#seelio

[obeyfeline]

Detail of a silk jacquard smoking jacket and dusty pink unlined washable leather gloves by Paris shirtmaker Seelio, another of the five best in the world in the 1920s according to Flusser, along with Seymour, Boivin, David and Poirier.

[pipulp]

when you and your friends all looking fine as hell

[seelio]

When our office is being re-modeled and we end up cramming into a small room for two weeks... that's the life of a startup!

[seelio]

Developer Detour: Trailing Semicolons FTW

Our Dev Team works HARD at Seelio, and we love them for it.

From re-working our front page to coding our new on-boarding process and more, they have little time to do everyday things like eat, sleep, etc. KIDDING, but they do have little time to write blog posts, so we were real thrilled when our head developer David sent us this.

Those who want to know what its like to be a Seelio developer, enjoy!

Today after we compiled and launched our new add work feature (check it out, btw! Screengrabs, image grabs, and Vimeo integration are all new!), my coworker turned her laptop around to show me our page jumbled all together and beyond recognition. As every programmer knows, one semicolon can make a disproportionate amount of difference.

So we generally use uglify.js to minify our javascripts. We also concatenate all our scripts together per each page so that we can reduce numbers of requests to our server and keep our load times shorter. However, this doesn't help when trying to debug a script which is one line tall and 397495 characters (give or take a few thousand) long, and the only clue you're given is:

Object is not a function.

Step one:

Beautify the uglified javascript so that debugging is even possible. I tried three different tools, and finally found this one that worked. The result was 9000 lines long, and I wasn't about to fish through that in one line.

Step two:

Copy the new script to the server as a file. Pasting that many characters and lines proved prohibitive over ssh and vim. Find the offending line.

Step three:

Google the issue. This is always a step.

Step four:

Discover that the object that is not a function is actually being called because two scripts have been concatenated together, and one of the scripts is entirely surrounded by parenthesis because CoffeeScript compiles to Javascript as whole functions wrapped in parenthesis and then evaluated. The second script has been placed next to the first script, such that Javascript parses as the first script as a function being called with the second script as an argument. Obviously.

Step five:

Add a semicolon in the offending line at the appropriate spot. Everything works.

Step six:

Add a trailing semicolon to the former of the two concatenated files, so that, when concatenated, there will be a semicolon between the two.

Step seven:

Recompile the concatenated javascript for testing. Still working! Score. (Usually this is where things are still choosing not to work, in which case steps eight through up to seven hundred sixty three may become necessary).

Step eight:

Push the changes to the live server. Crisis averted.

Lessons:

1) If you're going to concatenate scripts, run your pages once with everything concatenated to make sure everything checks out.

2) Also, add trailing semicolons to all your files. It will make concatenating just a little safer.

Hope you enjoyed this little foray into our front-end debugging. Leave some comments if you've got better ways of doing things, we're always up for hearing them!

[seelio]

See His Seelio: Air Force Pilot and Entrepreneur, Robert Barlow

This week we want to introduce you to Air Force Pilot, Robert Barlow. Robert graduated from the United States Air Force Academy and is currently pursuing his Masters in Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University. Robert also interned with Seelio remotely for the past semester.

1.  Tell us a little about yourself.

I was raised in the Quad Cities, which is on the Iowa/Illinois border about halfway between Chicago and Des Moines.  Growing up I played all kinds of sports and in high school I turned out to be pretty good at football and wrestling.  Because of this, I was recruited to play football at the United States Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, CO.  I had other options such as Northwestern, Dartmouth, and the University of Iowa, but my gut feeling told me to head West.  I played football for the first two years at USAFA and served as an assistant strength and conditioning coach my junior year before stepping down my senior year and focusing on Academics.  I never really wanted to fly growing up, but once again, my gut feeling told me to go for a pilot slot.  Luckily my overall performance at the Academy proved to be enough to earn a pilot slot, which is a fairly competitive process.  Upon graduating in May of 2009, I moved to Enid, OK to attend Air Force Pilot Training.  I don’t think I have ever worked harder academically than I did over the 52 week undergraduate pilot training course.  The hard work paid off as I graduated #2 in my class of 30 and was selected to remain at Vance as a first assignment instructor pilot flying the T-6 Texan II.  After my tour at Vance is finished, I hope to attend follow on training at Luke AFB, in Phoenix, AZ, to learn how to fly the F-16 Fighting Falcon or some other type of fighter/attack aircraft.

2. From Air Force to Masters in Entrepreneurship is an interesting transition. What made you decide to pursue a degree in entrepreneurship?

