Business, Technology, Movies, Rants and anything that I think is cool or worth bitching about.
Just a shot in the dark to see if anyone has heard from an old friend of mine, Mason. We worked together in Austin, TX and I was curious to see if anyone had heard from him, or if they knew how to reach him. He’s an awesome graphic designer, and last I knew was big into Volkswagon’s and Kirby Lane.
Let me know if you’ve seen or heard from him!
–Ryan
Those web app guru’s over at 37Signals recently released “Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application“. It’s a $19 PDF download and a highly recommended read. There are a few sample articles available at the book site, along with “Getting Real” posts on their SVN blog site.
This book could not have been released at a better time. I’m currently working on an organization tools for Personal Trainers, Massage Therapists, Aerobic Instructors, and anyone else who provides Health and Fitness services. I’ve found that by following one of the maxims provided the the 37s, I’ve been able to maintain a great deal of momentum.
Getting Real: SAYING DONE!
This post boils down to not getting bogged down in the details. Make decisions, evaluate feedback, wash, rinse, repeat. Simple to say, hard to do. I’ve been agonizing over a simple calendar system. In particular, recurring events. Here’s the story of the feature:
Say a trainer works out with a client every Monday at 6:00am. The trainer should be able to enter an event and then specify that it is recurring. The event should then be generated in the database. Here’s the rub, how long should it recurr? 1 month, 3 months, 6 months? After trying to figure out how to do this, and fearing a database table of event filling up, I decided to say DONE!
The trainer will specify the recurring period from a drop down that will go up to 1 year. So, the appointment example above will populate in the database and in the system until March 2007, if it were entered today.
I finished the code a few hours ago, and my wife is now using the feature! I could have spent hours trying to figure out some way to be clever, instead the feature is delivered, and I’ll have feedback shortly… How cool is that?
–Ryan