CodeSimple by Brad Milne

COO@ www.getelevate.com. I write on coding, startups and online marketing.

[bradmilne-blog]

The One Tip That Will Help You Learn To Code 10x Faster

I spend a fair amount of my own time teaching myself to code and recently, trying to build an actual application that I plan to put online and have other people use. Recently, while I was in a bit of slump trying to make a major push on the app. I knew that the next stage - figuring out the DB structure and then coding a music quiz - was going to be difficult. 

In fact I knew that it was going to be a grind and that the majority of the my weekend was going to be dedicated to reading out-dated Stack Overflow articles and struggling to find simple solutions to simple problems. But the day before, an incredible developer that I work with gave me a piece of advice I won't be forgetting anytime soon:

The key to being a good developer is to be able to find your answer as quickly as possible without learning anything else.

    To be honest, it hurt when I heard it because I literally have spent probably close to 100 hours so far looking for answers online and getting caught up into learning something else. You know how it is... because you don't know what you don't know it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that whatever you're learning at the time is worthwhile. IT ISN'T.

The most important thing you need to do is launch a product. Finish you application, get the website live, etc. Anything that keeps you from it is a distraction that you'll have plenty of time to learn about when you need to finish a project and that exact issue is stopping you from it.

Ever since then I've been much more productive because I don't feel bad ignoring most of what I read about Rails and coding online - the same stuff that would have me worried that I don't know enough.

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Keeping Your Rails Development Environment As Similar To Production As Possible

It's a pain in the ass to setup a local development environment that mimics what you're going to be deploying on Heroku but I'll tell you right now - it's worth it.

The way I've always had it set up was SQLite for my local DB with Webrick as my local server and then using the standard Heroku defaults ( I believe at the time of writing it's Postgres and the Thin webserver) on production. Like many others I pretty much reused what I learned in Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial and went with it.

Unfortunately while working on an application that I'm putting together now, I ran into a multi-hour frustrating issue that finally convinced me I need to go through the pain and learn to setup a proper local development environment. 

(For those interested the issue that I ran into had to do with a Boolean DB field that caused a conflict between my local SQLite and my production PostgreSQL DBs.)

As usual - I'm so grateful and happy to pay the $9/month for my subscription to RailsCasts where he has an amazing tutorial about setting up a project using Postgres as your local DB and migrating an existing SQLite DB to Postgres. While it took me a little bit of time to sort out the workflow of creating a Postgres DB and migrating them, I haven't once yet experienced any pain in pushing DBs up to Heroku. 

A bit of upfront work but I know that I'm saving myself many frustrating hours in the long run.

[getelevate-blog]

Brad Milne's Latest Post on Content Marketing Institute

Just a note to let you know that my latest post on content marketing distribution is online. The topic is ‘3 B2B Content Distribution Turbochargers You Should Activate.’ Please reshare!

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My Experience: Rails vs. Django

I've read enough times to not worry about which language or framework to learn and I know that it makes sense. But I recently made the decision to switch to learning to code using Rails instead of Django even though we use Django at Elevate.

A major tradeoff is that I can't ask any of the incredible guys I work with to take a look at whatever is tripping me up (and there's ALWAYS something to give me problems.) That said I never asked them too much since I respect their time and our joint commitment to the company too much to burden them with my beginner's questions. 

The reason that I made the switch though was because I found that it was easier in Rails to make progress on my own. Especially as a beginner, I find it easy to buy into the 'convention over configuration' that Rails preaches. The truth is I know nothing about servers and I have absolutely no independent preferences for any software. The only thing I care about is that I can build a simple version of whatever I'm trying to do in as little time and with as little frustration as possible.

Spending a few months with each will teach you that they both can do the exact same stuff and they're both advanced, awesome pieces of software that help you develop things quickly. The only thing that should sway you is how quickly can you develop as a programmer with either one. Between Code School and most importantly, RailsCasts, I find it quicker to advance using Rails.

