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Masters At Genius Engineering

Posted on by Ben Ehrlich

“If you choose to sail upon the seas of [ecommerce], build your [ecommerce website] as you would your boat, with the strength to sail safely through any storm.”

– J. Safra Sarasin (sort of)

Once upon a time, some shipwrights came together and said, “we’ve had enough of these old ships. Let’s make the best ship ever– it’ll be really sturdy, and really fast, and it’ll carry an unlimited number of passengers–and let’s make the ship standardized and configurable, so if someone wants to change out boards on the ship or put in new parts, they don’t need to muck around in the bowels of the ship.” Because these guys have seen lots of other ship designs that have different issues and inefficiencies and they have the solution to all the problems other ships have.

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I Love PHP

Posted on by Ben Ehrlich

I love PHP because it comes with a santa’s bag size feature set, and I am charmed by PHP because these features often make no sense and are wildly inconsistent across the language. My friend says he won’t do web development because it requires ‘tribal knowledge’ and I think this is what he’s talking about. Let’s talk about string functions.

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Oh Settings, Where Art Thou

Posted on by Ben Ehrlich

The removal of the headphone jack was a failure. We all know it. There is no one in the world who says “I’m so glad we got rid of the headphone jack so this phone could be .1mm thinner.” There are a lot of people who say, “I don’t want to spend $100+ on headphones that will be unrepairable in a few years,” or “I can’t charge my phone and listen to music at the same time.” Apologists say, “just buy a $x adapter, you can leave it in all the time,” but I’d rather not pay extra money to make a new phone have the basic functionality that my previous phone had.

To the same note: It’s been 7 years since Windows 8 released. We’re still dealing with the UI decisions and the fragmentation it caused in the Windows user experience. We know it was bad, and we continue to suffer with it.

Rewind to 2012. Exciting things are happening. Computers are getting touch screens, we’re looking at Intel processors in phones. It’s seriously looking like there might be a complete convergence of technologies—a momentary dream: run the same software across all ecosystems. Oh how naive we were.

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Fun In Horrible API Land

Posted on by Ben Ehrlich

There’s plenty of API horror stories out there, I figured I’d share mine. This is a story of a certain API of a certain piece of software and the trials and tribulations I went through to avoid making users upload a CSV file.

Background: There’s not a lot of software in the space of the company I was working for at the time. The quality ranges from poor to less poor and my company opted for one of the less flexible more stable bad options–I will call it Athletic. This was customer facing software that had a very decent user experience if you were a customer and a very bad experience if you were actually paying for it.

So I’m building a web app to be used internally at my company which needs data from the software in Athletic. The options are: 1. Download an excel spreadsheet that you can export from Athletic, convert it into a CSV, and upload it. This works, but is a painful process for users and this will need to be repeated weekly, sometimes more often. Option 2 is to use Athletic’s API. I opt for option two. So the odyssey begins.

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