Improvising

You know the feeling you get when you touch down in Mumbai and you realize you left your AeroPress filters safely tucked away in your kitchen 7797 miles away? Ugh.

My solution: empty tea bags.

A few notes about this particular MacGyver setup:

• Rinse the bags thoroughly
• I double-up with paper from two bags of tea
• The extra paper can be unwieldy when screwing the screen on to the Aeropress (cut to-size if possible)
• These particular tea bags are surprisingly water-impermeable. This is fine for the Aeropress because you have pressure from the plunger, but I don’t think this approach would work well for, say, pour-over

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Us coffee nerds are obsessed with all the little details of the kit. Grinder, brewer, kettle, timer, thermometer, etc. But despite all the pomp and circumstance we include around our sacred ritual, coffee itself is a fairly simple. Fresh coffee + hot water + attention = delicious.

De-sharding Redis

Pre-sharding is a common technique for preemptively managing the growth of your Redis infrastructure. At StepOut we’ve been running on a cluster of 64 pre-sharded Redis nodes for quite a while without any real pain to speak of. That said, in an effort to trim some of the fat from our systems resource allocation I started looking at some alternatives to our current setup. What I arrived at was a fairly different topology than we started with, consisting of only 8 shards on a single host box (replicated for performance and durability).

* Based on Rackspace cloud pricing

The only (significant) downside to the proposed configuration is that we would need to re-shard our data. Ugh. I considered upgrading to the Redis 2.6RC early in order to take advantage of the new dump and restore commands, but it seemed like too big of a gamble to introduce both pre-release software and a major infrastructural change. Luckily, the final solution was actually much more simple.

Thanks to the structure of the Redis AOF, you can concatenate individual backups into a single file.

It’s also pretty handy to run the redis-check-aof tool to verify that the process was completed correctly.

Then in the application, we just had to make a slight change to our key hashing function:

Becomes:

The approach requires some downtime, but it ended up being fairly minimal, especially when considering some of the alternative solutions. Anecdotally, I’ve also noticed some performance improvements dealing with fewer instances, although it’s still a little early to call that conclusively.

Discussion on Hacker News.

Redis Mutex in PHP

When you think about PHP, “concurrency” probably isn’t among the first things that come to mind. Fortunately (unfortunately?) we live in a world where distributed applications are the de-facto standard which means that not even humble, single-threaded PHP is immune to the woes of concurrent programming. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and inspired by the work of many before me, I’ve built a very simple redis-backed mutex:

Suppose in your application that you are interacting with an API that doesn’t allow partial updates. You would use the mutex as follows:

This implementation is far from unique, but it is very functional and hopefully simple enough to be dropped-in to most projects with only minor customizations.

Discussion on hacker news.

Don’t Commit Syntax Errors

Add this as an alias in your .gitconfig file:

Now, before you commit a batch of changes, you can run git syntax-check. Simple!

For a few other git niceties, take a look at my full .gitconfig

On Browser Support

No one likes it, and we all look for ways to get out of it. At StepOut the dev team has been fighting the good fight to try to deprecate support for IE6 and IE7. Unfortunately, it’s a tough business sell. No one wants to hear that they’re going to lose n% of their visits, regardless of what n happens to be.

Admittedly we should have thought to look at this sooner, but instead of simply comparing visits and pageviews, we started to dive into site usage metrics across our major browsers. The data was striking:

Full-sized image

When you see the absolute numbers (redacted), it’s really quite astounding. The relative measures still tell the story though. Essentially, on our site, IE6 and IE7 users are 80% less engaged. Now that is data you can pitch.

Odometer-style Counter using jQuery

A couple months back I had to implement an odometer-style counter for the new StepOut landing page. I found a few implementations here and there, but I didn’t really like any of them so I decided to roll my own. It’s not the most elegant code I’ve ever written, but it seems to work fairly well and is nice and succinct.

So how does it work?

Each digit in the counter is represented with the following HTML:

<span class="digit">
    <span title="3">3</span>
    <hr />
</span>

We store the value of each digit and replace the value of the inner span with a list of numbers 0-9 (well, really 1-9, padded with 0s). We then change the position of that span so that the original number is visible. During each ‘tick’, we animate the top property of the span so that the next digit becomes visible, and wrap around once we hit 0.

