Prateek Dayal

The second edition of RubyConf India is happening this month on the 28th and 29th of May. I will be speaking on Single Page Web Applications Using Backbone.js & Ruby on Rails.

We are using Backbone.js to build the Agent Dashboard for SupportBee. We test drive our javascript code using Jasmine and Sinon JS . We use Handlebars for templating and Jammit for packaging the assets and compiling the handlebars’ files. The JS UI talks to the server using a RESTLike API (I’ll talk about why we don’t call it RESTful yet in the conference). The talk will describe this setup and walk through a small application that can demonstrate backbone’s features and patterns.

There are also several other interesting talks in the two day conference. Do checkout the schedule and register for the event. See you there!

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I just came back from RedDot Ruby Conf 2011 in Singapore. It was a great conference that featured great rubyists and speakers like Matz, Dave Thomas, Mikel Lindsaar, Gregg Pollack.

Some of the talks that I enjoyed were Ruby Can Haz Everyone by Mikel and Under the Covers with Rails 3 by Gregg. Apart from the talks, I had some interesting discussions on API designing with Tom and Ryan that I really enjoyed. Here is a list of other talks from the conference.

The best part was attending the Github Drinkup on the second day of the conference. The drinks and food were good and the conversations awesome. Here are some pics from the day two of event and the drinkup

Apart from meeting some great rubyists, I had the chance to meet Superman, Batman and Robin. Here is a pic of them from first day of the conference

The conference was really well organized and executed. Thanks Andy for the great conference (and coffee). I’ll be back next year :)

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Amateurish, Illegal, Rip-off. If the person was actually concerned shouldn’t he have participated in the discussion on HNI itself or the mailing list and offered his side of the argument? If I was allowed to grade amateurishness his behaviour was definitely more amateurish than starting HNI (if at all that can be called amateurish!) Or may be he was dying for some attention.

In all this confusion, I knew one thing for sure. If this is a problem for PG I would change the name. I was not going to change the name assuming PG has a problem. So I mailed PG.

Here’s my mail

Hi Paul,

I have been a reader of HN for about 3 years and we recently had a HN meetup in Bangalore. One of the things we discussed was how some issues are very India specific and HN is not the best place to discuss them (as not everyone is interested). So I went ahead and created http://hackernews.in and it has had some good traction in the last couple of days.

There have been some concerns over the name “Hacker News”. I picked up the name because we were essentially catering to the same community and we are clearly not running this for profit. However if YC has a problem with this, I can change the name. However, I think that having local HN sites may be very useful to startups (as you can see from the discussions on HN India).

I am happy to put a disclaimer in the footer saying that this site is not affiliated to YC. However since the code is in lisp, its taking me a little longer ( I have no lisp background).  Please let me know your thoughts and I will comply.

Finally, thanks a lot for HN and YC. Its been very useful.

Thanks,

and here is the response I got from him

Hrm, I don’t know.  We’re not usually very fussy about such things,
but it’s possible this is something we might want to do ourselves
someday.  Not immediately but maybe in several years.  You’re
welcome to use the code of course but would  you mind calling it
something else?  You’ll probably find any other name will do just
as well anyway.  –pg

Since he did not want me to continue using the name, I went ahead and bought hackerstreet.in and redirected the site to it. In a followup email, I also asked PG for the latest codebase but he needs a few weeks to clean it up before he can release it.

Only time will tell the whether HSI will succeed or not but I believe that there is a great need for something like this in India and would always be proud that we started this.

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During my recent trip to Vietnam, I worked on dual monitor machines at EastAgile and loved it. Once I was back in India, I missed the screen real estate and got a dual monitor setup for my macbook pro. Sadly it wasn’t easy but totally worth it. I had to buy a USB display adapter to get the second monitor hooked up to the MBP. I also bought two identical Samsung B2230 monitors (1920×1080). Overall this gives you 3840×1080 resolution. The only downside is that since the second monitor is on a USB display card, it does not support OpenGL. Here is a picture

I have been using this setup for a few weeks now and I think it has almost doubled my productivity. One big benefit is that I can have code (vim) and terminals (log and shell) on one monitor and I can have two browsers (firefox for debugging and chrome for reference) on the second monitor. This makes sure that I never have to alt-tab to switch to browser or other windows needed for programming. This in turn makes sure that I don’t lose focus. Overall I have found this to be really productive.

