It’s a full python development stack, ready to be used in your browser. After a quick subscription for a free account,
-you have access from your dashboard to [python, ipython, bash] consoles in different python flavours.
-
-
You can also browse your files, make cron scripts and create python web apps on the fly.
-
-
The most interesting features are the consoles pause/resume feature, which can be shared
-with other people. This could be very helpful to collaborate on code or teach python.
-Behind the scene, it’s an encrypted ajax window over your home folder running on a remote server hosted on EC2.
-
-
DaaS may be on it’s first baby steps. Though, it could rapidly become a standard way to code for developers especially in startups.
-Before diving in the pros and cons, let’s analyse the different development stacks possibilities.
-
-
-
-
-
First, there’s the good old fashion way. Setup a server on a cloud service
-(I guess there’s still people doing it with bare metal servers ). You have plenty of choice there, (EC2, AppEngine, Azure, Rackspace…),
-it depends on your IT needs, spiritual beliefs (many don’t care) and your pockets.
-
-
Then pick the development stack of your preferred language/framework: Python(Django, Web2py, Pylons, Flask…), Ruby(Ruby On Rails) for the rock stars, Java/.Net, PHP …
-
-
Here, you have to maintain every piece involved in the process, packages versions, build tools, deployment, scaling. That’s a lot of time and resources needed to finally get your developers pushing and your apps running.
-
-
The next big step was the Heroku and Dotcloud like services, aka Deployment/Scaling as a Service.
-They release from the burden of deploying and give enough abstraction to exclusively focus your effort on the application logic.
-The process is often the same, basically setup your project with a simple conf file, then deploy to the server with one command.
-They practically all handle version control systems like git,
-so your project is deployed every time you push your code.
-I believe Github helped a lot making these services exist as deployment is often tightly bound to code revisions, and Github offers an excellent API and a huge community.
-
-
We have been adding more and more abstraction to the development process in order to make it easier, faster, stronger …
-However, there is still one constant, “localhost development”. The coding itself is done on your machine/laptop.You still can use your favourite OS, IDE, tools.
-
-
Well, DaaS is going to cross that last barrier.
-There are already several web services for online development like jsfiddle.net for web design or koding.com.
-They offer something that could change the way we see development, the abstraction of your OS, ide and development environment.
-If you think about it, that’s a lot of time saved. No multi-platform mess, no more scripts to ensure the same development stack. Using the enormous processing power
-of cloud platforms, there is virtually no compile time. You can even forget about your machine, all you need is a keyboard and a screen.
-
-
It seems only benefit but the thing is, if DaaS is really going to be the next step,I think we are missing something very important.
-Before a developer learns to code, he has
-to understand the building blocks of programming, what’s a computer, what’s an Operating System, how does it do its work. All the abstractions we built are built
-using this knowledge. How could a programmer understand code optimization ? Security flows?
-How could he understand the interaction of his code with its environment if he’s not gonna use it?
-Maybe we’re not concreted with that yet, but the next generations of programmers are.
-
-
What do you think ?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/atom.xml b/_site/blog/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index 4cec2e8..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,319 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-04-18T11:51:00+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/my-most-valuable-lesson-in-life-learnt-the-hard-way
- Hollywood movies are often introduced with a main character living his life until a big event happens,
-something that is enough life changing to justify a compelling story. And we, as an audience,
-tend to identify to that hero or some event in the story that helps us forget the boredom of real life.
-I believe this is one of the secret ingredients that make the movies industry so successful.
-People need to forget about their daily life because they believe it’s boring.
-In the timespan of 159 minutes they are thrilled in something more exciting, adventurous, romantic …
-everything that does not seem to exist in “real life”.
-
-
-
-
-
I love movies and cinema, and I really enjoy seeing a good one. However, something have always kept me a bit skeptical about the whole phenomenon.
-In my sight, real life is more exciting, there’s an infinite amount of possibilities
-and outcomes to what you do. Everything seem possible when you stop picturing your
-actions and ideas in the way society expects you to do. This feeling has started filling me since I was a teenager.
-It forged my personality and made me what I have been until now. People nowadays call it being an “entrepreneur” or “hacker”.
-I don’t think any word could describe the way I feel about my life and my role in the current society.
-
-
I left my country 6 years ago and came to France in order to study computer science.
-I had been to medical school before, trying to follow my dad’s footsteps.
-My path through my studies has been the same thing as it has always been my whole life:
-trying new things, never settle down at the same place, always thinking of the next project
-and moving forward. As an immigrant student I have done many little jobs, worked for big IT
-companies ( although I was not always allowed to ), joined a prestigious computer school club
-where I learned so much about sysadmin in system engineering and met many people.
-Still, I was always feeling something missing. Deep inside, there was a voice who has been there since the beginning.
-It kept telling me what
-I needed to do. I was working as a system engineer on a short term contract when a friend
-(at the time) offered me to start our own startup where I would be responsible for all the
-technical aspect. When I think about it now, the idea was not that attractive,
-there was no business plan and we were just a team of three guys without any previous experience in
-the startup business. It was one of the most important choices I had to do.
-Either decline a comfortable job offer which would’ve let me acquire a legal worker
-status and finish my studies working with cool technologies, and maybe even travelling.
-Or jumping right into the startup adventure, with no guaranty of success, no market
-research whatsoever, and no immigration status possible especially in France which
-is about ten years far from a Startup Act .
-
-
Flash forward, I am co-founder and CTO at jib.li. Many things happened since and
-long story made short, we made a pivot and had new people in the team.
-I will share this story with my friend and co-founder Ryadh in an other article,
-a story which I think every foreign entrepreneur to France should know about.
-For the time being, Jib.li has been launched 6 months ago, had some worldwide press and
-media coverage, and is currently one of the first crowd-shipping/shopping platforms.
-
-
Then comes last week. Something big happened. Actually it was a succession of
-events that, taken alone could be considered probable, but thinking they would happen all
-at the same time in the lapse of a few days made them what we define as “life changing” events.
-They are totally unrelated, each having a huge impact in some aspect of my personal and
-professional life. But still, they are all connected together with the same variable
-that makes them what I feel like being born in a new life.
-
-
Each one of these events could be considered a failed, depressing twist filled with despair.
-In fact, they made me feel that way and I could barely sleep at night, always feeling a pain
-in my stomach like I have been punched in the nuts. I am not enough comfortable to talk about
-the personal one and the next articles will explain the rest of the story. What really matters
-here is the key denominator, something I can now consider, with confidence, as the most important factor in any
-future project and my whole new life. I am talking about Trust. Of course, it seems obvious !
-Well I taught it was too.
-
-
The history of humanity has been shaped by trust. You can’t build a pyramid if
-you can’t trust the architect. You can’t build an army when people don’t trust you. You can’t learn if you don’t
-trust a teacher or a mentor, and you can’t found a family if you don’t trust a partner…
-It is something that must be earned. Something you can’t afford with money and power. Something you can
-fake with lies and charisma . I am now convinced the only way to find trust is to look for Passion inside people and that every human
-being have to learn it the hard way. You must be betrayed in order to acknowledge it’s worth. I sincerely hope for
-you it won’t be the same as me, but I can say for sure this was my life changing event.
