#my_projects

This time I built  an email newsletter sender/analytics, sorta like a super simple version of mailchimp. I used it for my startup. I couldn't use mailchimp or other newsletter services for this because I was essentially cold emailing businesses to find out if they wanted to use my product. (Mailchimp only allows emails of those who have explicitly expressed that they are ok receiving your newsletter) This app allowed me to track if businesses received and read the email or not. This allows me to tweak my subject line and body message to increase open rate and effective rate!

I wrote a simple business card app that would send my business card to people if I forgot to bring physical business cards. bizcard.joshteng.com.

There were other projects that I attempted such as railscasts downloader. My pain was that I wanted to watch the videos offline and I didn't want to store it on my computer. (there are over 300+ videos at this point of writing and doing it by hand was stupid). So one day, I wrote a simple app that uses web scrapping with mechanize. It would log me into railscasts, download all videos not yet downloaded and upload them into my amazon S3 bucket. One challenge was that I had to make the actual task of downloading the videos into my S3 bucket as a background job because it took too long and cannot persist through the http request. Thankfully with ruby there are gems to help me background job. I used queue_classic gem. I hosted this app on Heroku and didn't want to pay for anything more than I had to use. Unfortunately heroku only gave one 'dyno' for free and in order for me to use background job I had to add 1 working 'worker'. This app would automatically scale my app to use 1 worker when it starts and scale back down to 0 worker to save me money! Gosh. Have I told you how much I love building apps and tools. Btw, I do not use my app to pirate railscasts. I use it only for myself and really am grateful for Ryan Bates! I'll never short change his effort. The videos on my S3 bucket!

I also built snappress.com about 9 months back. It was an idea I had to help e-commerce merchants generate more traffic through social referral. How it works is that e-comemrce merchants would embed a button on their site that says 'Get Discount or Get 15% off' (merchants get to customize the text), when a shopper clicks on that button, they'll be prompted to share it with their social network and a promo code will appear. The widget was a lot of javascript and the site was built with RoR on the backend. I'm honestly a bit embarrassed by these sites. I feel like an amateur, the design is nothing fancy, the video is homemade, the code might not be the best. But heck it, I decided to just throw it out there. And I'm proud to say I have 2 paying customers!

I built a job list for startup and tech job in southeast asia (nineonwards.com) using RoR as it's backend. Employers would pay SGD 5 to post a job. Go check it out. I'm not really pursuing this at this point. But if you are interested to talk let me know. I believe this will greatly benefit startups in the Southeast Asia region!

iPhoneアプリもRailsアプリも、

とりあえず何かどんどんアイディアを出して実際に作っていくことが

力をつける一番の道ということをインターン先の方や大学の先輩に言われ

たしかにと思いこれから何か1ヶ月に1つとか、2つとかなにかしら簡単なもの

でもいいのでiPhoneアプリ、Railsのアプリをつくってみようと思います。

手始めに先週の金曜日から今週の月曜日にぐらいにかけて

一つRailsのアプリケーションを作りました。

MyLab　〜研究共有サービス〜

https://github.com/hiroism007/mylab/

サービス概要：

大学生が個人の研究を投稿して、似たような研究をしている人

興味分野が同じような人を見つけて、つながるきっかけを

つくってあげるサービス。

個人個人がプロジェクトを投稿して

それにタグ付するサービス。

omniauth-twitterでユーザー認証。