In any case, take the time to research the learning resources for whatever technology you're planning on choosing. You're going to be spending 80% of your time there instead of in your text editor - believe me.

Good luck and keep coding!

[bradmilne-blog]

APIs for New Coders (Django + Bootstrap + Twython)

In a previous post I detailed how I wanted to learn how to connect to Facebook using a small Django project. My thinking is that just about any web application these days has to connect in some way to the major platforms online (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) and just about any ambitious coding project you want to take on in the future needs to connect to a payments provider (Stripe, Braintree, etc.) if you're ever planning on making money from it.

And outside of the social + payments world, there are so many fantastic services available go developers now for email to photo sharing to anything else you can imagine, you're going to have to learn how to hook up your project to someone else's API.

For the complete beginners, the best definition I can give you comes from Wikipedia:

The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and updated in multiple locations on the web.

Essentially, if an online service has an API you can connect your application to it and make use of the content / user profiles on the service.

Although I first started out thinking I'd dive into the Facebook API, since we use the Twitter API extensively at work, I figured if I ran into some issues like I usually do I could easily find out the answer.

After a bunch of research where I looked at various Django apps like Django-Social-Auth and Tweepy I decided to go with Twython because I could best understand how the code actually worked and how I wanted to use it.

To get started I copied a Django skeleton with Bootstrap that I have saved locally. I then copied the example models.py, views.py, urls.py and tweets.html from the incredibly useful example file that Twython creator Ryan McGrath put together.

The only hangup at that point was that I needed to go and change the app name (since I didn't clone the app directly) in the three files to the app name I had created for the project and I was good to go. /Login sent me to authenticate my Twitter credentials and /user-timeline prints out a list of tweets. 

I'm going to dig further into the project I'm working on and my changes will be up on GitHub but I'm pretty damned pleased I managed to connect an app to the Twitter API.

Mission Accomplished! 

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If you're interested in what I get up to during the day check out www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

Learning To Code One Small Task At A Time

Large coding projects are hard. Smaller projects are generally easier. I regularly remind myself of this simple advice in order to keep pushing ahead and learn more.

I'm a terrible coder. But one of the realities of picking up a new skill is that you're not going to be good at it for the foreseeable future. But trusting that if you keep working hard at it and putting in the time and effort you will improve is hopefully enough for you to persevere.

Something that's fairly common to hear when people are talking about learning something new is the strategy of breaking a large task down into small, manageable tasks. On one hand, you have a better chance of understanding and completing the task, and on the other, you set achievable milestones that are always gratifying to reach.

If you're teaching yourself to code, you're probably thinking about some pretty ambitious projects for yourself in the future that likely include a bunch of stuff you don't know how to do yet. This is a good thing.

Right now I have an idea for a project where the main requirement is that I need users to login with Facebook and I need access to some of their data. However when I go through the Django Social Auth app (or anything similar) I'm immediately intimidated since they all show off how the app can connect to 20 different services.

I really want to build a prototype though so I've planned out how I'm going to achieve it.

For me to take a logical next step, I need to break this down into much smaller chunks. My plan is to learn:

1.) Basic Django login 

2.) Basic Django login with extensions to the user model

3.) Social Auth integration with Facebook login

4.) Social Auth integration with Facebook login and API request

So my large project is now broken down into 4 parts where each step will logically lead into the next and at the end of it I will accomplish the main thing I wanted to learn in the first place. And I'm confident that once I learn one, the next will be fairly easy to understand.

Keep coding!

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If you're interested in what I get up to during the day please check out www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

Learning Design Tools Helps You Write Better Code

If you're getting into coding and trying your hand with HTML, CSS and maybe even some server side language, you might consider spending some time with Balsamiq & Pixemator.

Balsamiq is wireframing software. It's drag and drop, black and white and is an incredibly fast way to whip up the outlines of a webpage. Below is something that I'm working on right now. This took about 10 minutes to do and most importantly, it made me think about key features and concepts as opposed to colors, perfect positioning and whether it works properly in IE or not. In short, it's a great tool to help focus your thinking.

