August 9, 2019 by topherPedersen

Marketing Like Dr. Squatch

This really great ad from a soap company called Dr. Squatch keeps popping up in my YouTube feed, and I just wanted to bookmark it here on the blog for reference. Here in a couple of weeks I plan on “re-launching” my personal finance app, MoneyPhone, and I’d like to shoot a similar style ad for MoneyPhone:

And no, I didn’t purchase a bar because it’s kind of expensive. But I still love the ad. #CopyWhatYouLike => http://paulgraham.com/copy.html

August 7, 2019 by topherPedersen

A Mix of Entertainment & Education

This blog post is brought to you by the developer of BitBudget. BitBudget is an automated budgeting app for Android and iOS which syncs with your bank account and helps you avoid overspending. If you’d like to quit living paycheck-to-paycheck and get a better handle on your finances, download it today! https://bitbudget.io

Almost everything I do I try to have a mix of entertainment and education. There’s a sweet spot between those… If it’s too entertaining you don’t learn anything, and if it’s too educational nobody listens.
Russ Roberts

August 7, 2019 by topherPedersen

How to Build a RESTful API in Python with Flask in 50 Lines or Less

Really simple example of how to build an API with Python and Flask that listens for HTTP requests and spits out JSON. The hard part of all of this is building the JSON with python. For really simple JSON we can just use a dictionary. However, where things get complicated is if you want your JSON objects to contain objects. The work around I’ve found is to simply create a dictionary of dictionaries, where we will use dictionaries instead of objects. In the example below first_category, second_category, and third_category would normally be represented as objects, but have been converted to dictionaries instead:

	# Import Flask
	from flask import Flask, render_template, request, jsonify, session, redirect, url_for, Response

	app = Flask(__name__)

	# REFERENCE: http://blog.luisrei.com/articles/flaskrest.html
	@app.route('/dictionary-to-json-test', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
	def dictionary_to_json_test():

	list_of_categories = []

	first_category = {
	"name": "Fast Food",
	"number_of_transactions": 13,
	"amount_spent": 427.33
	}

	second_category = {
	"name": "Restaurants",
	"number_of_transactions": 1,
	"amount_spent": 54.0
	}

	third_category = {
	"name": "Entertainment",
	"number_of_transactions": 2,
	"amount_spent": 125.0
	}

	list_of_categories.append(first_category)
	list_of_categories.append(second_category)
	list_of_categories.append(third_category)

	dictionary_of_dictionaries = {
	"category": list_of_categories
	}

	# Convert Dictionary to JSON
	json_obj = json.dumps(dictionary_of_dictionaries)

	# Create Response Object
	response_obj = Response(json_obj, status=200, mimetype='application/json')

	# Return JSON (Response Object)
	return response_obj

	if __name__ == "__main__":
	app.run()

view raw simple_api_example.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

August 4, 2019 by topherPedersen

MoneyPhone Feature Requests and Bug Tracking

Hello Internet Friends,

This post isn’t really for you. I just wanted to jot down a few notes on feature requests and bugs that need to be addressed with my app MoneyPhone before I forget:

Feature Requests

Allow users to edit transactions
Add spending categories
Include pending payments (accurately)
Bring back “money spent yesterday” sms feature
Add category budgets

Bug Tracking

Figure out how to handle expired access_tokens

August 4, 2019 by topherPedersen

Get Year Month & Day as Integers from an ISO 8601 Date String in Python

	date_str = "2017-01-29"

	year_str = date_str[0] + date_str[1] + date_str[2] + date_str[3]

	month_str = date_str[5] + date_str[6]

	day_str = date_str[8] + date_str[9]

	year_int = int(year_str)
	month_int = int(month_str)
	day_int = int(day_str)

	print(year_int)
	print(month_int)
	print(day_int)

view raw iso8601_date_string_to_integer.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

August 3, 2019 by topherPedersen

The Beautiful Thing About Programming & Startups

The beautiful thing about programming and startups is that it doesn't matter if there are competitors. You can literally program the machine to do whatever you want. So in reality, there is no competition. The possibilities of what you can build are infinite.
— topherPedersen (@topherPedersen) August 3, 2019

August 3, 2019 by topherPedersen

Free Marketing on Quora— a Traction Channel Experiment

Dear Internet Friends,

Tonight I wanted to write a real quick post on an experiment I’m conducting. I’m still struggling to find a traction channel for promoting my personal finance app, MoneyPhone, so on a whim I decided maybe I should try answering some questions regarding the topic of personal finance on Quora. To my surprise the site actually has a pretty decent Personal Finance / Budgeting section with many recent unanswered questions on the topic. And since I’m actually using MoneyPhone successfully to solve my own personal finance and budgeting problems, I decided to answer a couple of questions suggesting the OPs try my app. Not sure if my answers will get any views, or result in any downloads, but it’s worth a shot right?

So without further ado, here are the links to my two answers:

Read topherPedersen's answer to How do you avoid spending the next month’s budget this month? on Quora Read topherPedersen's answer to How do I create a monthly budget? on Quora

Sincerely,

Your Friend Topher

UPDATE (8/3/2019): I woke up the day after posting my two Quora answers and found that Quora moderators had deleted one of my answers. I sort of assumed that this would be a possibility considering they need to make money from people looking to market/advertise on their platform. However, I don’t think its a very good policy as I was ready to start spending money on their platform to promote some answers but have now changed my mind. Really, it was quite unnecessary. They easily could just push answers from marketers down the page unless they pay to push their answers up to the top. O well! On to the next traction channel.

