Ahmad//Bitplayer

[bitplaying-blog]

Startup Fever

It's been a week since my partner Jin and I started work on an idea that we believe could take off. We could even pursue it beyond our time at Bitmaker if we get encouraging feedback from early users.

What's the idea?

Our mission is to help you be impulsive, and get in a state of constant exploration. We do that by organizing and featuring three new 'Outings' every weekend, each of which have a certain number of spots available (usually 6-10). These Outings represent a wide range of activities and price points, and they're geared toward discovery and forming new hobbies/interests.

The 10-second pitch?

Do something for the first time. Make new friends. Get spontaneous.

Go on an Outing.

We're called OutWith.Us, and you can sign up now to get notified when we launch. Since the minute we decided to start work on this project, it's been a constant rush of emotions. Elation as we figure out implementation details, coupled with wave after wave of doubt as we get feedback on our ideas and ask if anyone would actually use it. We've been hit with Startup Fever (has this term been coined already?), and we haven't even built any functionality yet. There's so much to do, and a sinking feeling that if we don't do it all in the next week we'll immediately fail. I know that's not perfectly rational, it's just an obsessive condition. The fever's got us, and I think we're stuck with it until we IPO or fail.

So far, it's been a constant process of refining our product idea with feedback from the people we're talking to. Every day, we perfected the idea little by little until now we feel that we have a solid basis of an idea that we can start building and coding.

Before any actual code has been written however, we've dedicated a lot of time to working on graphical assets, design language, and putting out our landing page with a Mailchimp sign-up form. We believe it's important to brand ourselves early on, eschewing the "lean" methodology of focusing entirely on building an MVP. A little bit of work on design details and marketing goes a long way in showing potential users that we're serious about what we're doing, and that we care about getting things right.

It's a tough hard slog, but I've never been so motivated. Here's to the Startup Fever!

Cheers, Ahmad

[bitplaying-blog]

Rails 4 Defaults to Minitest. Frustration Follows

Since I had an assortment of issues trying to create a Rails 3.2 app while 4.0 was installed, I decided to plow through the Bitmaker projects all in Rails 4 and just work out the differences as I went.

When using Guard testing for the Crowdfunder project, I got stuck on an error that kept coming up in the console:

~/.../unit.rb:1037:in `block in process_args': invalid option: --use-color (OptionParser::InvalidOption)

The reason we got this error was that Rails 4 now defaults to Minitest, and so we have to use a different version of guard. In the gemfile, replace 'guard-test' with 'guard-minitest'. After that, go to your Guardfile and copy-paste the following sample Guardfile (from github.com/guard/guard-minitest)

guard :minitest do watch(%r{^test/(.*)\/?test_(.*)\.rb}) watch(%r{^lib/(.*/)?([^/]+)\.rb}) { |m| "test/#{m[1]}test_#{m[2]}.rb" } watch(%r{^test/test_helper\.rb}) { 'test' } end

And that's it. Cheers!

[bitplaying-blog]

Speed Bumps

I've said since day one of Bitmaker that one of the best parts of the program is being in the middle of a startup as it grows into an established company. It's incredibly interesting to watch the founders struggle with issues as varied as doing the dishes, improving teaching methods, and encouraging development of soft skills like communication. Being in the second cohort means we still see a lot of rough edges, and we learn how those things get smoothed over as time goes on.

On Monday we learned of the biggest challenge yet - a threat to the existence of Bitmaker Labs. As the first bootcamp coding school of its kind in Canada (carrying over the model of Dev Bootcamp, Starter League, and similar schools in the U.S.), it faced an investigation by Ontario's Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU). Since it trains students to be web developers, which is a registered occupation, and since it is both more than 40 hours and $1000 tuition, Bitmaker was required to apply for a private career college certification despite not issuing any diploma or certification of any kind.

When Matt Gray came out to tell us, we could immediately tell that something tragic had happened. As we began to understand the situation we were in, and the chance that we'd have to just fold it all up and go home, a limp sense of shock settled over the class. There were two possible outcomes - this could be one of those foundational events that make a good story years later when you're giving talks to young would-be entrepreneurs, or this could be the end of Bitmaker.

The tension hung on us all week, as fewer and fewer people showed up to school. We still made a valiant effort to pull together: students who were proficient in particular subjects led group sessions and lectures to help other students catch up, some of us went on with the course work as it was previously planned, and plenty of us tweeted and posted on Facebook showing our frustration and disappointment. But we were crushed, and it showed.

On Tuesday afternoon, I wrote a letter that expressed the great things that Bitmaker stood for, what its life-changing potential meant to me and many of the other students, and I implored the Minister Brad Duguid to allow Bitmaker to operate as a sign of intent of building up the technology startup community here and being flexible with the aging laws. After getting two dozen signatures from other students, we handed it into his office the next morning. It might not have played any part in his decision, but it was a cathartic experience nevertheless.

On Thursday, after the most anxious few days any of us are like to experience this summer, we finally got the news we'd been dying to hear: Bitmaker could keep running while it went through the career college approval process!

The whole ordeal was nerve-racking for me, and as a student living just a few blocks away it wasn't even particularly troublesome to my plans. I can only imagine how others, who quit their jobs or travelled across the world to come here, must have felt while all this was sorted out.