-Anything that will come after will be different and I am very thankful I was given this precious lesson in my youth.
-
-
I don’t know what words could describe the aftermath. I feel new, free, light.
-I feel a strength rising inside me, like the power to shape the future. I still have so many
-things to learn and experience, and the pains that come with it. Entropy makes
-life beautiful, the uncertainty built in the entire universe makes our lives much more interesting than any Hollywood movie.
-
-
Good luck to all those who create, make and change things, and for anyone else, just listen to the voice speaking to you.
-]]>
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-03-06T20:01:00+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/redesigning-jibli-lessons-learned-form-hack-design-part-1
- As many programmers, I have always thought web design is a
-discipline best reserved for people doing art and design.
-You know, the hipster with his MacBook, his pletora of Adobe suites,
-and the huge time spent learning to use them.
-
-
I come from a background of system administration and networking, always
-fascinated by the obscure backend’s thing happening behind what you
-see on your screen. Furthermore, I started web development for the sole purpose
-of building Jib.li, as a CoFounder and CTO on this
-project, and as a team which had no money to hire a full time designer.
-
-
Needless to say I boarded the UI Design ship on the wrong foot.
-
-
In this first article I am going to share my experience on how I got passionate
-about creating and designing a User Interface and what I learned from all the
-resources shared on HN and Hack Design lessons which helped me redesign Jib.li.
-
-
-
-
-
Before
-
-
-
-
After
-
-
-
-
Where to start ?
-
-
We launched the public beta of jib.li on October 2012. A few weeks later we had had
-plenty of feedback and proposals for new features.
-
-
For strategic reasons, we chose to start Jib.li with no registering process and just a “Connect with Facebook” instead.
-
-
We had no money to make a “how it works” video we could show
-next to the home page form, like many startups do when they launch their
-product. We only had a teaser video that we made before starting this project
-where you see a bunch of people (our team at that time) pitching the idea.
-
-
The home page actually looked like many location based services and the
-typical workflow of a user was:
-
-
-
Fill in the “From” and “To” location fields
-
Choose what action to take: Send, Deliver
-
A modal shows up to let him select a date depending on which action he chose
-
Redirecting the user to a listings results page
-
The user can then click on listings or create a new one if he’s not satisified
-
-
-
-
We noticed that many people when they first reached the home page, where not able to figure out what to do next.
-To assist new users we used bootstrap tooltips everywhere, even on the action buttons.
-
-
On the graphic design aspect, we were just using a slightly customized bootstrap theme
-
-
Getting inspiration
-
-
So after we decided it was time to have a fresh and better look, I saw the opportunity
-to start practicing what I have been learning on HN, Hack Design and About Face 3 about
-UI/UX Design. It was also a good opportunity to stop frontend programming with spaghetti jQuery dom
-manipulation and start using AngularJS which devprived me of my sleep hours lately.
-(frontend programming will be the subject of an other article)
-
-
I think the most difficult step when you start working on something, no matter what kind
-of project, is actually to start. For me it was no exception. I was certainly looking
-for visual inspiration because a User Interface for a web application is first of all something
-we see before we touch and interact with.
-
-
To help me filter out the overwhelming quantity of images, photos and visuals available on the internet,
-I made list of words that sum up what Jib.li was about and started combining those words in search queries
-for images and photos.
-
-
I ended up with this one when looking for the words bike and bag, which seemed to summarize the ideas
-of transportation, carrying and environment which jib.li is all about.
-
-
-
-
This photo comes from this beautiful article by Dottie and all credits go to her.
-
-
When I saw this one ideas started immediately flowing and I knew where to start.
I actually repeated the process until I get a set of colors which validate these conditions:
-
-
-
Have at most 3 main colors
-
Have dark close to black color
-
Have a light close to white color
-
-
-
-
This one has two main colors, a wide blue range and the yellow/gold one. Grays and white are
-just desaturated and very light colors.
-
-
This should suffice to always have a color to pick from this palette instead of choosing
-one from a color picker, and so basically when looking for black I just choose the darkest one and when looking for white I pick
-the most close to white.
-
-
The wide range of blue colors made me choose the blue as the main color.
-
-
I was heavily inspired by this article of Ian Storm Taylor, which also made me
-start using HSL (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) everywhere I wanted to get new colors from the palette.
-
-
Rapid prototyping vs flat PSD design
-
-
One thing I learned in interactive design is that a User Interface can’t possibly be represented as a flat image only.
- Bret Victor made an excellent talk about the process of creation and the necessity to get immediate visual feedback.
-My design process has been a mix of rapid prototyping and design exploration with chrome developers tools then representing ideas in
-a PSD file as a reference for later.
-
-
Although I’m not going to talk much about frontend programming, this is the stack I prepared to quickly test ideas and move back and forth
-from prototype to PSD.
Using git submodules to add frontend dependencies (Bootstrap, AngularUI, FontAwesome … )
-
-
-
-
Whenever I wanted to test some behavior feature I first tested it with Chrome, played
-with styles and interactions, then tried to represent it as a layer in PSD.
-
-
On the other hand, when trying to work on the look aspect of something, I prefered the PSD
-approach first, which gives more freedom on the graphics.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
End of Part 1
-
-
I hope some programmers who are interested about web design and don’t know how
-to start might find some insight from this article and the next ones.
-
-
Part 2 will be about getting from prototype to stylesheets using chrome devtools, the importance of shadows and
-some tips I learned about textures and details.
-]]>
-
-
-
-
-
- 2012-04-29T20:26:09+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/Development-as-a-Service
- Let me start by presenting a new web service pythonanywhere.com.
-
-
It’s a full python development stack, ready to be used in your browser. After a quick subscription for a free account,
-you have access from your dashboard to [python, ipython, bash] consoles in different python flavours.
-
-
You can also browse your files, make cron scripts and create python web apps on the fly.
-
-
The most interesting features are the consoles pause/resume feature, which can be shared
-with other people. This could be very helpful to collaborate on code or teach python.
-Behind the scene, it’s an encrypted ajax window over your home folder running on a remote server hosted on EC2.
-
-
DaaS may be on it’s first baby steps. Though, it could rapidly become a standard way to code for developers especially in startups.
-Before diving in the pros and cons, let’s analyse the different development stacks possibilities.
-
-
-
-
-
First, there’s the good old fashion way. Setup a server on a cloud service
-(I guess there’s still people doing it with bare metal servers ). You have plenty of choice there, (EC2, AppEngine, Azure, Rackspace…),
-it depends on your IT needs, spiritual beliefs (many don’t care) and your pockets.
-
-
Then pick the development stack of your preferred language/framework: Python(Django, Web2py, Pylons, Flask…), Ruby(Ruby On Rails) for the rock stars, Java/.Net, PHP …
-
-
Here, you have to maintain every piece involved in the process, packages versions, build tools, deployment, scaling. That’s a lot of time and resources needed to finally get your developers pushing and your apps running.