Go ahead and try this setup out if you think you can be more productive than you currently are. You may wanna try three smaller monitors instead of two really large ones. Some people have found it to be better. Also be sure to read monitor reviews before buying the monitors.

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They say that third time’s a charm. I am certainly hoping that they are true as I am about to embark on my third product startup, SupportBee. My first startup lasted about six months and I never really launched. My second startup, Muziboo launched and I worked fulltime on it for the last three years. SupportBee has been in the works for the last few months and its about time I talked to people about it :)

What is SupportBee?

SupportBee is a customer support and interaction tool. There are plenty of customer support softwares out there but none solves the correct problems. Right now, it’s really hard to do awesome customer service. Typically founders at startups are very passionate about customer service and they put in a lot of effort in researching about their customers and replying to every query. However, as they bring more people into the organization, the quality of responses goes down. Also one should not have to work so hard to provide well researched and thought out responses. The ideal software would make it really easy for anyone to do great customer service by providing them with relevant data about the customer (among other things).  That’s the direction we are taking with SupportBee. We’ll help you delight your customers. You can read more on our about us page. Also, do subscribe to our blog, where we will be publishing interviews with people passionate about customer service. The first to come up next week would be with Valarie of Balsamiq

SupportBee is currently in closed beta as we work on improving the product with a handful of passionate customers. Please do signup and let us know if you have any ideas for the product or customer service in general.

The future of Muziboo

Muziboo has been a great learning experience and we are very proud of what we have accomplished. We have over 200,000 users from all over the world who have uploaded over 100,000 tracks to Muziboo. The service is profitable and is in fact the seed fund/test bed for SupportBee. Muziboo will continue to run with the same quality of service and customer support. Bugs will get fixed and new features rolled out as and when they make sense. In short, nothing changes there.

I hope to write more about the switch, Muziboo experience and related things sometime soon. If you have any specific questions, do let me know. Do signup for SupportBee beta and/or pass it on to people who are passionate about customer service and think that this is still not a solved problem. We would love to talk to you :)

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Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces code to pass that test and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards.

Enough has been said and written about Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). However, I still find a lot of startups (especially small startups) not investing in TDD/BDD because they think its too much extra effort that slows down their development. In fact I am guilty of thinking the same way in the past and having switched over to the the TDD/BDD camp earlier this year, I wanted to put down my thoughts on why I think the extra effort is worth its while.

Test coverage helps you iterate faster

As any wise person would tell you, startups are all about execution. Your ability to execute on your ideas and iterate based on the feedback you get from your customers determines the success of your startup. Having a good test coverage gives you the confidence to change things in your codebase and not worry about breaking something unintentionally. I would even argue that if you don’t have test coverage, as your code base grows, you may come to a point where you may not want to make changes for the fear of breaking something.

Also writing tests (or behavior) first helps you in writing more modular and hence reusable code. Its easier to refactor or to add functionality to it. You should not consider tests simply as tests. You should think of them as specifications that help you drive your development. In fact thats what BDD is all about.

Manual Testing is not fun

One big reason I started looking at TDD was because I had gotten really bored of testing things manually. To give you an example, everytime I modified the payment logic for Muziboo, I would setup the paypal sandbox and test all the steps manually. If something failed, I would repeat the entire process. I found the entire thing very demotivating and also error prone. Automated testing frees you up and lets you focus on more exciting things.

Specs for your non Tech Founder

Tools such as cucumber help you specify what you are trying to achieve/test in plain english. They execute plain-text functional descriptions as automated tests. Here is an example:

Feature: Search courses
  In order to ensure better utilization of courses
  Potential students should be able to search for courses
 
  Scenario: Search by topic
    Given there are 240 courses which do not have the topic "biology"
    And there are 2 courses A001, B205 that each have "biology" as one of the topics
    When I search for "biology"
    Then I should see the following courses:
      | Course code |
      | A001        |
      | B205        |

These feature files can help even your non tech founder understand whats going on and what exactly the system does. Also, six months down the line, even you are gonna find it useful :)

Testing is Easy

The final point I want to make is that TDD/BDD is actually very easy and fun given the resources available. Right from awesome books to great tools, there are tons of resources to help you get started. There is a learning curve but once you are used to it, things can be very fast and productive. So do yourself a favor and adopt BDD

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I have been in Vietnam for last two months and for most part, I have been living in Ho Chi Minh City. Near my hotel is a cafe called Ca fe Tinhte. Its the best cafe I have known for people to sit and work from. There is free wifi and every table has power points for plugging in your laptop and other gadgets.

