HeyAstro: Dropping Everything and Jamming for 16 Hours

When Mike IMed me a few months ago to ask if I would join him and Kunmi for StartupXLR8R, I resisted at first. I am already focusing so much time on STRUCTO, and already distracting myself with side projects like WhoMails.Me and ProudlyMadeinDC (the latter of which Mike is a co-founder), that another project would be too much to handle. But we approached it with a different spin. While we all had our own startups, and all the other teams applying were for the most part well established startups, we were going to go from zero to launch. In two days (16 hours).

We had tossed around a number ideas, but ended up choosing a smaller idea that we knew we could launch an initial version of by 4 PM Sunday afternoon, when it was time to pitch our product for “investors” (not that we had any interest in raising capital for this). We settled on an idea I had, a daily e-mail customized for you.

So Saturday morning, we headed off into our breakout room (thanks Microsoft for an absolutely gorgeous space), and just started cranking out code. Kunmi worked on the frontend display, Mike on the email and configuration backend, and myself on all the data sources. It was an exciting weekend, with sixteen straight hours of heads down, don’t-talk-to-us coding.

By 3:59 PM (we were pushing code as we were walking into the conference room), HeyAstro was born. In the few days since we’ve launched, we’ve had over 150 people sign up, an immense amount of amazing feedback, and a laundry list of new things we want to do with the product.

Sign up for HeyAstro, and let us know what you think!

Final Stack:

• Ruby on Rails (#FTW)
• Heroku for Hosting
• Delayed Job for Queue Management
• SendGrid for email delivery and analytics
• Gems, Gems, Gems. There is no way we could have built this in any other language than Ruby, as so much of the backend relied on particular gems. Koala for Facebook, HttParty, Instagram, OAuth etc…

Say Hello to Structo

First they ignore you,
then they ridicule you,
then they fight you,
then you win.

I’m behind in writing this post, but I’m happy to finally get around to talking about this now. I’ve been working on a new startup.

Say hello to Structo.

Structo was born out of a pain I saw as a web developer, and, in speaking with many other web developers, I found I wasn’t alone. There are many components in a web application that have to be repeated every single time.

What is Structo?

Structo is a hosted RESTful database. You specify your schema in a drag and drop interface, and then have a full infrastructure for your web application. You get to focus on what’s really important in your web app – we’ll handle the rest.

Struc.to Introduction from Zvi Band on Vimeo.

You’ll hear a lot more about it, but the best way is to go to Structo and sign up for updates!

FixMyCityDC Receives an Honorable Mention

The DC 311 application I built and Zach designed received an Honorable Mention in the Apps for Democracy competition!

Read my full post at my other blog

Learning ImageMagick with Run DMC

Wait — what?

Every PHP Web Developer, or any other kind of web developer, has, at one point, butted heads with ImageMagick, or its inferior nemesis, GD. We’ve tussled with setup and installation, debugged scripts, and stolen code, but rarely do we look to it for anything beyond generating a thumbnail or resizing an image.

Armed with nothing more than the native manual, I started experimenting with its abilities. What could I make with it? I thought it would be cool to start out with making a script to generate your own version of the iconic RUN DMC logo, as I’ve seen many variations.

And so it was born.

Above is what my script generates… nearly identical to the original.

Of course..

It will also resize appropriately, given how much text you pump in.

I’ve made the source code available. Steal away.

Obama Widget, Version 0

I had an idea for a widget, and felt like brushing up on my Flash and Actionscript skills.

Here is a very very rough Version 0, with Clearspring already set up!

I have to work a lot more on the style of course. I’m also thinking that these narrow dimensions just arent cutting it.

BarcampDC2 Was Awesome

BarcampDC2 was this past Saturday. It was an amazing day with a number of great sessions.

Thanks to all the sponsors for making it possible, and CDIA for hosting. The volunteer organizers, primarily Justin, Shaun, Peter, and John, deserve an infinite amount of praise. The DC community has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year, and were it not for the efforts of people like you, we would not be where we are today, myself included. So thank you. I had attended the first planning meeting, but unfortunately I was unable to attend any others or contribute any time, and I’m sorry for that.