-
-
The next big step was the Heroku and Dotcloud like services, aka Deployment/Scaling as a Service.
-They release from the burden of deploying and give enough abstraction to exclusively focus your effort on the application logic.
-The process is often the same, basically setup your project with a simple conf file, then deploy to the server with one command.
-They practically all handle version control systems like git,
-so your project is deployed every time you push your code.
-I believe Github helped a lot making these services exist as deployment is often tightly bound to code revisions, and Github offers an excellent API and a huge community.
-
-
We have been adding more and more abstraction to the development process in order to make it easier, faster, stronger …
-However, there is still one constant, “localhost development”. The coding itself is done on your machine/laptop.You still can use your favourite OS, IDE, tools.
-
-
Well, DaaS is going to cross that last barrier.
-There are already several web services for online development like jsfiddle.net for web design or koding.com.
-They offer something that could change the way we see development, the abstraction of your OS, ide and development environment.
-If you think about it, that’s a lot of time saved. No multi-platform mess, no more scripts to ensure the same development stack. Using the enormous processing power
-of cloud platforms, there is virtually no compile time. You can even forget about your machine, all you need is a keyboard and a screen.
-
-
It seems only benefit but the thing is, if DaaS is really going to be the next step,I think we are missing something very important.
-Before a developer learns to code, he has
-to understand the building blocks of programming, what’s a computer, what’s an Operating System, how does it do its work. All the abstractions we built are built
-using this knowledge. How could a programmer understand code optimization ? Security flows?
-How could he understand the interaction of his code with its environment if he’s not gonna use it?
-Maybe we’re not concreted with that yet, but the next generations of programmers are.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/entrepreneurship/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/entrepreneurship/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index 75bdd78..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/entrepreneurship/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,99 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-04-18T11:51:00+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/my-most-valuable-lesson-in-life-learnt-the-hard-way
- Hollywood movies are often introduced with a main character living his life until a big event happens,
-something that is enough life changing to justify a compelling story. And we, as an audience,
-tend to identify to that hero or some event in the story that helps us forget the boredom of real life.
-I believe this is one of the secret ingredients that make the movies industry so successful.
-People need to forget about their daily life because they believe it's boring.
-In the timespan of 159 minutes they are thrilled in something more exciting, adventurous, romantic ...
-everything that does not seem to exist in "real life".
-
-
-
-
-
I love movies and cinema, and I really enjoy seeing a good one. However, something have always kept me a bit skeptical about the whole phenomenon.
-In my sight, real life is more exciting, there's an infinite amount of possibilities
-and outcomes to what you do. Everything seem possible when you stop picturing your
-actions and ideas in the way society expects you to do. This feeling has started filling me since I was a teenager.
-It forged my personality and made me what I have been until now. People nowadays call it being an "entrepreneur" or "hacker".
-I don't think any word could describe the way I feel about my life and my role in the current society.
-
-
I left my country 6 years ago and came to France in order to study computer science.
-I had been to medical school before, trying to follow my dad's footsteps.
-My path through my studies has been the same thing as it has always been my whole life:
-trying new things, never settle down at the same place, always thinking of the next project
-and moving forward. As an immigrant student I have done many little jobs, worked for big IT
-companies ( although I was not always allowed to ), joined a prestigious computer school club
-where I learned so much about sysadmin in system engineering and met many people.
-Still, I was always feeling something missing. Deep inside, there was a voice who has been there since the beginning.
-It kept telling me what
-I needed to do. I was working as a system engineer on a short term contract when a friend
-(at the time) offered me to start our own startup where I would be responsible for all the
-technical aspect. When I think about it now, the idea was not that attractive,
-there was no business plan and we were just a team of three guys without any previous experience in
-the startup business. It was one of the most important choices I had to do.
-Either decline a comfortable job offer which would've let me acquire a legal worker
-status and finish my studies working with cool technologies, and maybe even travelling.
-Or jumping right into the startup adventure, with no guaranty of success, no market
-research whatsoever, and no immigration status possible especially in France which
-is about ten years far from a Startup Act .
-
-
Flash forward, I am co-founder and CTO at jib.li. Many things happened since and
-long story made short, we made a pivot and had new people in the team.
-I will share this story with my friend and co-founder Ryadh in an other article,
-a story which I think every foreign entrepreneur to France should know about.
-For the time being, Jib.li has been launched 6 months ago, had some worldwide press and
-media coverage, and is currently one of the first crowd-shipping/shopping platforms.
-
-
Then comes last week. Something big happened. Actually it was a succession of
-events that, taken alone could be considered probable, but thinking they would happen all
-at the same time in the lapse of a few days made them what we define as "life changing" events.
-They are totally unrelated, each having a huge impact in some aspect of my personal and
-professional life. But still, they are all connected together with the same variable
-that makes them what I feel like being born in a new life.
-
-
Each one of these events could be considered a failed, depressing twist filled with despair.
-In fact, they made me feel that way and I could barely sleep at night, always feeling a pain
-in my stomach like I have been punched in the nuts. I am not enough comfortable to talk about
-the personal one and the next articles will explain the rest of the story. What really matters
-here is the key denominator, something I can now consider, with confidence, as the most important factor in any
-future project and my whole new life. I am talking about Trust. Of course, it seems obvious !
-Well I taught it was too.
-
-
The history of humanity has been shaped by trust. You can't build a pyramid if
-you can't trust the architect. You can't build an army when people don't trust you. You can't learn if you don't
-trust a teacher or a mentor, and you can't found a family if you don't trust a partner...
-It is something that must be earned. Something you can't afford with money and power. Something you can
-fake with lies and charisma . I am now convinced the only way to find trust is to look for Passion inside people and that every human
-being have to learn it the hard way. You must be betrayed in order to acknowledge it's worth. I sincerely hope for
-you it won't be the same as me, but I can say for sure this was my life changing event.
-Anything that will come after will be different and I am very thankful I was given this precious lesson in my youth.
-
-
I don't know what words could describe the aftermath. I feel new, free, light.
-I feel a strength rising inside me, like the power to shape the future. I still have so many
-things to learn and experience, and the pains that come with it. Entropy makes
-life beautiful, the uncertainty built in the entire universe makes our lives much more interesting than any Hollywood movie.
-
-
Good luck to all those who create, make and change things, and for anyone else, just listen to the voice speaking to you.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/experience/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/experience/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index 20902a7..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/experience/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,99 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-04-18T11:51:00+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/my-most-valuable-lesson-in-life-learnt-the-hard-way
- Hollywood movies are often introduced with a main character living his life until a big event happens,
-something that is enough life changing to justify a compelling story. And we, as an audience,
-tend to identify to that hero or some event in the story that helps us forget the boredom of real life.
-I believe this is one of the secret ingredients that make the movies industry so successful.
-People need to forget about their daily life because they believe it's boring.
-In the timespan of 159 minutes they are thrilled in something more exciting, adventurous, romantic ...
-everything that does not seem to exist in "real life".
-
-
-
-
-
I love movies and cinema, and I really enjoy seeing a good one. However, something have always kept me a bit skeptical about the whole phenomenon.