Pixelmator on the other hand is a fantastic piece of software (caveat: you need a Mac) that is essentially Photoshop-lite. It doesn't have all the features of Photoshop but it works like a slightly more complicated version of Balsamiq and lets you produce high quality mockups of the pages you want to create. Playing around for a couple days you should be able to produce some decent looking pages.

But importantly, it helps you think about some design concerns other than key features and concepts. Instead, I find that it helps me think about color, spacing, usability and overall aesthetic.

It might seem like a step backward (at least to me) why you would learn some design tools instead of spending the same time focusing on your coding. It's not.

These tools help refine your thinking about what you're actually creating so that you don't waste your time writing unnecessary code. Going back and redoing HTML, CSS, and your server-side code is part of the process... BUT so is refining your idea, questioning your core features, and caring about usability from the start.

[bradmilne-blog]

Listening > Being Smart

Every great product is based on a great need.

I was thinking about the iPhone the other day which is one of the greatest products of all time (and definitely one of the most successful) - but what makes it so great?

As a previous owner of one I can tell you it's not the phone reception. And although the browser is good, it's not like I'm away from my computer that much that I need it. In my opinion, what makes the iPhone great is that it's customizable to solve any number of your personal pain points.

Having trouble with your weight? Download any of the calorie tracking apps or the gym apps. Need to remember your ideas? Evernote will take care of that. The entire culture of 'There's an app for that' is about being able to use one single device to solve any pain point that you experience. So when I think about the iPhone as a gorgeously designed device that can solve anyone's personal pain points - it makes perfect sense why a phone that doesn't work great as a phone is one of the most popular products in history.

Not all of us are Steve Jobs. In fact, there might not be another one of us that's Steve Jobs. But any of us can try and observe and understand a real life situation that frustrates someone enough that they would pay for a solution.

The more you pay attention to actual pain and listen to the people experience it, the better position you will be in to make a great product.

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If you're interested in what I get up to please check out www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

The CEO is NOT the Talent

You may have coded the app yourself or landed the first sale but sooner you realize that you're not the talent, the better your startup's chances are.

Starting a company is incredibly difficult. From conceptualizing, prototyping, speaking to potential clients, learning how to do sales, recruiting, pivoting, etc. - it's really hard. And it requires talent, perseverance, incredibly thick skin.

But if you have any success, you're going to grow. And growing means that you're going to cede responsibility to a number of parts of the business to the people you hire. Parts of the business that are meaningful and will directly impact the success of the company. Parts of the company that you will stake the entire existence of the company on.

If you've recruited successfully, each person that joins your company will be a talented, positive, creative person who gets results day in and day out. It also means that ratio of you to the people in your company will continue to skew in the direction of them.

While this is all happening, you need to realize that you're NOT the talent. Humility can be hard, especially for first-time CEOs, but one of the most important things you can do is realize that the people that you hire are your company. They come up with the ideas, make the changes, and contribute and execute on the vision. Put simply, they're the talent.

And as such you should do your best to include them on as many aspects of the company as you can while staying focused on providing an environment where they can thrive independently and as part of the team. Take the time to listen to their ideas, heed their advice and make sure you listen more than you talk.

Trust, involve, and appreciate the people you work with. And be humble. They're the talent.

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If you're interested in what the talented people around me get up to please visit www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

Your Employees Control Your Brand

(originally posted at getelevate.tumblr.com)

A brand is a company’s essence.

In addition to a logo, a color scheme and a tagline, a brand represents what people think and feel about a company. It contains the aggregate sentiment, values and goodwill that a company builds up over its lifetime and should be considered central to any marketing efforts.

The rise of LinkedIn and Twitter poses a new challenge for brand managers and marketers. Because all Twitter profiles and many parts of LinkedIn profiles are public, an employee’s online presence now represents a further extension of your brand - one that puts a human face (or faces) to it. Anywhere online where your employees list and speak about who they are while at the same time associating themselves with their company is now crucial to branding efforts.

