Some of my students have been playing a lot of mope.io lately when they’re suppose to be coding during our lessons, so one thing I like to do when this happens is talk about the tech used to build whatever game they happen to be playing before I block it. However, I’ve had a little trouble trying to figure out what language/game-engine/framework was used to create mope.io. But tonight I think I happened to stumble upon the answer. According the creator of mope.io Stan Tatarnykov’s Stack Overflow profile he seems to be using the Cocos2d engine and is either using JavaScript, TypeScript, or CoffeeScript. Boom there’s the answer! Wonder if anyone will ever be looking for the answer to this question and happen to stumble upon this post. Hmm…

About a month ago I launched MoneyPhone.app, a personal finance application for monitoring your spending habits (powered by Plaid). However, I’ve been having the hardest time trying to convince users to trust my app enough to link their bank accounts. Everyone seems to think my site is some sort of Russian phishing site.

So per the advice of my friends, family, coworkers, and strangers on the internet, I’m working on redesigning my site so that it is very clear that the mechanism for linking your bank account to my application is securely enabled by Plaid, the startup behind household names Venmo, Coinbase, and Robinhood.

I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do this yet, but I just wanted to start bookmarking links to articles about Plaid here on the blog. So without further ado, here is my collection of links/stories on Plaid:

• Meet the start-up you’ve never heard of that powers Venmo, Robinhood and other big consumer apps (CNBC)
• # TODO: Add More Links HERE

After launching MoneyPhone.app about a month ago, I’ve been having the hardest time trying to market it. If you don’t happen to follow my blog, MoneyPhone.app is a personal finance application that I built to help me better manage my money. Essentially the app lets you know exactly how much money you’re bringing in each month, how much you’re spending, and most importantly, where all your money is going! In my first month of using the prototype I saved $600 by cutting out wasteful spending that I identified by using the app.

However, I still haven’t figured out how to get people to use the thing! I know it’s good because I literally use it everyday. And it’s already saved me a ton of money, and I know couldn’t live without it having used it for the past month or so.

At work I can’t shut up about the thing, and how I’ve been having trouble attracting users, so my boss (who doesn’t wish to be named here on the blog) offered to help me with marketing. Her two main suggestions were creating a better YouTube Ad (mine was pretty terrible), and improving my non-existent landing page so that it includes basic stuff like (who, what, where, when, why, etc.)

While the animated infomercial that my boss created was a whole lot better than the crummy video that I shot on my Moto G4 smartphone, I kind of want to shoot a commercial in the style of Mike Lindell, creator of MyPillow. For years I’ve been obsessed with this Mike Lindell guy, and TV pitchmen in general for that matter. But unlike other pitchmen, Mike Lindell is actually the guy. I mean, he is MyPillow essentially.

So that’s what I think I want to do going forward. I’m going to try and go full Mike Lindell and become the MoneyPhone.app guy.

If you happen to have visited my blog before, you know I love to bookmark stuff here. So I just wanted to bookmark another wonderful site so I can find it in the future: visiondirect.co.uk

For some time now I’ve been buying all of my glasses and contact lenses online. One of the great benefits of this is avoiding the Luxottica glasses monopoly here in the United States that is wildly driving up the price Rx glasses. Another great benefit of purchasing your glasses online is that you don’t have to pay a doctor to write you a new prescription every year! What a racket that is!

I believe the most well known online glasses dealer, Warby Parker, requires you to submit a valid prescription. So I personally use 39DollarGlasses.com which does not require a valid unexpired prescription. However, I always have a hard time remembering who to use for contact lenses (that doesn’t require a valid unexpired prescription). After a little digging through my Gmail it looks like I last used visiondirect.co.uk, so that’s who I am ordering through right now as I type (in a different tab of course).

$33.56 (or £25.97 GBP) for three pairs, boom, done! Who knows how much that would have cost going to the doctor. Big shout out to Vision Direct & 39DollarGlasses.com!

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

My number one predictor of whether or not a company will find product-market fit: High shipping cadence.

— Naval (@naval) May 14, 2019

(It’s the speed at which the team iterates the product. From “shipping code / shipping product.”)