-In my sight, real life is more exciting, there's an infinite amount of possibilities
-and outcomes to what you do. Everything seem possible when you stop picturing your
-actions and ideas in the way society expects you to do. This feeling has started filling me since I was a teenager.
-It forged my personality and made me what I have been until now. People nowadays call it being an "entrepreneur" or "hacker".
-I don't think any word could describe the way I feel about my life and my role in the current society.
-
-
I left my country 6 years ago and came to France in order to study computer science.
-I had been to medical school before, trying to follow my dad's footsteps.
-My path through my studies has been the same thing as it has always been my whole life:
-trying new things, never settle down at the same place, always thinking of the next project
-and moving forward. As an immigrant student I have done many little jobs, worked for big IT
-companies ( although I was not always allowed to ), joined a prestigious computer school club
-where I learned so much about sysadmin in system engineering and met many people.
-Still, I was always feeling something missing. Deep inside, there was a voice who has been there since the beginning.
-It kept telling me what
-I needed to do. I was working as a system engineer on a short term contract when a friend
-(at the time) offered me to start our own startup where I would be responsible for all the
-technical aspect. When I think about it now, the idea was not that attractive,
-there was no business plan and we were just a team of three guys without any previous experience in
-the startup business. It was one of the most important choices I had to do.
-Either decline a comfortable job offer which would've let me acquire a legal worker
-status and finish my studies working with cool technologies, and maybe even travelling.
-Or jumping right into the startup adventure, with no guaranty of success, no market
-research whatsoever, and no immigration status possible especially in France which
-is about ten years far from a Startup Act .
-
-
Flash forward, I am co-founder and CTO at jib.li. Many things happened since and
-long story made short, we made a pivot and had new people in the team.
-I will share this story with my friend and co-founder Ryadh in an other article,
-a story which I think every foreign entrepreneur to France should know about.
-For the time being, Jib.li has been launched 6 months ago, had some worldwide press and
-media coverage, and is currently one of the first crowd-shipping/shopping platforms.
-
-
Then comes last week. Something big happened. Actually it was a succession of
-events that, taken alone could be considered probable, but thinking they would happen all
-at the same time in the lapse of a few days made them what we define as "life changing" events.
-They are totally unrelated, each having a huge impact in some aspect of my personal and
-professional life. But still, they are all connected together with the same variable
-that makes them what I feel like being born in a new life.
-
-
Each one of these events could be considered a failed, depressing twist filled with despair.
-In fact, they made me feel that way and I could barely sleep at night, always feeling a pain
-in my stomach like I have been punched in the nuts. I am not enough comfortable to talk about
-the personal one and the next articles will explain the rest of the story. What really matters
-here is the key denominator, something I can now consider, with confidence, as the most important factor in any
-future project and my whole new life. I am talking about Trust. Of course, it seems obvious !
-Well I taught it was too.
-
-
The history of humanity has been shaped by trust. You can't build a pyramid if
-you can't trust the architect. You can't build an army when people don't trust you. You can't learn if you don't
-trust a teacher or a mentor, and you can't found a family if you don't trust a partner...
-It is something that must be earned. Something you can't afford with money and power. Something you can
-fake with lies and charisma . I am now convinced the only way to find trust is to look for Passion inside people and that every human
-being have to learn it the hard way. You must be betrayed in order to acknowledge it's worth. I sincerely hope for
-you it won't be the same as me, but I can say for sure this was my life changing event.
-Anything that will come after will be different and I am very thankful I was given this precious lesson in my youth.
-
-
I don't know what words could describe the aftermath. I feel new, free, light.
-I feel a strength rising inside me, like the power to shape the future. I still have so many
-things to learn and experience, and the pains that come with it. Entropy makes
-life beautiful, the uncertainty built in the entire universe makes our lives much more interesting than any Hollywood movie.
-
-
Good luck to all those who create, make and change things, and for anyone else, just listen to the voice speaking to you.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/it/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/it/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index cd7c77f..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/it/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,73 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2012-04-29T20:26:09+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/Development-as-a-Service
- Let me start by presenting a new web service pythonanywhere.com.
-
-
It's a full python development stack, ready to be used in your browser. After a quick subscription for a free account,
-you have access from your dashboard to [python, ipython, bash] consoles in different python flavours.
-
-
You can also browse your files, make cron scripts and create python web apps on the fly.
-
-
The most interesting features are the consoles pause/resume feature, which can be shared
-with other people. This could be very helpful to collaborate on code or teach python.
-Behind the scene, it's an encrypted ajax window over your home folder running on a remote server hosted on EC2.
-
-
DaaS may be on it's first baby steps. Though, it could rapidly become a standard way to code for developers especially in startups.
-Before diving in the pros and cons, let's analyse the different development stacks possibilities.
-
-
-
-
-
First, there's the good old fashion way. Setup a server on a cloud service
-(I guess there's still people doing it with bare metal servers ). You have plenty of choice there, (EC2, AppEngine, Azure, Rackspace...),
-it depends on your IT needs, spiritual beliefs (many don't care) and your pockets.
-
-
Then pick the development stack of your preferred language/framework: Python(Django, Web2py, Pylons, Flask...), Ruby(Ruby On Rails) for the rock stars, Java/.Net, PHP ...
-
-
Here, you have to maintain every piece involved in the process, packages versions, build tools, deployment, scaling. That's a lot of time and resources needed to finally get your developers pushing and your apps running.
-
-
The next big step was the Heroku and Dotcloud like services, aka Deployment/Scaling as a Service.
-They release from the burden of deploying and give enough abstraction to exclusively focus your effort on the application logic.
-The process is often the same, basically setup your project with a simple conf file, then deploy to the server with one command.
-They practically all handle version control systems like git,
-so your project is deployed every time you push your code.
-I believe Github helped a lot making these services exist as deployment is often tightly bound to code revisions, and Github offers an excellent API and a huge community.
-
-
We have been adding more and more abstraction to the development process in order to make it easier, faster, stronger ...
-However, there is still one constant, "localhost development". The coding itself is done on your machine/laptop.You still can use your favourite OS, IDE, tools.
-
-
Well, DaaS is going to cross that last barrier.
-There are already several web services for online development like jsfiddle.net for web design or koding.com.
-They offer something that could change the way we see development, the abstraction of your OS, ide and development environment.
-If you think about it, that's a lot of time saved. No multi-platform mess, no more scripts to ensure the same development stack. Using the enormous processing power
-of cloud platforms, there is virtually no compile time. You can even forget about your machine, all you need is a keyboard and a screen.
-
-
It seems only benefit but the thing is, if DaaS is really going to be the next step,I think we are missing something very important.
-Before a developer learns to code, he has
-to understand the building blocks of programming, what's a computer, what's an Operating System, how does it do its work. All the abstractions we built are built
-using this knowledge. How could a programmer understand code optimization ? Security flows?
-How could he understand the interaction of his code with its environment if he's not gonna use it?
