In this article, I'll be explaining two different A/B tests I've ran recently. One of them led to some great results, and the other one was inconclusive. Both times, I learned something! ...

Recently I added mailchimp integration to uludum. Mailchimp is a fantastic platform for email, especially for non-transactional emails. I'm using it to send occasional emails to our users. With mailchimp, designing and sending the email is extremely easy. ...

A prominent feature on medium.com is the concept of displaying how long it will take to read an article. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like: ...

The 'chicken and egg' dilemma that I'm talking about exists for newly created marketplaces. The marketplace needs both sellers and buyers to be successful. But sellers want existing buyers before joining a platform, and buyers want sellers before they join, too! Otherwise, what value would they get from the marketplace? ...

I receive a lot of questions from people who want to hear hard numbers about what kind of yield you can get with an arbitrage strategy. There are so many different options for how you run your strategy, but the math is actually pretty basic to calculate yourself. ...

Bitcoin interest has been growing lately, and with that comes volatility. Bitcoin is currently much more volatile than any other currency, making it a prime candidate for arbitrage. Before I get into details of Bitcoin arbitrage, lets get this out of the way: ...

At the most recent Seattle Startup Weekend, I worked on an awesome team developing 404kids. ...

I've now used the awesome geocoder gem in a few Ruby on Rails projects to implement features like geolocation and plotting things on a map. While the gem does a lot of the work for you, there are some extra tips that can be helpful to make the most of the gem. ...

At Startup Weekend, we have a few cake tasks for aggregating data and statistics that we run nightly. Figuring out how to test these cake tasks was an interesting conversation, and eventually we ended up running a child process to execute our cake task. Here's an example of what our mocha tests looked like: ...

CSRF protection is a method websites use to prevent cross-site request forgery. Basically, the goal is to only allow certain endpoints of a website to be accessed through a form originating on their site. An example of an 'attack' this may try to prevent could be brute-force password cracking bots. It basically works by adding a CSRF token to every web form. When the form is submitted, the CSRF token can be validated to ensure it originated from their site. ...

CSS3's text-shadow property allows you to do some awesome effects to create letterpress, neon, and retro designs. I use the same techniques on this site for the main Hank Stoever headline. Here's what it looks like: ...

Tracking page views really isn't too difficult with Ruby on Rails. Consider a blog with a Post model, which has a views column. ...

In this tutorial, we'll be designing a book cover to be displayed on a webpage. Instead of using an image to represent the cover of a book, using HTML and CSS alone will make your content more accessible and SEO-friendly. It's not that big of a difference, and you can't get as pixel-perfect of a design as you could in Photoshop. Personally, I like to spend my time in code, so designing in CSS is much more efficient. ...

For a while, every time I created a new Ruby on Rails project, I would refer to previous sites I built to remember things like what gems to use, how to create a haml application template, and other defaults like a devise user account. This was a manual process and it was really easy to forget steps along the way. ...

I love well-tested code, because it creates a certain peace of mind when you are writing software. It allows you to add new features and refactor old code while remaining confident that you aren't breaking anything. When all tests are passing, you can trust that deployments won't break. This post will teach you how to incorporate continuous deployment patterns to maximize developer efficiency and code stability. ...

The fall of 2012 was the first time I ever made money from my own website on the internet. I made a script that scraped the official Seattle University bookstore website to collect a database about required books for each class. The script looked up each book on Amazon.com by ISBN, and if there was a match (which there was about half the time), I would store the price of the Amazon book and a link to it's page with my Amazon referral tag. I then created a static website, hosted it on Amazon S3, and put it live at seattleubooks.com. ...

I recently open sourced a bitcoin arbitrage bot written in ruby. Read my explanation of arbitrage if you're unfamiliar with the topic. After putting the project on Github, I posted it to Hacker News. It didn't get any points, but it did receive two comments. The top one was:
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Github recently released mobile layouts for many pages on their website. Instead of using css media queries to change the display of the page, Github's servers respond with entirely different markup. The main advantage of this is to reduce page sizes: ...