Notes from the work
An archive of product, engineering, startups, and the decisions behind building software. Older posts stay dated; they are here as a record, not a publishing schedule.
I met Blaine Stillerman almost a year again at a networking event and I consider him a good friend. I recently met his friends and business partners Mike and Leo. Together, they are working on a mobile language acquisition gaming startup called subVerses. After talking to the team, I decided I wanted to help. Besides being […]
There’s nothing more frustrating than an old tutorial that you can’t get to work. I encountered this when attempting to Tutorialzine’s Tutorial on Creating Chrome Extensions. There are 7 main issues that are wrong with this tutorial. There are links below which will explain each individual issue with the tutorial and how to fix them. Alternatively, […]
This post is part of a series of posts fixing the Chrome Extension Tutorial from Tutorialzine.com. [sc:fixing_the_tutorialzine_tutorial_navigation] If you made it to this page, you probably fixed the major issues with the Tutorialzine Chrome Extension Tutorial and now there’s only a few aesthetic changes to go! Since popup.html […]
There a few posts about fixing the Tutorialzine How To Build a Chrome Extension that we put together already. If you’ve followed these posts to this point, you probably just uploaded your chrome extension to find the popup now pops up, but doesn’t show any of the expected contents. It probably looks something like this. […]
If you are new to Ruby on Rails and you recently launched your first application on Heroku, you may be puzzled by how slowly your website loads at times. Heroku has a built in power up/power down mechanism that automatically powers down your application if no one visits your website over a 5-15 minute period of […]
One of the most challenging bugs in recreating Tutorialzine’s How To Build a Chrome Extension was debugging why the popup would not “pop up”. If you’ve seen the demo, then you know that browser action’s create small icons next to Chrome’s address bar. The popup variable inside the browser_action array tells the chrome extension which […]
While working through the Tutorialzine.com “Build Your First Chrome Extension”, I came across an issue early on related to the icon.png files. Their Manifest.json referred to two icons image files, but didn’t have a location for the user to download those icons anywhere. I decided to create a mini tutorial on how to fix this […]
If you are working through an older chrome extension tutorial, you will probably run through this error before any other error. The reason you will likely get this error is that Chrome did not always force a version_manifest value in the manifest.json file. Since moving from manifest_version 1 to manifest_version 2, I believe Google […]
I recently unfollowed over a hundred people on Twitter. I did this originally to remove distractions from my life, but this did much more. Targeted Twitter Unfollowing It removed negative thoughts and reminders from my mind and replaced them with positive thoughts and reminders. Instead of following 12 reporters constantly updating me on Philadelphia Eagles […]
I don’t run iBuildMVPs.com and I have neglected it a lot over the past two years. In short, I got comfortable. This started as planning a marriage, and enjoying the honeymoon phase. I’ve been married for over 6 months and now its time to get back to the grind. Distractions are the little things that […]