Again, I have to say it: the most awesome thing about Bitmaker is that it is a startup itself, and it's teaching us to found startups of our own. So when I'm facing the imminent death of my first startup, I'll just remember how these guys handled it and hope to be half as cool, transparent, and decisive in the moment.

[bitplaying-blog]

End of Week 1 // Data Mining Twitter

I accessed the Twitter API today for the first time. Actually, this was the first time that I’d accessed any API, and I think I’m going to like it. Suddenly, it feels like the tiny little programs we’ve been writing have access to so much potential information that they could really become useful.

What was the first thing I did with such awesome power? Built an IRC spambot, of course!

The bot returned tweets ranging from Rob Delaney to Goldman Sachs Elevator Gossip (Twitter classics) to less-known but equally funny finds @JonyFuckingIve and @UrbanEnglish. Simply by sending out an IRC message with the code phrase “bloodsucking vampires,” for example, the program would return the latest Goldman Sachs gossip going back one day each time to keep the results fresh.

Now that I’m not so intimidated by APIs, I plan to spend a few hours this weekend just playing around and seeing what other fun things I can do with them. Of course it makes it way easier if, like Twitter, there’s a Ruby gem available to access it, but I imagine figuring out the basics of JSON APIs wouldn’t be too hard if I had to.

Since I tend to relate all my web development learning to music somehow, I imagine that the Twitter API could be an extremely useful tool to find out about music trends worldwide. Searching for different keywords like the newest subgenres of EDM (currently: trap) and filtering them by locations could expose what is happening in the most music-aware neighborhoods in the world. I could track obscure artists and measure their changing popularity, where their fanbase is, and whether their live events are generating any buzz for them in each city they play. Of course, there’s an endless field of tweet visualizations that I could come up with to surface interesting patterns. Are dubstep fans tweeting later in the day? Are followers of soft indie bands more likely to tweet about sad or emotional topics? Are DJs wilder than rock stars?

I could do this all day. And I think I will.

[bitplaying-blog]

Day 2

Finally, our first dive into real coding, real Ruby. The first game we had to make was simple enough: turn words into Pig Latin by moving the first letter to the end (if it wasn’t a vowel) and add “ay” to the end. The process went by simply enough, giving us that first sense of writing code rather than just filling in blanks and evaluating answers.

When we got to making a Hangman game, the challenges multiplied along with our frustration. My partner Dylan and I started in a very unstructured fashion, making random methods as we needed them and rewriting every line of code we wrote multiple times as later issues developed. We chose to pursue our own solution rather than follow the boilerplate template on the Bitmaker github, but that quickly went awry. We tried to write a method that would evaluate and print the correct Hangman board whenever it was called, but as soon as we finished and tested it, we realized that it redrew the board whenever you typed in a new letter - it forgot the correct answers you entered before!

Our initial hope was that we could neatly avoid saving every result to memory and using a dozen different methods for every minor task by chaining much of the process into one method.  However, this approach didn’t make any room for easily putting in exceptions (e.g. when you’d already guessed a letter), and random errors kept creeping in until we knew that we had to start over.

Starting to feel hopeless and tired, we frantically reworked our whole program, deleting almost everything we wrote and slowly building it up in a new way that depended on saving every result to variables before proceeding. Finally, a full three hours after we started, we got the first hopeful sign: we had properly written a method that filled in the correct letters, and saved the result until the next letter was guessed. The sense of accomplishment grew as old errors were fixed quickly after that, and new issues didn’t stump us for long. We checked that we were running our code as efficiently as possible, making changes to loops that were onerously written and redoing the way we drew our initial empty board to remove a few unnecessary lines. Nearly done! A few edge cases bothered us; for example, the ability to write in multiple letters at once or use numbers or other characters. We added in some extra if blocks to handle those cases, and BOOM! Done!

I can see how I’d get addicted to the thrill of finding a solution. That thousandth time you run the program, and all of a sudden everything has fallen into place and it performs as expected - that’s magical! Next up is tic-tac-toe, but that can wait for tomorrow. It’s time to unwind and meet some mentors now. Cheers!

[bitplaying-blog]

Day 1

I stepped in ready with excitement. Like a toddler giddy about the prospect of going to kindergarten, I came off a lifelong string of unfulfilling educational experiences ready for the next phase of life. In the introductory icebreakers, you could tell how strong that sentiment was among the cohort - at least a dozen people cited their pride at leaving behind their staid jobs, the rat race, the old-fashioned expectations of friends and family, and giving it all up to try to make something.

That might be making something of ourselves, or making some actual thing. I heard people say they want to unleash their creativity, they want to enable themselves to take control of their dreams, or at the very least they want to find a job that doesn’t treat them like replaceable number-crunchers. Together those confessions collude to create a beautiful sense of understanding of why we all came here.

Going into the first lecture was tense; it seemed that everyone was scared to know less than everyone else. Our nerves eased, however, as Khurram did a fantastic job of setting the pace appropriately, constantly reaching out for feedback, and turning the abstract advantages of Git version control into simple, concrete lessons.

When we got on to our first assignment, it slowly started to make sense - the thrill of “actually” coding (even though this was just an exercise in command-line and git interfaces), and seeing understanding driven by our own ability to tinker and experiment and fail repetitively until the idea sinks in. The “Aha!” moment is the best part of it all. We’re obviously going to be exhausted by the end of these nine weeks, but right now the exhilaration of being here and making it all happen overwhelms any sense of tiredness. Let’s pray that feeling lasts!