-Maybe we're not concreted with that yet, but the next generations of programmers are.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/jib-li/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/jib-li/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index 0f51ba9..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/jib-li/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,179 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-03-06T20:01:00+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/redesigning-jibli-lessons-learned-form-hack-design-part-1
- As many programmers, I have always thought web design is a
-discipline best reserved for people doing art and design.
-You know, the hipster with his MacBook, his pletora of Adobe suites,
-and the huge time spent learning to use them.
-
-
I come from a background of system administration and networking, always
-fascinated by the obscure backend's thing happening behind what you
-see on your screen. Furthermore, I started web development for the sole purpose
-of building Jib.li, as a CoFounder and CTO on this
-project, and as a team which had no money to hire a full time designer.
-
-
Needless to say I boarded the UI Design ship on the wrong foot.
-
-
In this first article I am going to share my experience on how I got passionate
-about creating and designing a User Interface and what I learned from all the
-resources shared on HN and Hack Design lessons which helped me redesign Jib.li.
-
-
-
-
-
Before
-
-
-
-
After
-
-
-
-
Where to start ?
-
-
We launched the public beta of jib.li on October 2012. A few weeks later we had had
-plenty of feedback and proposals for new features.
-
-
For strategic reasons, we chose to start Jib.li with no registering process and just a "Connect with Facebook" instead.
-
-
We had no money to make a "how it works" video we could show
-next to the home page form, like many startups do when they launch their
-product. We only had a teaser video that we made before starting this project
-where you see a bunch of people (our team at that time) pitching the idea.
-
-
The home page actually looked like many location based services and the
-typical workflow of a user was:
-
-
-
Fill in the "From" and "To" location fields
-
Choose what action to take: Send, Deliver
-
A modal shows up to let him select a date depending on which action he chose
-
Redirecting the user to a listings results page
-
The user can then click on listings or create a new one if he's not satisified
-
-
-
-
We noticed that many people when they first reached the home page, where not able to figure out what to do next.
-To assist new users we used bootstrap tooltips everywhere, even on the action buttons.
-
-
On the graphic design aspect, we were just using a slightly customized bootstrap theme
-
-
Getting inspiration
-
-
So after we decided it was time to have a fresh and better look, I saw the opportunity
-to start practicing what I have been learning on HN, Hack Design and About Face 3 about
-UI/UX Design. It was also a good opportunity to stop frontend programming with spaghetti jQuery dom
-manipulation and start using AngularJS which devprived me of my sleep hours lately.
-(frontend programming will be the subject of an other article)
-
-
I think the most difficult step when you start working on something, no matter what kind
-of project, is actually to start. For me it was no exception. I was certainly looking
-for visual inspiration because a User Interface for a web application is first of all something
-we see before we touch and interact with.
-
-
To help me filter out the overwhelming quantity of images, photos and visuals available on the internet,
-I made list of words that sum up what Jib.li was about and started combining those words in search queries
-for images and photos.
-
-
I ended up with this one when looking for the words bike and bag, which seemed to summarize the ideas
-of transportation, carrying and environment which jib.li is all about.
-
-
-
-
This photo comes from this beautiful article by Dottie and all credits go to her.
-
-
When I saw this one ideas started immediately flowing and I knew where to start.
I actually repeated the process until I get a set of colors which validate these conditions:
-
-
-
Have at most 3 main colors
-
Have dark close to black color
-
Have a light close to white color
-
-
-
-
This one has two main colors, a wide blue range and the yellow/gold one. Grays and white are
-just desaturated and very light colors.
-
-
This should suffice to always have a color to pick from this palette instead of choosing
-one from a color picker, and so basically when looking for black I just choose the darkest one and when looking for white I pick
-the most close to white.
-
-
The wide range of blue colors made me choose the blue as the main color.
-
-
I was heavily inspired by this article of Ian Storm Taylor, which also made me
-start using HSL (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) everywhere I wanted to get new colors from the palette.
-
-
Rapid prototyping vs flat PSD design
-
-
One thing I learned in interactive design is that a User Interface can't possibly be represented as a flat image only.
- Bret Victor made an excellent talk about the process of creation and the necessity to get immediate visual feedback.
-My design process has been a mix of rapid prototyping and design exploration with chrome developers tools then representing ideas in
-a PSD file as a reference for later.
-
-
Although I'm not going to talk much about frontend programming, this is the stack I prepared to quickly test ideas and move back and forth
-from prototype to PSD.
Using git submodules to add frontend dependencies (Bootstrap, AngularUI, FontAwesome ... )
-
-
-
-
Whenever I wanted to test some behavior feature I first tested it with Chrome, played
-with styles and interactions, then tried to represent it as a layer in PSD.
-
-
On the other hand, when trying to work on the look aspect of something, I prefered the PSD
-approach first, which gives more freedom on the graphics.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
End of Part 1
-
-
I hope some programmers who are interested about web design and don't know how
-to start might find some insight from this article and the next ones.
-
-
Part 2 will be about getting from prototype to stylesheets using chrome devtools, the importance of shadows and
-some tips I learned about textures and details.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/programming/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/programming/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index e3ca004..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/programming/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,73 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2012-04-29T20:26:09+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/Development-as-a-Service
- Let me start by presenting a new web service pythonanywhere.com.
-
-
It's a full python development stack, ready to be used in your browser. After a quick subscription for a free account,
-you have access from your dashboard to [python, ipython, bash] consoles in different python flavours.
-
-
You can also browse your files, make cron scripts and create python web apps on the fly.
-
-
The most interesting features are the consoles pause/resume feature, which can be shared
-with other people. This could be very helpful to collaborate on code or teach python.
-Behind the scene, it's an encrypted ajax window over your home folder running on a remote server hosted on EC2.
-
-
DaaS may be on it's first baby steps. Though, it could rapidly become a standard way to code for developers especially in startups.
-Before diving in the pros and cons, let's analyse the different development stacks possibilities.
-
-
-
-
-
First, there's the good old fashion way. Setup a server on a cloud service
-(I guess there's still people doing it with bare metal servers ). You have plenty of choice there, (EC2, AppEngine, Azure, Rackspace...),
-it depends on your IT needs, spiritual beliefs (many don't care) and your pockets.
-
-
Then pick the development stack of your preferred language/framework: Python(Django, Web2py, Pylons, Flask...), Ruby(Ruby On Rails) for the rock stars, Java/.Net, PHP ...
-
-
Here, you have to maintain every piece involved in the process, packages versions, build tools, deployment, scaling. That's a lot of time and resources needed to finally get your developers pushing and your apps running.
-
-
The next big step was the Heroku and Dotcloud like services, aka Deployment/Scaling as a Service.
-They release from the burden of deploying and give enough abstraction to exclusively focus your effort on the application logic.
-The process is often the same, basically setup your project with a simple conf file, then deploy to the server with one command.
-They practically all handle version control systems like git,
-so your project is deployed every time you push your code.
-I believe Github helped a lot making these services exist as deployment is often tightly bound to code revisions, and Github offers an excellent API and a huge community.
-
-
We have been adding more and more abstraction to the development process in order to make it easier, faster, stronger ...
-However, there is still one constant, "localhost development". The coding itself is done on your machine/laptop.You still can use your favourite OS, IDE, tools.