August 2, 2019 by topherPedersen

Get Fired Up Like Jorge Masvidal

Feeling fired up, like Jorge Masvidal.

July 31, 2019 by topherPedersen

SpaceWalk PhaserJS Tutorial

Cool “spacewalk” PhaserJS tutorial for use with my students @ theCoderSchool:

Repl.it Starter Template (Includes Game Assets, No Code)

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html>
	<head>
	<script src="//cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/phaser@3.18.0/dist/phaser.js"></script>
	<!-- import phaser (phaser.js) -->
	<!-- <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/phaser-ce/2.13.2/phaser.min.js"></script> -->
	<style>
	body {
	margin: 0;
	overflow: hidden;
	}
	</style>
	</head>
	<body>

	<script>

	var config = {
	type: Phaser.AUTO,
	width: window.outerWidth,
	height: window.innerHeight,
	physics: {
	default: 'arcade',
	arcade: {
	/* gravity: { y: 300 }, */
	debug: false
	}
	},
	scene: {
	preload: preload,
	create: create,
	update: update
	}
	};

	// DECLARE GLOBAL VARIABLES
	var spaceMan;

	var game = new Phaser.Game(config);

	function preload() {
	// do stuff
	this.load.image('space', 'assets/high-res-space.jpg');

	// LOAD SPRITE
	this.load.image('spaceMan', 'assets/spaceMan.png');
	}

	function create() {
	// do stuff
	this.add.image(window.outerWidth / 2, window.innerHeight / 2, 'space');

	spaceMan = this.physics.add.sprite(window.outerWidth / 2, window.innerHeight / 2, 'spaceMan');

	spaceMan.angle = 270;

	// ADD CURSORS (USER INPUT / CONTROLS)
	cursors = this.input.keyboard.createCursorKeys();

	// SET SPACEMAN VELOCITY
	spaceMan.body.velocity.x = 0;
	spaceMan.body.velocity.y = 0;
	spaceMan.body.angularVelocity = 0;
	spaceMan.body.velocityFromAngle = 0;

	spaceMan.setDamping(true);
	spaceMan.setDrag(0.99);
	spaceMan.setMaxVelocity(200);


	}

	var coordinatesDisplayed = false;
	var centerX;
	var centerY;

	function update() {

	// ROTATIONAL THRUST
	if (cursors.left.isDown) {
	spaceMan.angle -= 0.5;
	} else if (cursors.right.isDown) {
	spaceMan.angle += 0.5;
	}

	// FORWARD THRUST
	if (cursors.up.isDown) {
	this.physics.velocityFromRotation(spaceMan.rotation, 200, spaceMan.body.acceleration);
	// DOWNWARD THRUST
	} else if (cursors.down.isDown) {
	this.physics.velocityFromRotation(spaceMan.rotation, -200, spaceMan.body.acceleration);
	} else {
	spaceMan.setAcceleration(0);
	}

	this.physics.world.wrap(spaceMan, 250);
	}


	</script>
	</body>
	</html>

view raw spacewalk.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub

July 29, 2019 by topherPedersen

Ratchet: Swapping Out Push.js for Turbolinks

Quick update on my latest HTML5/Apache-Cordova application. I recently decided to ditch the Materialize CSS framework in favor of Ratchet, an HTML5 framework from one of the core contributors to Bootstrap. However, I’ve run into a bunch of problems using the Push.js library that comes with Ratchet. Push.js is kind of like Turbolinks in that it is meant to make building single page HTML5 applications a lot simpler than using something like React, Angular, or Vue. However push.js isn’t very well documented and I haven’t been able to get it to do what I want!

So… since I’ve already figured out how to get Turbolinks to do what I want, I’ve decided that I’m just going to dump the Push.js library that comes bundled with Ratchet in favor of Turbolinks instead. While I still don’t have everything worked out completely, I think Ratchet + Turbolinks is going to be the easiest way for me to build an HTML5 application using Apache Cordova. And hey, when I get all of this finished maybe I can just combine Ratchet and Turbolinks into my own nifty HTML5 framework? I really like Ratchet so far, it just seems to be missing some stuff when it comes to developing single page applications. To build my app the “push.js” way I believe would require me to do a lot of server-side rendering which isn’t really something I want to do.

I know that there are obviously the big three SPA frameworks out there that solve this problem, but they are a lot more complicated that what I want. I wonder if I can use Ratchet and Turbolinks plus a little of my own ingenuity to make the simplest single page application framework? I really want something that is almost as easy as just creating a website with straight HTML. I know it won’t end up being quite that simple, but I think I could whip up something like this, where when a user clicks on a button/link we =>

Fetch some data from a server with AJAX (if necessary)
Load new HTML that is stored locally on the phone with Turbolinks
Add some JavaScript to each new HTML page that will dynamically update our HTML using the data returned from the server.

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A Blog About my Misadventures in Startups, Software Development, & Whatever Else I Feel Like Writing About

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