Simply put, it’s bad business to disregard the LinkedIn and Twitter profiles of your employees. It’s also presents a new challenge because unlike most company branding efforts, your employees’ online presences combine who they are and what they do with the company’s brand.

For those new to the digital world this might sound like an overwhelming issue. How can a company, in addition to managing its own branding efforts, manage its employees’ online brands as well?

The short answer is that it can’t be fully controlled. But it does give the company an incredible opportunity to extend their brand reach and amplify their marketing efforts if their employees present a positive, knowledgeable and professional presence on these social networks.

Think about it - you have the opportunity to add the total size of your employees’ personal and professional networks to your company’s existing brand reach.

For all the CEOs, branding and marketing directors - make sure you help your employees understand how to best represent themselves on Twitter and LinkedIn using complete profiles, recent photos and intelligent profile updates - because your brand is now controlled by their brand.

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Want to improve your employee brand awareness? Contact us at www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

We Can't All Be Justin Beiber (On Twitter)

(Also posted on getelevate.tumblr.com)

Twitter can be a deflating experience.

Even though the greatest use of Twitter in my opinion is finding out what people more interesting than me are up to, it’s impossible to not react at all to seeing your low vanity metrics.

If you’re lacking in followers, retweets and mentions you might feel self-conscious in your presence on Twitter. However most people outside of PR, marketing and celebrity culture should not compare themselves to the numbers you see put up by people like Bieber or more appropriately, massive consumer brands.

It’s unreasonable to think that a single professional has the brand awareness and reach of a company. There usually isn’t a comparative marketing budget, advertising budget, or word-of-mouth possibility when looking at a company and an individual side by side. Instead, professionals should measure their Twitter presence through a unique lens and follow these guidelines:

1.  Measure yourself by the best in class in your industry

If you’re an IP lawyer then seek out similar IP lawyers on Twitter and compare your progress with theirs in terms of the golden metrics. See what there style is on Twitter and think how you can approximate it.

2. A smaller relevant audience is better than a larger irrelevant audience

What’s the point of having 2000 followers if most of them aren’t interested in your saying? Granted, it helps you look like you have a large audience but you should be more concerned with the quality of your followers. Mentally note who is reading what you write online - if they’re the target audience or close to it then you’re doing a good job.

3. Maintaining an active presence is important.

You may not have a ton of followers, retweets or mentions, but a well maintained Twitter profile is still valuable. Why? Because it helps potential clients find you instead of your competitors and it lets you control your brand. When these people find your profile they will know much more about you and your business from what you choose to post online which could be the difference between you them contacting you or not.

Good luck and keep posting!

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If you’re interested in learning how to build a better professional online presence, visit www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

Startup People Are Optimized As Startup People

If you walk into a big company's marketing department, you wouldn't expect that the people have CFO-level insights into the company's financials. Why?

Because in large companies, people are optimized to become experts at specific skill sets. Rarely does someone who works in a marketing department stay generalized - instead they specialize at email, direct, digital or any of the other areas where they can contribute better to the goals of the department.

Essentially, companies seek to optimize their employees at a skill-set or optimize them at managing people with specific skill sets. This makes sense when you're in a large company because you don't need 15 people in your marketing division with overlapping skills. The benefit of being specialized in a particular area is that you carve out your own domain and can show off your unique skills.

In a startup you're dealing with an entirely different form of optimizing. The best people I've seen in the earliest stages of a startup are those that can optimize themselves for the particular task at hand. Need a brochure? Client service? Make a sale? Go through a legal document? They'll figure out enough about what needs to be done at the moment in order to get by.

By not specializing at a particular task they have the opportunity to build a wide variety of skills in order to get to the point where you can hire people to do specific tasks better than you.

Perhaps the best example of this I remember is how Dennis Crowley learned enough code to hack together a version of his first project Dodgeball which he then sold to Google for millions.