-
-
Well, DaaS is going to cross that last barrier.
-There are already several web services for online development like jsfiddle.net for web design or koding.com.
-They offer something that could change the way we see development, the abstraction of your OS, ide and development environment.
-If you think about it, that's a lot of time saved. No multi-platform mess, no more scripts to ensure the same development stack. Using the enormous processing power
-of cloud platforms, there is virtually no compile time. You can even forget about your machine, all you need is a keyboard and a screen.
-
-
It seems only benefit but the thing is, if DaaS is really going to be the next step,I think we are missing something very important.
-Before a developer learns to code, he has
-to understand the building blocks of programming, what's a computer, what's an Operating System, how does it do its work. All the abstractions we built are built
-using this knowledge. How could a programmer understand code optimization ? Security flows?
-How could he understand the interaction of his code with its environment if he's not gonna use it?
-Maybe we're not concreted with that yet, but the next generations of programmers are.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/python/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/python/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index 52216a1..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/python/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,73 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2012-04-29T20:26:09+02:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/Development-as-a-Service
- Let me start by presenting a new web service pythonanywhere.com.
-
-
It's a full python development stack, ready to be used in your browser. After a quick subscription for a free account,
-you have access from your dashboard to [python, ipython, bash] consoles in different python flavours.
-
-
You can also browse your files, make cron scripts and create python web apps on the fly.
-
-
The most interesting features are the consoles pause/resume feature, which can be shared
-with other people. This could be very helpful to collaborate on code or teach python.
-Behind the scene, it's an encrypted ajax window over your home folder running on a remote server hosted on EC2.
-
-
DaaS may be on it's first baby steps. Though, it could rapidly become a standard way to code for developers especially in startups.
-Before diving in the pros and cons, let's analyse the different development stacks possibilities.
-
-
-
-
-
First, there's the good old fashion way. Setup a server on a cloud service
-(I guess there's still people doing it with bare metal servers ). You have plenty of choice there, (EC2, AppEngine, Azure, Rackspace...),
-it depends on your IT needs, spiritual beliefs (many don't care) and your pockets.
-
-
Then pick the development stack of your preferred language/framework: Python(Django, Web2py, Pylons, Flask...), Ruby(Ruby On Rails) for the rock stars, Java/.Net, PHP ...
-
-
Here, you have to maintain every piece involved in the process, packages versions, build tools, deployment, scaling. That's a lot of time and resources needed to finally get your developers pushing and your apps running.
-
-
The next big step was the Heroku and Dotcloud like services, aka Deployment/Scaling as a Service.
-They release from the burden of deploying and give enough abstraction to exclusively focus your effort on the application logic.
-The process is often the same, basically setup your project with a simple conf file, then deploy to the server with one command.
-They practically all handle version control systems like git,
-so your project is deployed every time you push your code.
-I believe Github helped a lot making these services exist as deployment is often tightly bound to code revisions, and Github offers an excellent API and a huge community.
-
-
We have been adding more and more abstraction to the development process in order to make it easier, faster, stronger ...
-However, there is still one constant, "localhost development". The coding itself is done on your machine/laptop.You still can use your favourite OS, IDE, tools.
-
-
Well, DaaS is going to cross that last barrier.
-There are already several web services for online development like jsfiddle.net for web design or koding.com.
-They offer something that could change the way we see development, the abstraction of your OS, ide and development environment.
-If you think about it, that's a lot of time saved. No multi-platform mess, no more scripts to ensure the same development stack. Using the enormous processing power
-of cloud platforms, there is virtually no compile time. You can even forget about your machine, all you need is a keyboard and a screen.
-
-
It seems only benefit but the thing is, if DaaS is really going to be the next step,I think we are missing something very important.
-Before a developer learns to code, he has
-to understand the building blocks of programming, what's a computer, what's an Operating System, how does it do its work. All the abstractions we built are built
-using this knowledge. How could a programmer understand code optimization ? Security flows?
-How could he understand the interaction of his code with its environment if he's not gonna use it?
-Maybe we're not concreted with that yet, but the next generations of programmers are.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/blog/categories/ui-design/atom.xml b/_site/blog/blog/categories/ui-design/atom.xml
deleted file mode 100644
index 3b50c1d..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/blog/categories/ui-design/atom.xml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,179 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-12-19T13:54:11+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/
-
-
-
-
- Octopress
-
-
-
-
-
- 2013-03-06T20:01:00+01:00
- http://sp4ke.github.com/blog/redesigning-jibli-lessons-learned-form-hack-design-part-1
- As many programmers, I have always thought web design is a
-discipline best reserved for people doing art and design.
-You know, the hipster with his MacBook, his pletora of Adobe suites,
-and the huge time spent learning to use them.
-
-
I come from a background of system administration and networking, always
-fascinated by the obscure backend's thing happening behind what you
-see on your screen. Furthermore, I started web development for the sole purpose
-of building Jib.li, as a CoFounder and CTO on this
-project, and as a team which had no money to hire a full time designer.
-
-
Needless to say I boarded the UI Design ship on the wrong foot.
-
-
In this first article I am going to share my experience on how I got passionate
-about creating and designing a User Interface and what I learned from all the
-resources shared on HN and Hack Design lessons which helped me redesign Jib.li.
-
-
-
-
-
Before
-
-
-
-
After
-
-
-
-
Where to start ?
-
-
We launched the public beta of jib.li on October 2012. A few weeks later we had had
-plenty of feedback and proposals for new features.
-
-
For strategic reasons, we chose to start Jib.li with no registering process and just a "Connect with Facebook" instead.
-
-
We had no money to make a "how it works" video we could show
-next to the home page form, like many startups do when they launch their
-product. We only had a teaser video that we made before starting this project
-where you see a bunch of people (our team at that time) pitching the idea.
-
-
The home page actually looked like many location based services and the
-typical workflow of a user was:
-
-
-
Fill in the "From" and "To" location fields
-
Choose what action to take: Send, Deliver
-
A modal shows up to let him select a date depending on which action he chose
-
Redirecting the user to a listings results page
-
The user can then click on listings or create a new one if he's not satisified
-
-
-
-
We noticed that many people when they first reached the home page, where not able to figure out what to do next.
-To assist new users we used bootstrap tooltips everywhere, even on the action buttons.
-
-
On the graphic design aspect, we were just using a slightly customized bootstrap theme
-
-
Getting inspiration
-
-
So after we decided it was time to have a fresh and better look, I saw the opportunity
-to start practicing what I have been learning on HN, Hack Design and About Face 3 about
-UI/UX Design. It was also a good opportunity to stop frontend programming with spaghetti jQuery dom
-manipulation and start using AngularJS which devprived me of my sleep hours lately.
-(frontend programming will be the subject of an other article)
-
-
I think the most difficult step when you start working on something, no matter what kind
-of project, is actually to start. For me it was no exception. I was certainly looking
-for visual inspiration because a User Interface for a web application is first of all something
-we see before we touch and interact with.
