My wedding anniversary is June 14th, which is right around the middle of the year. My motivation to work hard comes quite a bit from wanting to provide a good life for my family, so I want to take this time of year from now on to reflect on my personal career growth. (instead of focus on goals like beginning of year or quarterly reviews)
Author Archives: lytstephen
Finally finished moving (kind of)
Most of the end of May, and half of June until now, pretty much most of my time was used to take care of moving apartment. I had moved quite numerous times back when studying in the U.S., but moving as a family unit is whole other story!
Schedule moving company, renovation at new place, dealing with landlords, packing, unpacking, etc…. more work than actual work itself! Now that I’ve moved, and finished all the ‘basic’ unpacking, yesterday was the first day I got some work in!
Calculated field with Meteor and MongoDB
My dating app has this function where I rank user based on an algorithm which takes their last login date, and some other ‘factors’.
I thought this was gonna be easy. Well, it would’ve been if I wanted to take the entire collection to the client, the use JS to calculate the field, sort, and display to user.
Problem is, I can’t load the entire collection. That’s thousands of users. I have to sort BEFORE I return the result. Which means I have to sort at the database level before I return the results, which was quite challenging.
Payments with PayPal IPN and Meteor
First of all, if you need to do payment with Meteor, I’d highly recommend using Stripe or Braintree. Their API is much simpler, better UX, everything … so why am I using PayPal?
Well Stripe is not in my country, and Braintree beta rejected our application because it’s a dating website!!!! *face palm*
Anyways, without much other choice, I went with the PayPal basic payment HTML form, submit to pay on their site, and return data with IPN (Instant Payment Notifications). It’s friggin stone-age technology but heck it still works.
image drag and drop upload to Amazon S3 with Meteor
Image upload is one of those pretty daunting things for beginner programmer (myself before I finish this). Luckily good folks that use meteor has already done the bulk of the work for us.
However, it’s still no simple feat to put it all together. I used the dropzone.js package for the drag-and-drop client-side image handling, then use CollectionFS to handle storing image record in database and upload to Amazon S3 as well.
There’s also a great package someone wrote to compress and correct orientation, saved my life! : ccorcos:clientside-image-manipulation.
Push notifications are working on development mode
After taking care of May’s HK Christians event, patching up some loose ends on the registration flow, the second week of May is starting to get pretty quiet.
Fortunately I also have my HKC admin help start to learn programming and help me with some coding stuff as well. In return I’m teaching him the coding stuff I know. Pretty good deal for both of us.
Moving forward slower than I hope…
yeah so turned out getting the apps all done by end of april is way too ambitious.
It’s been a week and half since I had any progress on the mobile apps part. Turned out hosting the first HK Christians event on the new app was more work than I thought:
- building, testing new event reg system
- iterating after real people using it
- getting my admin help up to speed on everything (thank god I have someone, helping me 5-10hrs/wk)
- cleaning up old contact list, setting up admin backend system on the app, so my admin help can easily notify users about event, and track notification statuses
First subscription membership sale for HK Christians!
First post of the series here, read more about my current startups
Today someone subscribed for a 6-month membership on HK Christians!
First sale is always exciting… although HK Christians technically isn’t a startup, and had always been making some money, it’s still good to see it coming through the new web app I built!
Mobile apps dev moving forward!
Well OS finally upgraded, Xcode running my meteor (cordova) project ok, got the test app on my phone, whew!
Good news someone already did a lot of work into wrapping push notifications in meteor into a nice package, raix:push, and along with a pretty detailed documentation too. Bad news it’s still not that easy.
mac OS update issue
sigh another unproductive day as I wrestle with weird tech shit … this time is the mac.
Apparently my Xcode needed to be upgraded to a version which only the latest OSX El Capitan supports, so o wells upgrade OS, no big deal, 1-2 hours max right? WRONG.
I’m not sure if it’s because I selected some ‘yes, please encrypt my hard drive’ option … but once the new OS booted up, it just shows a grey stop sign. HOLY SHIT.