I can personally testify to how cool it is to be picking up new skills on a near-daily basis as you try to get things done even though you have no idea what you're doing. But just keep in mind that working in a startup doesn't optimize you for working in a large company.

Good Luck!

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If you're interested in what I do for a living you can check out www.getelevate.com.

[bradmilne-blog]

Nothing Takes 2 Minutes In Web Development

Unless it's a simple text change, nothing takes 2 minutes to do. I've learned this after years of being frustrated by not understanding why changes that seemed so simple would take half a day or more to get done.

As I've started to code more and more I've really gained an appreciation for the complexity of any reasonably sized application. When you move past editing basic HTML pages and move into actual web applications you start to see how most things have a dependency to some feature, code, stylesheet, etc. and that in order to make a small change, you have to understand what might be affected when it's implemented.

A common situation in marketing and pr agencies is when someone wants to make a quick change on a website. I've requested these changes thousands of times so I know rush of incredulity when I'm told it'll be ready some time by the end of the day. Anyway, it's important to realize that just about everything on a website is hand-coded. Programmers for the most part don't deal with Lego blocks they can just snap together.

Learning to code has helped me to have have better conversations with the programmers I work with and helped reduce frustration with not understanding timelines. By understanding what's involved in the process of making changes whether cosmetic or functional, I can help set my own expectations for timelines and better understand why some things take longer than others.

Just another reason why learning about web development can help your career in the digital world.

[bradmilne-blog]

Code Something Even If It Sucks

If you looked at the mantle in my living room you would see a stack of technical books on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Rails and Django. I haven't read all of them and there are only 1 or 2 that I've read all the way through. The most important thing I can tell you if you actually want to learn to code is to put the books down and build something you care about.

I don't suggest trying to build your dream idea as a first project even if it's the thing that's going to make you a million dollars since it will be more frustrating than informative. But think of your hobbies, something that will be a funny joke for your friends, or something would actually simplify your life.

Pick something small that you care about and build it.

For me it was a small site for my recreational softball team that tracks our stats and ranks us according to the stats they talk about in the movie Moneyball. Nothing that's going to change the world or make my name but something where I'm going to learn the process of going from zero to a real, working website.

Make sure your project encompasses a useful technical hurdle.

This is an important point that you might not fully get now but when you're choosing your project it needs to push your boundaries of comfort. For me it was learning the template and form system in Django - fairly basic stuff but I learned more about them trying to customize them for my needs than I learned out of 50 pages of textbooks and online tutorials. Down the road a bit further I got stuck on model methods, accessing values in templates, iterating over lists in python, etc. - everything I've read before but only put to use when it personally mattered to me.

It won't work properly. And that's OK.

Because you're pushing your comfort zone, you're likely not going to get your project to work the way you want it to. It's going to be time intensive and you're going to struggle a ton trying to build it but the struggle is the learning process. Just keep in mind that the hours you spend looking at broken code and other people's questions on stack overflow is how you learn this stuff.

We're so used to using incredible software built by amazing engineers that our expectations are easily raised to unrealistic heights. The stuff that you build when you're starting out isn't going to be great. It won't work properly. Crucial features will be missing. It will look terrible.

But the effort you put into coding your first projects is what's going to get you good enough to build something even better.

[bradmilne-blog]

Learn Enough Code To Get A Promotion

There's been a ton of debate online recently about whether you should learn to code or not. As someone who spends most of his free time learning to code I have a strong opinion about the topic.

You should learn to code if you want to be a programmer. You should learn enough code if you want to get a promotion.

I'm not talking about non-technical startup founders and why it's a good idea to bootstrap your first product. I'm talking about people who work in marketing or PR who understand that the shift to digital in their industry is going to be catastrophic for people who don't 'get' the Internet. If you work in those industries, you can't make a better decision than to learn enough about coding and web development in general that you can understand how it works and speak intelligently on the topic.