-
-
To help me filter out the overwhelming quantity of images, photos and visuals available on the internet,
-I made list of words that sum up what Jib.li was about and started combining those words in search queries
-for images and photos.
-
-
I ended up with this one when looking for the words bike and bag, which seemed to summarize the ideas
-of transportation, carrying and environment which jib.li is all about.
-
-
-
-
This photo comes from this beautiful article by Dottie and all credits go to her.
-
-
When I saw this one ideas started immediately flowing and I knew where to start.
I actually repeated the process until I get a set of colors which validate these conditions:
-
-
-
Have at most 3 main colors
-
Have dark close to black color
-
Have a light close to white color
-
-
-
-
This one has two main colors, a wide blue range and the yellow/gold one. Grays and white are
-just desaturated and very light colors.
-
-
This should suffice to always have a color to pick from this palette instead of choosing
-one from a color picker, and so basically when looking for black I just choose the darkest one and when looking for white I pick
-the most close to white.
-
-
The wide range of blue colors made me choose the blue as the main color.
-
-
I was heavily inspired by this article of Ian Storm Taylor, which also made me
-start using HSL (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) everywhere I wanted to get new colors from the palette.
-
-
Rapid prototyping vs flat PSD design
-
-
One thing I learned in interactive design is that a User Interface can't possibly be represented as a flat image only.
- Bret Victor made an excellent talk about the process of creation and the necessity to get immediate visual feedback.
-My design process has been a mix of rapid prototyping and design exploration with chrome developers tools then representing ideas in
-a PSD file as a reference for later.
-
-
Although I'm not going to talk much about frontend programming, this is the stack I prepared to quickly test ideas and move back and forth
-from prototype to PSD.
Using git submodules to add frontend dependencies (Bootstrap, AngularUI, FontAwesome ... )
-
-
-
-
Whenever I wanted to test some behavior feature I first tested it with Chrome, played
-with styles and interactions, then tried to represent it as a layer in PSD.
-
-
On the other hand, when trying to work on the look aspect of something, I prefered the PSD
-approach first, which gives more freedom on the graphics.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
End of Part 1
-
-
I hope some programmers who are interested about web design and don't know how
-to start might find some insight from this article and the next ones.
-
-
Part 2 will be about getting from prototype to stylesheets using chrome devtools, the importance of shadows and
-some tips I learned about textures and details.
Hollywood movies are often introduced with a main character living his life until a big event happens,
-something that is enough life changing to justify a compelling story. And we, as an audience,
-tend to identify to that hero or some event in the story that helps us forget the boredom of real life.
-I believe this is one of the secret ingredients that make the movies industry so successful.
-People need to forget about their daily life because they believe it’s boring.
-In the timespan of 159 minutes they are thrilled in something more exciting, adventurous, romantic …
-everything that does not seem to exist in “real life”.
As many programmers, I have always thought web design is a
-discipline best reserved for people doing art and design.
-You know, the hipster with his MacBook, his pletora of Adobe suites,
-and the huge time spent learning to use them.
-
-
I come from a background of system administration and networking, always
-fascinated by the obscure backend’s thing happening behind what you
-see on your screen. Furthermore, I started web development for the sole purpose
-of building Jib.li, as a CoFounder and CTO on this
-project, and as a team which had no money to hire a full time designer.
-
-
Needless to say I boarded the UI Design ship on the wrong foot.
-
-
In this first article I am going to share my experience on how I got passionate
-about creating and designing a User Interface and what I learned from all the
-resources shared on HN and Hack Design lessons which helped me redesign Jib.li.
It’s a full python development stack, ready to be used in your browser. After a quick subscription for a free account,
-you have access from your dashboard to [python, ipython, bash] consoles in different python flavours.
-
-
You can also browse your files, make cron scripts and create python web apps on the fly.
-
-
The most interesting features are the consoles pause/resume feature, which can be shared
-with other people. This could be very helpful to collaborate on code or teach python.
-Behind the scene, it’s an encrypted ajax window over your home folder running on a remote server hosted on EC2.
-
-
DaaS may be on it’s first baby steps. Though, it could rapidly become a standard way to code for developers especially in startups.
-Before diving in the pros and cons, let’s analyse the different development stacks possibilities.
-
-
diff --git a/_site/blog/my-most-valuable-lesson-in-life-learnt-the-hard-way/index.html b/_site/blog/my-most-valuable-lesson-in-life-learnt-the-hard-way/index.html
deleted file mode 100644
index bc9f99b..0000000
--- a/_site/blog/my-most-valuable-lesson-in-life-learnt-the-hard-way/index.html
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,221 +0,0 @@
-
-
-
-
-
- My most valuable lesson in life learnt the hard way -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
An entrepreneur thaughts and ideas.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
My Most Valuable Lesson in Life Learnt the Hard Way
-
Hollywood movies are often introduced with a main character living his life until a big event happens,
-something that is enough life changing to justify a compelling story. And we, as an audience,
-tend to identify to that hero or some event in the story that helps us forget the boredom of real life.
-I believe this is one of the secret ingredients that make the movies industry so successful.
-People need to forget about their daily life because they believe it’s boring.
-In the timespan of 159 minutes they are thrilled in something more exciting, adventurous, romantic …
-everything that does not seem to exist in “real life”.
-
-
-
-
-
I love movies and cinema, and I really enjoy seeing a good one. However, something have always kept me a bit skeptical about the whole phenomenon.
-In my sight, real life is more exciting, there’s an infinite amount of possibilities
-and outcomes to what you do. Everything seem possible when you stop picturing your
-actions and ideas in the way society expects you to do. This feeling has started filling me since I was a teenager.
-It forged my personality and made me what I have been until now. People nowadays call it being an “entrepreneur” or “hacker”.
-I don’t think any word could describe the way I feel about my life and my role in the current society.
-
-
I left my country 6 years ago and came to France in order to study computer science.
-I had been to medical school before, trying to follow my dad’s footsteps.
-My path through my studies has been the same thing as it has always been my whole life:
-trying new things, never settle down at the same place, always thinking of the next project
-and moving forward. As an immigrant student I have done many little jobs, worked for big IT
-companies ( although I was not always allowed to ), joined a prestigious computer school club
-where I learned so much about sysadmin in system engineering and met many people.
-Still, I was always feeling something missing. Deep inside, there was a voice who has been there since the beginning.
-It kept telling me what
-I needed to do. I was working as a system engineer on a short term contract when a friend
-(at the time) offered me to start our own startup where I would be responsible for all the
-technical aspect. When I think about it now, the idea was not that attractive,
-there was no business plan and we were just a team of three guys without any previous experience in
-the startup business. It was one of the most important choices I had to do.
-Either decline a comfortable job offer which would’ve let me acquire a legal worker
-status and finish my studies working with cool technologies, and maybe even travelling.
-Or jumping right into the startup adventure, with no guaranty of success, no market
-research whatsoever, and no immigration status possible especially in France which
-is about ten years far from a Startup Act .
-
-
Flash forward, I am co-founder and CTO at jib.li. Many things happened since and
-long story made short, we made a pivot and had new people in the team.