— Naval (@naval) May 14, 2019

Companies are less about striking oil on first try; much more about learning how to speedily prospect adjacent sites until you find a giant gusher. (And then quickly shifting to building a refinery.)

— Daniel Gross (@danielgross) May 14, 2019

I would not disagree with that. It might sound like you could spoof this heuristic by constantly shipping random crap. But no one can stand doing that for long. So in practice shipping regularly means you’re on the track.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) May 14, 2019

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

Okay, so another click-baity SEO friendly title I know. This blog post would have been more appropriately titled, “Just Discovered Intercooler.js, It’s like TurboLinks/StimulusJS Except You Don’t Need Rails.” Anyway, wanted to make sure I bookmarked this here on the blog because I’m definitely going to use this to turn my web-app into an SPA (Single Page Application) without having to re-write everything and learn React etc. Furthermore, I have a few other sweet links I need to bookmark as well. After I bolt Intercooler.js onto MoneyPhone.app, I think I will be able to use PhoneGap/Apache-Cordova along with OnsenUI to create a pretty decent Hybrid Mobile App for MoneyPhone.app that I’ll be able to publish on the App Store & Google Play Store.

Not sure if anyone else on the ole interwebs is ever going to see this, but if you happened to Google something like “can I use TurboLinks in my Python/Flask application,” I hope this blog post has helped point you in the right direction!

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

A couple of weeks ago I launched my new app, MoneyPhone, on Product Hunt. Sadly enough, but not surprisingly, I didn’t receive a single signup! Following my dud-of-a-launch, I wrote a pretty salty blog post titled Product Hunt Doesn’t Work. But tonight I’m ready to give this whole launch thing a second go, and am re-launching MoneyPhone on Reddit running a $100 ad campaign targeting users in the DFW and Austin areas over the next two days. Wish me luck!

UPDATE (5/7/2019): The Reddit ad campaign was a complete failure. Ran $29.27 worth of ads, received 88 clicks, and zero signups. Going to scratch Reddit off my list of traction channels, and try giving YouTube a go instead. Creating a YouTube ad is going to be a lot more work on my end, but hopefully I can create an ad that is somewhat effective. If Tai Lopez can do it, then I can do it!

After work today I started playing around with web scraping in Python using requests and BeautifulSoup, following along with the tutorials in the book Web Scraping with Python by Ryan Mitchell. Specifically, I want to be able to scrape the AngelList website to create my own angel investor database for project I’m calling AngelDB.xyz. However, I quickly ran into problems related to Cloudflare and their anti-bot protections.

This isn’t the first time Cloudflare has foiled one of my legitmate projects (they pretty much rendered my Chrome Extension the Internet Archivist’s Intrepid Extension useless after a few months). Luckily this time around, I found a pretty sweet library to help me bypass Cloudflare and scrape on:

cloudflare-scrape by Anorov

I haven’t gotten an opportunity to play with the library just yet as I just discovered it a few minutes ago and wanted to bookmark it here. However, after I get node.js installed here on my Windows machine I play on taking it for a spin. Wish me luck!

UPDATE (5/4/2019 10:43PM): After playing around with cloudflare-scrape for a little bit I could not get it to bypass cloudflare’s bot-security measures, and ended up receiving the same cloudflare html instead of the page that I actually wanted just as before. So if anyone happens to stumble upon this blog post, I’m skeptical that cloudflare-scrape will actually work for you.

UPDATE (1/13/2021 92:24AM): I noticed this blog post has been getting some traffic so I wanted to post this update. A year after originally writing this I’ve discovered that the real answer to getting past Cloudflare is to use a proper web scraping service. This is a very common problem in web scraping, so common that there are many services available to help get past common road blocks like Cloudflare. I personally suggest Scraping Bee (https://www.scrapingbee.com). Scraping Bee is an excellent web scraping service which I have been using for my latest web scraping project. It’s very easy to get started and is available at very reasonable cost. The best part about it is that you will only need to tweak your Python/BeautifulSoup code just a little bit to get it working. Essentially, instead of scraping pages directly, you’ll ping Scraping Bee’s servers and they’ll pass the HTML/XML etc back to you.