January 2012
1 post
4 tags
Joel Spolsky's Future Trello Posts
June 1, 2012
Trello works on phones! We knew from day 1 we would have to go mobile in order to realize our goal of being a horizontal app for the masses. But as you’ll recall, when we launched Trello, we proudly stated:
There will never be an “installed software” version of Trello.
And we’ve held true to that. Most people out there think you need to build a native application...
December 2010
1 post
7 tags
AJAX Facebook Like Button
We recently added Facebook “Like” buttons to each of the product pages, but it significantly slowed down the page so we decided to implement the AJAX version of the Facebook Like Button. Here are the steps to setup the Like button to load asynchronously: 1. Add the Facebook HTML element to the page: 2. Add Javascript to insert and load the Facebook Developer SDK asynchronously:...
November 2010
1 post
Relating Inventables Products with Hadoop...
If you’re a frequent user of e-commerce websites, you’re probably familiar with the lists of related products these sites often feature to help customers find what they’re looking for on the store. Amazon, in particular, sports several such lists on every page, including “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought.”
If...
August 2010
1 post
5 tags
How Startups are like Soccer Teams
This summer I watched a lot of World Cup soccer games. Initially, I only watched the U.S. soccer team’s games, but then I slowly expanded my viewing. I started watching all of Spain’s games because I have close friends in Spain. Then I started catching the replays of as many games as I could in the evenings, and I’d sometimes listen to some of the audio of games during work if...
July 2010
2 posts
6 tags
On Batteries and Brainstorms
“I’m fully charged by this idea.”
I re-read Mark Boulton’s A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web this week and was inspired by a bit of wisdom from his ‘Ideas’ chapter.
In this chapter, Mr. Boulton lays out a very useful strategy for conducting brainstorm meetings that involves ranking generated ideas using what he calls a...
6 tags
Diffing Darwin: Visualizing the Future of a Web...
Could there be more reciprocity between the way programmers and designers think than what most in our industry have traditionally believed?
In a planning meeting this week, our development team discovered a surprising similarity in the way our designer, Billy, and our lead developer, Jeff, visualize things.
As our CEO discussed his vision for the company over the next several months, Jeff...
May 2010
3 posts
5 tags
What Motivates us at Inventables
Lately there have been a lot of headlines about what motivates us in the workplace. In this talk, Dan Pink boils it down to two things:
You make enough money so that you’re not worried about money
You have the autonomy to direct your own work and make an impact
Dan then gives an example of an amazing place to work where one day a quarter the employees get to work on whatever they want....
Goodnight, IErene.
As of May 2010, Inventables will no longer support Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6. The reasons for this are numerous and varied and range from the technical, to the methodological, to the ethical, to the practical.
IE6 is a 9 year old piece of software. That’s at least a century in internet years.
At a time when even resource-laden internet powerhouses like Google and Amazon are...
4 tags
Adventures in Typekit
One of the many great things about working at Inventables is that we, the development team, are continually afforded the opportunity to experiment with—and even implement—cutting edge web technologies like CSS3, HTML5, Typekit, and many others. Because we’re small and nimble we are able to adapt quickly to the changing landscape of the modern web. It’s a great atmosphere in which to...
April 2010
2 posts
7 tags
Amazon RDS Redux: Tracking down a slow query
In our last post we talked about how Inventables migrated from a MySQL server running locally on an EC2 instance to the Amazon RDS service.
One benefit of using Amazon RDS is that you gain access to a large array of performance statistics provided by the Amazon CloudWatch service without having to do any extra work. We were eager to start viewing these statistics to see how the new platform was...
8 tags
Migrating Inventables to Amazon RDS
Background
The Inventables Marketplace and all the technology needed to support it reside and operate in the cloud. Specifically, we use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering, and we’re really happy with it.
Our site is a Ruby on Rails application that runs on two Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. All of our static assets, such as images and videos, are stored on the...