the hood. Even if you never have to think about it directly, you should know how your data is being handled. We jumped on the journaling train and haven’t looked back. Now we know a bit more about the locomotive.
an excerpt from blog.mongo.org:
Version 1.8 of MongoDB supports journaling in the storage engine for crash...
May 2011
5 posts
2 tags
On Failing at Hackathons
Tech Crunch Disrupt was another success this year. Sadly, I didn’t get to go. Myles, Henry and myself entered the TCDisrupt Hackathon last weekend, hoping to crank out something brand new, present it, and get some free tickets. That didn’t happen. There are a few good reasons why we didn’t present. That was my first hackathon, and these are my learnings…
Don’t...
Being a Good Person
“You’re a good person if you work hard at something that is useful to society and you try to avoid hurting other people when it’s practical. ” Scott Adams
1 tag
April 2011
5 posts