Leslie, Bill, and myself gave a presentation on our awesome work for C-SPAN, through our respective companies New Media Strategies and JESS3. We received great feedback, and high praise for our work throughout the rest of the day. I chose to speak on how I leveraged the codebase in a number of open source projects to turn around each of these complex and high-performing sites in a week (no, I was not kidding), and people kept on coming up to me, shocked that I was able to do that  . Slides will be posted soon.

PygmyBrowse – a small screen tree browser

Like so many things from my college experience, I never realized how amazing this was until years later.

Rather than taking a “usual” internship at a government agency or consulting company for the summer, I instead chose to stay on campus for the summer, and in addition to a lot of relaxing, worked at two amazing labs at UMD. One was the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks, where I got to play around with awesome gadgets like motion tracking cameras and sensor networks. The other position, which I kept throughout the following school year, was as a researcher in the Human Computer Interaction Lab. I was tasked with working on an Java interface (using Swing) for the MALACH project, which, in a nutshell, was to allow people to browse and view a massive amount of transcripts of recordings of Holocaust victims. The recordings originated from the Shoah foundation, whose mission is to record and store all memories of survivors of the Holocaust (side note: my grandmother volunteered as one of the interviewers). So I spent the summer working under Ryen White, who now works at Microsoft Research.

As we were presented with developing an entirely new interface, we had a number of challenges. We came up with some pretty cool solutions. One thing I came up with was an interface element nicknamed PygmyBrowse. PygmyBrowse is a rather simple and easy method of bi-directional navigation of infinitely complex trees in a compact environment. I thought nothing of it at the time, but the professors around me disagreed, and suggested I pursue it further. After spending a good chunk of the semester holding user trials (in between running one of the largest student groups on campus, being actively involved in my computer, and oh yeah… double major), we ended up with an academic paper, with yours truly as the primary author. Which ended up getting accepted to a major human-computer interaction conference. Whiiich I didn’t attend, because there was one or another extra-curricular event going on (kicking myself 3 years later).

Now when you do a google search for PygmyBrowse (a lame moniker I concocted with a couple friends), it’s actually been implemented.

If I dig up the Java source code for it, I’ll release it.

You can download the PDF of my paper here, or view it on Scribd.

At it again, the Debate Hub

When I first made the jump from a big consulting company to a tiny creative agency, I was worried I would be spending most of my time doing small boring web projects. Yeah, right.

As if I the C-SPAN Convention Hubs that I wrote on earlier weren’t successful enough, we at JESS3 teamed up with C-SPAN and New Media Strategies again to launch the Debate Hub. I served as lead developer. Not only does this have the same great features as the Convention Hubs, like embeddable video, Twitter coverage, and blog content from all over the web, we added in some really killer features.
The Timeline is one of the best features. We’re pulling in transcripts as the debate progresses, and have it segmented out by speaker. Click on a piece of the timeline, and magic happens. This is built off of MIT’s SIMILE project.
The Transcript Treemap is another awesome feature. It shows the most used terms of each candidate, based on the transcripts, along with sparklines (more appropriately, the jQuery version). I even managed, thanks to some more jQuery magic, to allow you to dynamically filter what debates/candidates to show. Of particular importance to me, as the Treemap was created at my alma-mater’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, where I was a researcher for a short period of time (more on what I did there later).

It’s received a ton of press coverage, including ZDNet, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, RedState, and a number of other sites. It’s been a wild ride.

I’m not a very politically involved person. For me, I make sure I vote when possible, care about the issues I choose to care about, but never get more involved. However, I like to think that, when working on projects like these, we’re giving more people access to more information than they previously had, and allowing them to make more educated decisions when it comes to electing their leaders. It may only make a small difference for a small group of people, but that’s all that matters.

Hard to believe I graduated college two years ago…