Douglas Jarquin

I almost co-founded GitHub

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:44:48 -0500

## The Truth

Okay, that title is a bit misleading. I mean, how do you almost co-found one of the most important technology businesses for engineers, yet be basically a nobody.

Yes, I am just a rat race running, weekend entrepreneur. No, I didn’t exactly “almost” co-found GitHub, but I did have a possible opportunity to. This is the story of how I missed that opportunity.

## The Story

It was about 5 years ago today, and Rails was just beginning to make its now historical mark on the development world. During my research, I came across a blog app written in Rails named Ozimodo. It was one of the first, and especially in the beginning, it was raw.

You got to understand, the Rails community at this time was still new. There were many frustrations still to be had, and there was no GitHub that enabled painless collaboration.

So what did I do when I made some improvements to the app? Well, I emailed the developer. And who was this developer? None other than Chris Wanstrath.

I had a couple of app improvements, and I also completely refactored the templates removing the old school table based layouts that Chris was using. In my email I explained that, but Chris wanted to know how I did what I did.

I vividly remember starting to write the reply, then letting something else have my attention. I never wrote the email reply.

I never got to show Chris my skills. I never got to network with him. I never got to learn from him. And then of course, I never got to co-found GitHub with him.

## The Moral

Use the tools we have today to show off your work. Fork a hugely important project, and commit something meaningful. Let other developers see your work, get feedback, and learn from them. It’s now easier than ever, and you never know what that commit might lead to. A new job, a resume bullet, or maybe a future business partner.

My iPhone Home Screen

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 02:16:00 -0500

My home screen, inspired by this Signal vs. Noise post.

You’ll notice the following:

None of my apps have badges.
I leave the fourth row empty so that I can use it to scroll.

Links to apps:

What sucks about TuexDuex

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:27:00 -0400

I wrote this a while ago, and have since moved on to using Flow by MetaLab, but I thought I would share my list anyway.

Lack of a “today” view.
No print stylesheets.
No way to export data.
The dumb sync function of the iphone app.
Lack of an iPad interface

Poor man's Git hosting

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 22:23:00 -0400

For those who don’t know me, I am very cheap. Actually, it’s a point of pride, and something I reflect in a positive light. I don’t think it’s bad to be frugal. This is true for the way I host my Git repositories too.

At any given time I have a dozen of so tiny repositories filled with little experiments of mine. Instead of paying $300 a year, I just stick them in my free Dropbox account.

Up

From your git working directory:

Then, to push your changes to Dropbox, just run:

Obviously, change out master for your branch name. Alternatively, you could set th branch to track from Dropbox by default with:

Down

Once your repository lives in Dropbox, cloning it is as simple as:

If you want to have a dropbox remote instead of the default origin run:

Pushing up changes follows the same steps listed above, and this all works for shared directories, too.

Shout Outs

I can’t take credit for any of this, so below are the multiple sources where I pieced this together from.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:38:56 -0400

So, after a quick Google search, I was reminded that “inanimate” basically means without life. Know that I understand the question, my favorite inanimate object is my iPhone. I use it everyday, and it has become a hugely important part of me.

Updating all outdated Homebrew packages

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:11:00 -0400

I am not sure why this isn’t built-in to Homebrew, but if you frequently want to update all outdated packages like I do, this command should help out:

Maybe I should contribute a similar command?

Installing RVM on Mac OS X 10.6

Thu, 19 May 2011 16:43:00 -0400

I recently got a new MacBook Pro, and haven’t gotten around to installing RVM yet. So when I took on this task today, I was totally surprised buy the issues I faced.

Prerequisites

Git
Terminal chops

Installation

The default installation method is the easiest, so I suggest you follow it. As documented on the official RVM site, just use this one-liner:

That’s it, or so I thought.

Caveats

RVM will likely not work as expected

I kept getting the following error messages:

Not exactly sure what is causing it yet, but the solution is to remove RVM, and retry the installation.

I actually had to repeat this process four times before I did not see these errors anymore.

Command not found

The next problem I faced was that the rvm command wasn’t in my path. Luckily, I found the executable after a quick search. It lives at:

However, simply adding that to your path isn’t the solution. It actually didn’t even work for me. Instead, add the following to your .bashrc or .zshrc, respectively.

Bash

ZSH

Conclusion

So, my curious side wants to know exactly why this is happening, but I got nowhere. Some have solved the problem by setting some permissions, but that solutions seemed to hacky for me.

Hope it helps.

References

Hidden iPod controls on iPhone 4.

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:46:05 -0400

Hidden iPod controls on iPhone 4.

Backup Navicat with Dropbox

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 16:01:00 -0400

I recently started using Navicat for MySQL as my Mac database administration application of choice, and quickly wondered how I could back up my data. Particularly, Navicat has a great query interface, and in a few days I compiled 27 queries that I really did not want to have to rebuild.