The process ended up being fairly straightforward, so I hope the code will be at least somewhat legible.

I haven’t done much to generalize the code, so a bit of coaxing might be required to get it to work in your environment. I do have a working jsFiddle set up though. That said, all of this is provided without warranty. I mostly hope that this can serve as an interesting reference or starting point for someone else in the future.

HTML

JS

CSS

Result

2011 in Coffee

That’s 49 bags (probably around 30 pounds) of glorious, caffeinating goodness. Over the past year I tried to catalogue all of the coffee I brewed, and while I probably missed a few bags here and there, this is a pretty representative sample of what kept me percolating in 2011.

It was a great year for tasting and learning. Local spots like Porto Rico Importing Co. and subscription services like Craft Coffee and Tonx provided the opportunity to try different coffees from all over the world. I started the year dead set on dark roasts, but as my brew technique improved I started to appreciate the complexity across the gamut. For months, every new coffee I tried I’d declare the best in the world.

Coffee of the Year

Looking back over the year, was there a single stand out? You bet!

I’d like to say this was a difficult decision, and while more than a few exceptional coffees hit my cup, none came close to the El Salvador Finca Montery Bambu from Tonx. The Coffee Adventures review of this coffee pretty much sums it up for me:

I enjoyed this coffee more than I can put words together to describe this feeling.

The aroma alone convinced fellow developer Bob Patterson to give coffee a second chance. To paraphrase his reaction, “I had no idea coffee had actual flavor”.

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I thought I’d have this whole coffee thing figured out in no time, but, just like so many great pursuits, the deeper you go, the more you realize you still have to learn. It’s been a lot of fun experimenting, learning, sharing and of course, enjoying a year full of coffee.

My Perfect Cup

The Beans

I was lucky enough to get in on one of Tonx Coffee’s first roasts, and let me tell you, it’s some seriously good stuff. These beans came from Finca Matalapa in El Salvador.

Co-founder Nik Bauman told me that this particular roast came out a little darker than they would have liked. You can see that the beans are a really nice, chocholatey brown color. Despite being a little on the dark side, I still think this roast makes a phenomenal cup.

The Grind

Earlier this year I picked up a Hario Slim Mill and it’s definitely the MVP of my coffee setup. It produces an excellent, consistent grind, and I’ve come to really enjoy hand grinding (although it does get tiring if you have to do more than one cup at a time). I also have an electric burr grinder when I’m brewing several cups at once, but it really doesn’t come close to the quality of the Hario.

The Brew

I’ve been using a Clever Coffee Dripper which really nicely marries the full-immersion brewing of a press pot, with the crisp, clean cup of a pour over. The cleanup is also much easier than with the press pot, which is a huge win in my book.

I’ve tried a few different techniques with the Clever Coffee Dripper, all with pretty good results. The one I’ve settled on is fairly simple:

1. Pre-soak your filter and pre-heat your cup
2. Using 200° F water, completely soak your grinds
3. Let stand for 2:30, gently stir, and drain

The entire brew process takes around five minutes, and is (in my opinion) the best combination of simplicity and predicable results.

The Cup

Is all this work worth it? You bet it is! Proof below:

The Tyler Hayes: The Case for A Towing Company API →

thetylerhayes:

I get really excited when I hear business ideas that don’t rely on the “we’ll get a lot of users and then make money” approach. It’s not that it can’t work so much as it can not work.

tl;dr: Reduce overhead for towing companies (they don’t have to send out their trucks). Increase revenue for towing companies by increasing total fees paid, via basic turn-around time psychology like is used in mail-in rebates. Reduce stress and average fees paid-per-person.

Not sure if the economics are actually right, but this totally nails the conceptual model for entrepreneurship. It’s an industry where there is significant pain (bonus points for the pain exiting for both the consumer and provider) and there is a very obvious, very direct way in which to make money.

I dig it.

The Truth about Clones

locks:	well, code a clone of yourself
Judofyr:	but if he's *just* like me…
Judofyr:	… he won't do shit either
Judofyr:	he'll just code *another* clone