Setting Up Open Source and Live Coding — Part 1
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This is a play-by-play screencast of me moving a component out of SSToolkit into its own library. I cover setting up a good open source component, writing Core Graphics drawing code, a bit of low-level C stuff, and some of my workflow.
You can find the code so far for this on GitHub: github.com/soffes/SAMGradientView. We’ll be adding a lot more in part 2.
Sleep Schedule
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I'm really bad at sleep. There are so many more things I'd rather be doing. There was the one Bond villain that only had to sleep for 15 minutes a day or something. I want that.
I generally go to bed around 2am or 3am. Since I work from home, I wake up around 8:30 and starting in bed right away. I spend an enormous amount of time working in bed instead of at my desk. On most days, I don't get out of bed until 11 or 12. It's pretty great.
After my Seesaw work is doing around 6:30ish, I hang out with family and such. Around 10 or 11 I'll start working on whatever side project I feel like that evening. Lately, it's been Roon.
Making Roon Faster
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Last night, I deployed some changes to Roon that made things a lot faster. Drew told me I should write about it, so here we are. I did three things:
Our assets were taking awhile to load because S3 is a tad slow. We use the fantastic asset_sync to serve assets off of S3 instead of Heroku. This is a big performance (and cost) win by itself since Heroku is expensive and is better suited serving dynamic requests.
The main problem here is webfonts. Users can't see any text on our pages until the font loads for the first time. This is kind of a big deal for a blogging app. Even worse, due to iOS security, if you hit Roon in Tweetbot (or any other app using UIWebView), it will have to download it since it doesn't share the system HTTP cache for security reasons. All of this made Roon feel super slow—especially on mobile.
Tearing Up the Carpet
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Someone asked what Markdown parser we use for Roon. Roon uses Redcarpet.
I figured it was worth expanding a bit about this though. Mainly two things Roon does that's sorta unique made possible by the fabulous Redcarpet folks.
We have underline support. As far as I know, we are the only people that support this right now. Here's how you write it:
Parting Ways With Cheddar
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I made this thing called Cheddar last year. I'm pretty proud of it. I wrote why I stopped working on it here. I talked about this whole process at length in Founders Talk episode 38, episode 39, and little in episode 40. (Episode 41 isn't about me. Could have sworn I took over that show.)
Anyway, I posted that I was selling Cheddar a few months back. This has been a very interesting process. I learned a lot and met some really cool people. My biggest take away is most people just wanted to find out a lot because they were curious and were just wasting my time.
Today, the money from the Cheddar sale cleared in my back account. It's official. I don't own Cheddar any more. My good friend Josh Long owns it now. He has some big plans for it. He'll be posting about it soon. I'll tweet it out when he does.