The cafe is run by some people who started an online forum in Vietnam called tinhte.com. They started the cafe after the forum became popular and they wanted a place for people to hang out. You can see a lot of gadgets being unboxed here for reviews or pictures and a lot of freelancers working on their stuff. The staff is really friendly and you can hang out here all day. In fact, if you come here for a few days, you will start running into the same people. Its like a virtual office. Checkout the video of the place below

This cafe and the online operation is what would be termed a lifestyle business. Basically they are not looking at growing or opening more cafes or maximizing profits from this cafe. They wanna create a friendly environment for people to hang out and work and in the process keep the entire operation profitable. In some ways, being a lifestyle business gives this place its friendly touch and character.

I think we need a lot more lifestyle businesses like this. We need more friendly places and businesses that don’t put profits before customer service and customer happniess.

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Last month I finally took the plunge and bought a 15” Macbook Pro. Since I was traveling to Ho Chi Minh, I stopped over at Singapore and bought it from the iStore on Terminal 3. Apple Singapore prices are cheaper than India and if you buy at the airport, you don’t even have to pay the 7% tax.

I have now been using the macbook for over a month now and I can confidently say that it’s the best computer I have owned so far. There are things about the mac that make it the best development machine ever. One of the best features for me is the fast sleep and wake up. You almost never have to wait for the laptop to wake up. As soon as you open the lid, its back up. There is a nice battery level indicator on the left side that you can use to query the battery status even with the lid closed. Also, the battery lasts for a long times so you never have to really shutdown your laptop (and lose the workspace)

The hardware is really top notch. The trackpad is the best I have seen so far and mouse gestures are really useful. The sound quality is awesome and the screen super crisp. It works really well with external keyboard, mouse and displays and so when you are in office, you can use it as a desktop. Apple desktop keyboards have the same layout and spacing as their laptop keyboards so you will never feel any difference.

On the software side, it comes bundled with iPhoto and Garageband so you have some good apps to begin with. The inbuilt pdf viewer is very good too. Also, there are some really good free applications available for mac, especially for developers (for example GitX)

I think macbook is totally worth the money if you can afford it. Its a little expensive but no other laptop comes even close. They can probably match up or do better on the processor speed or RAM but as a package (hardware + software), nothing beats the macbook. If you want , you can read more 15” apple macbook pro reviews

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I have been in Ho Chi Minh City for the last two weeks and I am hoping to document my experience in this and (hopefully) few more blog posts. Basically it all started when I met Lawrence Sinclair last month in Bangalore and we talked about Ruby on Rails and East Agile (his company in Vietnam). I told Lawrence how both Nithya and I love traveling and would love to come over to Vietnam sometime and he offered me a two week consulting assignment in Vietnam. I accepted it and on 2nd August arrived in Ho Chi Minh (more on the journey and emmigration/immigration experience in another blog post).

I was expecting to see something like Bangalore but I was in for a total surprise (and a pleasant one at that). The city is big, not as crowded as Bangalore and hundred percent fun. First thing that you notice is that the cabs are very efficient here (if you follow this advice and get a good one) and as a result its very easy to get from anywhere to anywhere any time of the day. I have used the cabs as late as 4 AM and I have always had a very pleasant experience. Another thing that I loved about the city is the different kinds of cuisines that you can sample here. So far, I have tasted Vietnames, Korean and Japanese food and desserts and everything has been really good and reasonably priced. I never thought I would say this but the vegetarian food here is exceptionally good. Here are a few pictures from MoF (Ministry of Food), a japanese dining and desserts place

This place has a great night life and a lots of live music. A lot of restaurants have live music and there are some great places for rock lovers. Most places are open till 2 AM. There are a lot of cafes and clubs which are open all night and you can get some great food all through the night. Here is a picture of a place called Q-Bar which serves coffee and drinks till about 3 AM in the morning.

Thats all for now. I will post more pictures and updates/info in another blog post. So long!

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