Learning to code for you is not about building apps or checking in code. The programmers in your company are likely more skilled than you will ever be, and it's an inefficient use of company resources to have a bunch of non-programmers learning to code.

Learning to code is about learning how to communicate effectively with programmers.

The true value for you to pick up some web development skills is that the more you know, the better you will be at communicating your ideas to technical people and the more likely they will be able to understand you. As I become more technical myself I realize how far away I am from actually meaningfully contributing anything to our company, but the closer I am at being the product manager I want to be.

What about the promotion?

If you work in the marketing, PR, or advertising world, you'll know of many people thrust into digital roles that have no technical background and no idea of how web development works. As campaigns becomes more and more digital in nature, you can imagine that many more people will have to think and strategize in digital terms.

You will have a significant advantage over your colleagues / competitors if you have a better understanding of how the web development works.

So when your boss is considering who to hire for the role of digital strategist, account coordinator, account manager, etc. - they'll hire the person who fundamentally understands the digital landscape better.

[bradmilne-blog]

Startup Advice: Driving Your First Traffic

Congrats on launching! But now what?

If your business will depend on people coming to your website and signing up or requesting demos then you definitely need to be thinking about how to drive some initial traffic.

Disclaimer: at this point if you're thinking about driving traffic but don't have Google Analytics, KISSMetrics, or an Unbounce account, then you will be in a position where you can't measure your traffic properly and learn from it. Go do that first and then come back here.

Assuming you haven't been coding in your room your entire life, you've probably met people before, some of whom you might have emailed back and forth with before. For lots of us who were working in a career before starting their own company, there has been no shortage of professional connections made in jobs, meetings, conferences, etc.

These people are your best bets for initial traffic.

Go through your entire email contact list and segment them into relevant categories for your startup e.g. potential clients, potential connecters, potential investors, etc. This task is not fun and can be time consuming (ask my colleague Sandy) but it's one of the most important things you can do.

Send a personal email to the most important people on your list(s) and a semi-personal email to the others succinctly explaining what you've been up to and to thank them in advance for checking it out and letting them know you would appreciate any support they can give.

You can't be self-conscious about this. These people know you and hopefully trust you but at the very least they'll hear you out, visit your site, and maybe even turn into clients, investors, or people who can connect you with either.

You spend so much time and effort on your startup. Make sure the people hear about it.

[bradmilne-blog]

Django Virtualenv & Pip Explained

Learning the technology stack is harder than learning to code.

I'm a big fan of Codecademy and Treehouse and everyone else who puts up great programming lessons online but putting those coding concepts into practice means that you'll hit the same wall as thousands before you. Don't worry though, you'll get through it with time and effort but I'll tell you right now: making sense of all the technology that actually goes into making websites is more difficult than the actual code you can write (at this point anyway.)

When you're getting started with Django you're going to go online and look up a bunch of tutorials and you'll frequently see references to virtualenv and pip. It honestly took me more than a week to get Django set up and see the first Django powered page:

So right now I'll explain to you two basic things you need which will help you progress faster than I did. The first is virtualenv. This is short for virtual environment. It creates a sandbox on your computer where you can run Django independent of your actual system settings. Which means you are not dependent on the version of Python on your computer (in case something upgrades or changes and breaks all your work.)

To get create your virtual environment go to your terminal and type 'easy_install virtualenv' => you'll then see it create itself on your computer and you're good to go.

Pip is a package manager for Python. It's invaluable because it means whenever you want to use someone else's code e.g. registration, socialauthentication, etc. all you have to do is 'pip install <name of package here>'  and it will automatically retrieve and install the package for you which you can then access in all of your projects.

The last thing I want to cover is activating your virtual environment. Whenever you want to code with Django you have to remember that you need to activate your virtual environment. This means you turn it on.

To do so go to your terminal and type source ~/.virtualenvs/example/bin/activate or whatever your path is to get to activate from your virtualenv folder.

Hope that helps and message me with any questions!