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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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.
After having an unknown redirect if logged in bug for a week or so (well actually realizing it for a week, but it’s been there since beginning), I finally realized how to fix it.
I had the following code: