How to warm a cold email list

by Adam Loving on March 22, 2013

I had a quick chat session last week with my friend Darren. He was looking to promote his band’s latest album. He had an old email list, and he wanted to send them an announcement. Warming up a a cold email list (one you haven’t mailed in a while) is tricky. You need to blast [...]

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Ruby and Javascript contractor rate survey

by Adam Loving on March 7, 2013

I sent an informal survey to friends and Hacker News readers yesterday. The survey was to determine the current hourly rates for Ruby and JavaScript contractors. Below is the pivot table summarizing the results. You can take the survey here and see the raw results here. My conclusion: there is a lot of variance among experienced [...]

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Quantified self and lifestreaming

March 7, 2013

It seems inevitable that someone will create a lifestreaming hub for your personal activity data that allows you to capture and own your data (either before or after it is published). Here’s a collection of thoughts that have been bubbling in my brain for a while.  Assertions Tracking numerical stats about yourself (weight, steps) can create [...]

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Creating the WordPress of quantified self

March 7, 2013

I’ve been logging keystrokes and footsteps to a web page I call my Featbeat. My plan with Featbeat is to create the WordPress of quantified self – an open source logging platform. Why? It’s not just because “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” It’s also because measuring things tends to change behavior. Right now, [...]

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Ruby interview questions

March 7, 2013

I think there are two types, “phone screen” questions which gauge someone’s depth in a particular language. Then, white board questions where the language and syntax doesn’t matter (as much), just the candidate’s grasp of computer science.  Phone screen questions What are ruby code blocks? (or what is the difference between functional and object oriented programming) What is [...]

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Over-simplifying customer driven development

March 6, 2013

I was looking through my colleague’s notes on Steve Blank’s The Startup Owner’s Manual. A couple thoughts came to mind. 1. It’s hard for me not to over-simplify all the Steve Blank stuff into simply “are customers dying for your product?” It seems like that is 80% of the ball game. 2. I realize that it’s [...]

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Stack of the month club

February 20, 2013

One of the problems with Open Source technology is knowing which of the plethora of tools and technologies to choose. Is it stable? Does it have staying power (or is it just a fad)? In July 2010 I created a “Stack of the Month Club” spreadsheet to compare technologies with some of my developer friends. [...]

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Building tent apps with rails

February 20, 2013

I’ve been experimenting with the Tent protocol. Tent is a protocol for distributed social networking. It’s sort of like the WordPress of social networks. It provides a way to share status updates, photos, and blog entries without going through Facebook or Twitter. You can host your own server, or use someone else’s. Here is my [...]

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Why is email message going to spam?

February 19, 2013

For Contact Ready, I use SendGrid to send emails from the web site application, which is supposed to help with deliverability problems. However, my messages were still going to spam. Sendgrid manages SPF records, DKIM signatures, and does IP address whitelisting, but emails sent by my Ruby on Rails application were still going to spam. [...]

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Find email address by name

February 19, 2013

A while ago I created the find email tool to help guess someone’s email address. Marketers are using it a lot for SEO outreach. The service works by checking to see if the email has been used to register for a Gravatar profile. You can use it to help you guess someone’s email address using only their [...]

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