Luca Bonmassar's Blog

Github security audit.

Thanks Github for your security audit. Thanks, because by doing that you have fucked up all our installations - production / preproduction deployments, continuos integration system, etc. Now every process that tries to update a software hosted on you (and we pay for that) just dies with:

$ git pull origin master
ERROR: Hi xxx, it’s GitHub. We’re doing an SSH key audit.
Please visit https://github.com/settings/ssh/audit/485822 to approve this key so we know it’s safe.
Fingerprint: fc:93:ed:2a:2d:5e:47:b1:9b:42:aa:ec:1e:d5:a3:fa
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

You could have sent us an email, but that was too easy; you are very brilliant and you thought was way smarter to block all the connections. Congrats guys, a brilliant fuck up.

<meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” />

Amazing: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/17949261591/growing-up

Scrollorama!

The jQuery plugin for doing cool scrolly stuff

http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrollorama/

The future of Web Gamification

Game Dynamics were the hot topic this year (through “Gamification”).

Gamification is essentially the art of taking something boring (a News Website) and make it cool adding game dynamics (badges, leader boards, missions, levels, points, etc.). FourSquare and many other turned daily activities into games (how many websites at large do they give you badges/points for anything you do?).

Now a new interesting concept is coming out: pornification.

http://extralunchmoney.com/blog/pornification-the-future-of-web-startups/

That’s a step forward: turning boring activities in porno activities. Nice to be part of the QA btw.

How To Get TechCrunch’d

andrewdumont:

Let’s get something out of the way, before we dig in: Press is not a marketing strategy. 

Press is something that can provide initial visibility, credibility and a very small boost in users, if you’re lucky. 

That said, getting TechCrunch’d is a lot of fun. A. Lot. Of. Fun. But, without an agency pushing you (and costing you upwards of $10K/month) you’re on your own. Over the years, I’ve come to learn that the pitch is one of the most important parts to landing press, both on TechCrunch, and anywhere else.

Back when I did the press push for the launch of Leatherbound, we earned some awesomely unexpected coverage in Wired, Read Write Web, TechCrunch, LifeHacker and a few others, largely in part to the pitch and a bit of dumb luck.

To provide an example, here’s the exact pitch I used.

Read More

(via andrewdumont)

Developing in Rails

After developing for a while in Rails, that’s the usual development-cycle in Rails.

“I want to do this. Ah, lucky me, in Rails is just a gem and 2 lines of code”

gem install
2 lines of code
while true
  ERROR. Missing $$%$
  Google for ERROR. Missing $$%$
  Ah ok, it is a bug. I just need to patch it with this code from Github.
  Ops, to have the fix working, I need to install just a gem more
  Ops, they have updated the gem from version 0.3.1 to 0.3.2 and it is totally incompatible.
  Google how to fix migrating from 0.3.1 to 0.3.2
  Remove a gem. Install a new gem.  

In Rails, everything takes only 5 minutes! Unfortunately your todo list becomes very long…

Very nice pitches

In the past days I have received awesome proposals from people that would like to team up with me for a side project / moonlighting / future adventures.

These are my favorite quotes:

* I have an impressive successful track record. [But you are only 23???] Yes, I meant I have an impressive successful track record in school. 

* Our team is made of 4 guys, 2 executives and 2 senior board members [awesome! Anyone doing the job?]

* We have no experience whatsoever in IT/Web yet, but we are considering to build our first web startup outsourcing this slice of work in India

* …and to complete our team we are looking for an experienced CTO, some senior developers, some junior developers, probably 2 or 3 web designers. Then someone who can take care of Marketing, then someone for sales and accounting. We think we need some help also in the financing area and operations [hey, basically the team is ‘almost’ in place!]

In terms of pitches/ideas, the recurring one is “…we have an idea in the area of [whatever area] and we think we will be the leader in this market pretty soon. Among other qualities, our project will leverage on [choose three between the followings: ‘mobile’, ‘pervasive’, ‘social’, ‘cloud’, ‘crowd-sourcing’, ‘platform’, ‘viral’ ]. Do you want to know more about it? Unfortunately we cannot share any other details with you at this stage [because our idea is so damn good and disruptive that you will immediately run away stealing it from us!!! have you watched ‘The Social Network’???] but if you like the context [where ‘context’ is the area+some buzz words] we could definitively find an agreement [read: NDA] to protect our IPs [IPs??? what IPs??? An idea sketched on a pizza box is not an IP!!!]”

Try harder.

Thank You Steve

minimalmac:

aaronmahnke:

This is my favorite photo of Steve Jobs. Leaning forward to connect with his wife after his keynote presentation at the 2011 WWDC. You can almost feel the relief and accomplishment radiating from him.

When I see this photo, I see a man who bent every fiber of his will toward a goal so lofty, so seemingly unattainable that no one thought it was possible, and at the end of that race, with the task completed, he closed his eyes and rested.

Thank you Steve. I’ll miss you.

Enough.