Matt

  • Taking Rails Lessons to Django

    For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a number of Ruby on Rails projects with some talented and experienced developers.  After years of working in the Django world on various projects, Rails is an interesting contrast. My perspective on developing webapps has changed greatly since working with Rails. This is both due…

  • Minimum Viable Sale (MVS)

    One of the big things about running a business is managing risk.  As an entrepreneur I know that 25% of businesses fail within the first year, 60% have failed by year 4 and 71% have failed or closed by year 10. Given that most businesses are started with the best of intentions and usually with…

  • New Site New Direction

    With the launch of the new design for this site we have also taken a new tack on the strategy going forward for future development of products and features.  The backend services that currently have been built for Halotis iOS Apps will be re-built so that others can benefit from the work done.  Where appropriate…

  • Building something bigger

    Halotis is in the process of a pivot. We’re re-writing all of the software developed for the backend of our mobile apps so that they can be opened up for anyone to use. We will be offering a host of BaaS style applications to make mobile development easier, more social and hopefully raise the bar…

  • Playing with Docker, Vagrant, Dokku for deployment

    I’m looking at launching a series of new web services in the future and that got me thinking about finding ways to improve my development and deployment workflow to make it super trivial to launch new services and APIs. Recent experience with Heroku’s PaaS got me looking in that direction. Pushing a git repository to…

  • My Personal Brand

    Over the last week several things have popped into my news feed mixed with conversations I’ve had which brought up the idea of honing my personal brand. I’m not much of a fan of brand marketing in general but I’ve been doing some more research and reading about the idea. Personal branding is about taking…

  • Trick for crispy homemade sweet potato fries

    After much trial and error to create yam/sweet potato fries as good as a restaurant we finally discovered the secret. Coat them in corn starch and oil before baking. Simple and delicious.

  • Learning Ruby on Rails

    Rails has been the popular framework for generating web applications for a long time now, yet I’ve managed to avoid learning it until this month. However a new job gave me an opportunity to dig in and learn it. Having come from several years of Python/Django development learning Rails shouldn’t have been difficult. Ruby has…

  • A Better In App Purchase Model

    A couple years ago I gave my girlfriend one of the best christmas gifts she’d ever gotten. It was a pair of tickets for a full day at the spa. The catch was that she had to gift the other ticket to one of her girlfriends.. the second spa pass wasn’t for me. I gave…

  • The Web Sucks

    I’ve been bouncing around between working on native Applications and web apps for the last few years. Having experience with the state of the art in both areas of software development. One thing I have found is that web development is not nearly in a state that programming a complex application is sensible. A modern…