-I will share this story with my friend and co-founder Ryadh in an other article,
-a story which I think every foreign entrepreneur to France should know about.
-For the time being, Jib.li has been launched 6 months ago, had some worldwide press and
-media coverage, and is currently one of the first crowd-shipping/shopping platforms.
-
-
Then comes last week. Something big happened. Actually it was a succession of
-events that, taken alone could be considered probable, but thinking they would happen all
-at the same time in the lapse of a few days made them what we define as “life changing” events.
-They are totally unrelated, each having a huge impact in some aspect of my personal and
-professional life. But still, they are all connected together with the same variable
-that makes them what I feel like being born in a new life.
-
-
Each one of these events could be considered a failed, depressing twist filled with despair.
-In fact, they made me feel that way and I could barely sleep at night, always feeling a pain
-in my stomach like I have been punched in the nuts. I am not enough comfortable to talk about
-the personal one and the next articles will explain the rest of the story. What really matters
-here is the key denominator, something I can now consider, with confidence, as the most important factor in any
-future project and my whole new life. I am talking about Trust. Of course, it seems obvious !
-Well I taught it was too.
-
-
The history of humanity has been shaped by trust. You can’t build a pyramid if
-you can’t trust the architect. You can’t build an army when people don’t trust you. You can’t learn if you don’t
-trust a teacher or a mentor, and you can’t found a family if you don’t trust a partner…
-It is something that must be earned. Something you can’t afford with money and power. Something you can
-fake with lies and charisma . I am now convinced the only way to find trust is to look for Passion inside people and that every human
-being have to learn it the hard way. You must be betrayed in order to acknowledge it’s worth. I sincerely hope for
-you it won’t be the same as me, but I can say for sure this was my life changing event.
-Anything that will come after will be different and I am very thankful I was given this precious lesson in my youth.
-
-
I don’t know what words could describe the aftermath. I feel new, free, light.
-I feel a strength rising inside me, like the power to shape the future. I still have so many
-things to learn and experience, and the pains that come with it. Entropy makes
-life beautiful, the uncertainty built in the entire universe makes our lives much more interesting than any Hollywood movie.
-
-
Good luck to all those who create, make and change things, and for anyone else, just listen to the voice speaking to you.
Redesigning Jibli - Lessons Learned Form Hack Design Part 1
-
As many programmers, I have always thought web design is a
-discipline best reserved for people doing art and design.
-You know, the hipster with his MacBook, his pletora of Adobe suites,
-and the huge time spent learning to use them.
-
-
I come from a background of system administration and networking, always
-fascinated by the obscure backend’s thing happening behind what you
-see on your screen. Furthermore, I started web development for the sole purpose
-of building Jib.li, as a CoFounder and CTO on this
-project, and as a team which had no money to hire a full time designer.
-
-
Needless to say I boarded the UI Design ship on the wrong foot.
-
-
In this first article I am going to share my experience on how I got passionate
-about creating and designing a User Interface and what I learned from all the
-resources shared on HN and Hack Design lessons which helped me redesign Jib.li.
-
-
-
-
-
Before
-
-
-
-
After
-
-
-
-
Where to start ?
-
-
We launched the public beta of jib.li on October 2012. A few weeks later we had had
-plenty of feedback and proposals for new features.
-
-
For strategic reasons, we chose to start Jib.li with no registering process and just a “Connect with Facebook” instead.
-
-
We had no money to make a “how it works” video we could show
-next to the home page form, like many startups do when they launch their
-product. We only had a teaser video that we made before starting this project
-where you see a bunch of people (our team at that time) pitching the idea.
-
-
The home page actually looked like many location based services and the
-typical workflow of a user was:
-
-
-
Fill in the “From” and “To” location fields
-
Choose what action to take: Send, Deliver
-
A modal shows up to let him select a date depending on which action he chose
-
Redirecting the user to a listings results page
-
The user can then click on listings or create a new one if he’s not satisified
-
-
-
-
We noticed that many people when they first reached the home page, where not able to figure out what to do next.
-To assist new users we used bootstrap tooltips everywhere, even on the action buttons.
-
-
On the graphic design aspect, we were just using a slightly customized bootstrap theme
-
-
Getting inspiration
-
-
So after we decided it was time to have a fresh and better look, I saw the opportunity
-to start practicing what I have been learning on HN, Hack Design and About Face 3 about
-UI/UX Design. It was also a good opportunity to stop frontend programming with spaghetti jQuery dom
-manipulation and start using AngularJS which devprived me of my sleep hours lately.
-(frontend programming will be the subject of an other article)
-
-
I think the most difficult step when you start working on something, no matter what kind
-of project, is actually to start. For me it was no exception. I was certainly looking
-for visual inspiration because a User Interface for a web application is first of all something
-we see before we touch and interact with.
-
-
To help me filter out the overwhelming quantity of images, photos and visuals available on the internet,
-I made list of words that sum up what Jib.li was about and started combining those words in search queries
-for images and photos.
-
-
I ended up with this one when looking for the words bike and bag, which seemed to summarize the ideas
-of transportation, carrying and environment which jib.li is all about.
-
-
-
-
This photo comes from this beautiful article by Dottie and all credits go to her.
-
-
When I saw this one ideas started immediately flowing and I knew where to start.
I actually repeated the process until I get a set of colors which validate these conditions:
-
-
-
Have at most 3 main colors
-
Have dark close to black color
-
Have a light close to white color
-
-
-
-
This one has two main colors, a wide blue range and the yellow/gold one. Grays and white are
-just desaturated and very light colors.
-
-
This should suffice to always have a color to pick from this palette instead of choosing
-one from a color picker, and so basically when looking for black I just choose the darkest one and when looking for white I pick
-the most close to white.
-
-
The wide range of blue colors made me choose the blue as the main color.
-
-
I was heavily inspired by this article of Ian Storm Taylor, which also made me
-start using HSL (Hue, Saturation, Brightness) everywhere I wanted to get new colors from the palette.
-
-
Rapid prototyping vs flat PSD design
-
-
One thing I learned in interactive design is that a User Interface can’t possibly be represented as a flat image only.
- Bret Victor made an excellent talk about the process of creation and the necessity to get immediate visual feedback.
-My design process has been a mix of rapid prototyping and design exploration with chrome developers tools then representing ideas in
-a PSD file as a reference for later.
-
-
Although I’m not going to talk much about frontend programming, this is the stack I prepared to quickly test ideas and move back and forth
-from prototype to PSD.
Using git submodules to add frontend dependencies (Bootstrap, AngularUI, FontAwesome … )
-
-
-
-
Whenever I wanted to test some behavior feature I first tested it with Chrome, played
-with styles and interactions, then tried to represent it as a layer in PSD.
-
-
On the other hand, when trying to work on the look aspect of something, I prefered the PSD
-approach first, which gives more freedom on the graphics.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
End of Part 1
-
-
I hope some programmers who are interested about web design and don’t know how
-to start might find some insight from this article and the next ones.
-
-
Part 2 will be about getting from prototype to stylesheets using chrome devtools, the importance of shadows and
-some tips I learned about textures and details.