Stay Hungry

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. 

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 Engineers from Brown in 2005 that I wanted to build a startup with him.  He’s a phenomenal engineer.  Nobody pushed me harder in college.  And looking back, I’m still impressed at so much of what we built.

But we built that stuff for our professors.  Now we get to build for ourselves, and I couldn’t be more excited.

The Shelby team was already fucking awesome - returning from 10 days off the grid in Cyprus gave me even better perspective on that.  And now we get to add Mark to the formula (VMWare had him pushing too many pencils).  There’s so much more I could say, but I think this picture of Mark at our brand new west coast engineering campus says it best:

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 you get there organically, and it doesn’t make sense to open the floodgates right now.  So we started with

validates_format_of :nickname, :with => /\A[a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-]+\Z/

Allowing lower and uppercase letters, numbers, dot, hyphen and underscore.  A pretty standard start.  But we saw some validations fail when user names were copied from 3rd party services (twitter, facebook, tumblr) including some letters with accents over them.

Fortunately we are using Ruby 1.9 (with Rails 3.1) and validating with unicode is straightforward.  We added support for all the Latin extensions with just two tweaks.  First, we need this at the top of the file with the regular expression so Ruby interprets it correctly

# encoding: UTF-8

then we add from code point U+00C0 to U+02AE, chaning our regex to

validates_format_of :nickname, :with => /\A[\u00c0-\u02aea-zA-Z0-9_\.\-]+\Z/

Once we get bigger in countries that speak other languages, I’ll be adding some more characters sets to that regex.