Without over engineering a solution, and since there is no sensitive data to worry about as passwords are stored in Keychain, I decided to backup with Dropbox (referral link). I couldn’t move the directory into my Dropbox directory, which is my preferred method, so I went the symlink route.

Note: Replace the word username above with your username.

Melissa is well into labor now.

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 09:11:07 -0400

Melissa is well into labor now.

Just installed Django again and boy did I miss it.

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 03:43:13 -0400

Just installed Django again and boy did I miss it.

How to add a CakePHP book to Coda

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

I have to use PHP at work so I have been eyeing the CakePHP framework. Although it is nowhere near Rails in my opinion is does have some documentation and a big enough community. As my PHP development tool of choice I use Coda, from Panic. I know one of the latest features of Coda 1.5 was the ability to add your own Books so I thought I would write about how I setup a CakePHP book.

The assets

First, lets download the CakePHP Book logo I threw together. It took me awhile to get the image to align correctly in Coda, but if you have a better one let me know.

cake-book-logo.png.zip

My inspiration came from the small CakePHP book on the “Learn” tab of the homepage.

Settings

Now in Coda, click “Books” and then the “+” sign at the bottom to add a new book. Make sure your settings match this:

Note: You have to click and drag the image into the “Cover Image” box to apply the graphic.

Results

Hit “OK” and voila. Your very own CakePHP Book right in Coda.

Just set up MySQL replication.

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:56:37 -0400

Just set up MySQL replication.

Just setup Feedburner. Curious as to how many people have stumbled onto this site.

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:16:00 -0400

Just setup Feedburner. Curious as to how many people have stumbled onto this site.

Why Google Chrome is great for Safari

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Google Chrome is the new browser on the block, and boy is it getting all the neighborhood girls excited. I am sure you can find some entertaining article about why Google Chrome will rule the world, but I am going to tell you why I like it. Webkit. Yes, Google Chrome uses the exact same rendering engine as Safari which is my browser of choice, mobile Safari, and Android. This means that any site that renders well in Safari will look the same in Google Chrome.

What this also means is that if the adoption of Google Chrome is high enough, which it will be, web designers all over the world can finally give IE the boot. I see the signs already, “This site works fine in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome.” That’s three choices other than IE.

Melissa did not let me take pictures of her during week number 39.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:17:46 -0400

Melissa did not let me take pictures of her during week number 39.

Watched season 1 episode 3 and 4 of Lost.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:19:38 -0400

Watched season 1 episode 3 and 4 of Lost.

Just setup neighborly cron jobs on all of my slices.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:31:00 -0400

Just setup neighborly cron jobs on all of my slices.

Start backing up your Mac to S3 in 5 minutes

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

There are many tutorials out there on how to back up your Mac to Amazon S3, but over time this process has been simplified.

Requisites

Before we get started we will need a few things. Also, make sure you have your Amazon S3 access identifiers at hand. You can get those from your AWS account.

Amazon S3 account
Mac OS X Leopard
Terminal Skills

Back it up

In order to keep this under five minutes I am simply going to list the steps required and not going to really go into any major detail.

First

Install the S3Sync Ruby Gem. Read more about Ruby Gems here.

Second

Add your Amazon access identifiers to the top of your .bash_login file.

Third

Execute the command to backup where my_backup_bucket is the name of your bucket.

I personally do not like to schedule the backups with a cron because every time it runs I am doing something important. I suggest you create an alias for the command in your .bash_login file like this:

Then all you have to do is type backup whenever you want to run this command. Easy.

If the Terminal is not your kind of interface or your just want to backup a few folders of important files, I suggest you go with a full blown S3 file manager. Here are some of the applications I have used.

Applications

References

Stones brings Go to the iPhone

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Exactly a month ago I read an article on Rails Spikes titled “Why programmers should play Go”. If you found that article interesting, and own an iPhone or iPod Touch with version 2.0 of the firmware, you will love Stones.

Right now Stones is for two players only, which means there is no AI, but it is still very fun. Plus, like chess, the best way to master Go is to play yourself.

Douglas Jarquin

I almost co-founded GitHub

My iPhone Home Screen

What sucks about TuexDuex

Poor man's Git hosting

Up

Down

Shout Outs

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

Updating all outdated Homebrew packages

Installing RVM on Mac OS X 10.6

Prerequisites

Installation

Caveats

RVM will likely not work as expected

Command not found

Conclusion

References

Hidden iPod controls on iPhone 4.

Backup Navicat with Dropbox

Melissa is well into labor now.

Just installed Django again and boy did I miss it.

How to add a CakePHP book to Coda

The assets

Settings

Results

Just set up MySQL replication.

Just setup Feedburner. Curious as to how many people have stumbled onto this site.

Why Google Chrome is great for Safari

Melissa did not let me take pictures of her during week number 39.

Watched season 1 episode 3 and 4 of Lost.

Just setup neighborly cron jobs on all of my slices.

Start backing up your Mac to S3 in 5 minutes

Requisites

Back it up

First

Second

Third

Applications

References

Stones brings Go to the iPhone

Resources