As part of the Air Force rank promotion structure, every officer is required to get a masters degree in order to advance in rank.  If an officer fails to do this within the first 12-15 years of service, they will plateau at a certain rank.  With this in mind, I wanted to get masters done as quickly as possible once I finished pilot training.  As a management major at the Academy, I was exposed to many different facets of the business world.  The one that I enjoyed the most and excelled at was entrepreneurship.  After doing some research and asking other officers who were getting their masters, I decided on Oklahoma State’s program because it was completely online and had a great reputation.  In the military, your job is never assured much past a few months so I want to prepare myself to be successful in the private sector when that time comes.  I’d like to have my own business in the future and what better way to learn about starting one than a Masters in Entrepreneurship?

3. Why did you decide to create a Seelio? What made you want to work for the company?

Well, I actually started out by creating a TruApp profile before Seelio was even around!  I firmly believe success in life is a mix of what you know and who you know.  Seelio is a great way to connect with young go getters around the country and to get your name out to potential employers.  Currently, I am not really in a position to accept a job outside of the military, but as I said before, I like to be prepared for the future and Seelio helps do that.  I also really like the way the site is set up.  It’s easy to set up, change, and navigate!  I like it better than LinkedIn personally. I actually met Moses Lee on an airport shuttle to the Tempe Mission Palms in Arizona back in January of 2012.  I was on a cross country training trip and he was on his way to an entrepreneurship conference.  I struck up a conversation with him and he told me about a few of his start ups.  He gave me his business card and told me to check out TruApp.  I did and I liked what I saw!  I knew I had a class that was a virtual internship coming up so I sent him an email and asked if I could intern for TruApp in the fall of 2012.  He agreed and the rest is history.  I wanted to work for TruApp/Seelio because it was a social networking startup and I wanted to learn more about this form of business and make some connections.  It has been a great experience thus far!

4. What have you learned from the Air Force that you will take with you into future experiences?

Where to start?  I learned a lot at the Academy both academically and leadership wise.  I studied everything from behavioral sciences to mechanical engineering to law to political science.  The Academy’s rigorous academic requirements make you a well educated and academically rounded officer upon graduation.  Additionally, as you progress through the cadet ranks (freshman to senior) you are tasked with being in charge of more and more people and take on more and more responsibility.  Once I graduated, Air Force pilot training taught me the value of determination, focus, and the ability to buckle down and focus on one goal over a long period of time.  It proved to me that hard work really does pay off.  Finally, my current position has taught me that dependability it the key to success in large organizations.  Additionally, it has taught me that different situations require different leadership styles and that flexibility is the key to accomplishing goals and the overall mission of my squadron, which is to develop, deliver, and deploy airmen.  All of these lessons will stick with me until the day I die!

5.  What is your favorite thing on your Seelio?

I would have to say that a few of my works are my favorite things.  The first work, a video of T-6’s doing formation flying, is pretty unique.  After scouring through a lot of different users, I didn’t really find anyone who had any aviation related works.  I think it helps connect my about me portion to something visual and gives people an idea of what I do on a daily basis.  The second work I am most proud of, is the Air Force Biodiesel Initiative power point.  This slide show is just a small snapshot of a year of work and research I did for my management capstone at the Academy.  We did a lot of work to help the Air Force start the process of going green and that project is still being worked on at the Academy.  I guess you could say it is sort of the legacy I left in the management department at the Academy.

6. What is it you hope to do in the future?

As I stated before, I would love to have the opportunity to fly the F-16 Fighting Falcon.  However, if that is not in the plans for me, I will be happy flying whatever the Air Force places me in.  In my opinion, there is no such thing as a bad flying job!  My plan is to stay in the Air Force as long as I enjoy my job and it makes sense personally.  When the time to separate comes along I hope to have a lot of options.  I wouldn’t mind flying for Southwest or FedEx.  However, if I decide to take a non-flying job, I would like to start my own business, or be part of a business start up.  Whatever I do, I want to ensure the financial future for my future family and myself.  Once this is accomplished, I’d really like to teach high school history or physical education and coach football!  Football was my first passion in life and I’m a huge football fan in general.  I also think you can have a very positive impact on young peoples’ lives in high school athletics.  I’m not the type of person who plans to far ahead though because you can plan all you want but you never know what life will throw at you.  My goal is to always be prepared for whatever it is life throws at me!

The Seelio team also wants to thank Robert for his great work with us last semester! For more about Robert's work in the Air Force and some of his entrepreneurial projects see his Seelio.

If you want to be featured in a Seelio blog post, contact Community Manager Chelsea ([email protected]).