Mark McSpadden

The idea has been burning a hole in my brain for the last 3 or 4 months, and I told my self if the thought persisted until June 1, I would share it with everyone else. So here goes.

(What follows is much more ‘stream of consciousness’ than business plan.)

I would like to start a credit union for Dallas area designers and developers. The goal would be to help members of this unique community buy the tools (and toys) of their trade.

I’m thinking about things like “Adobe Loans” or “Monitor Loans” and maybe even structured savings accounts for those that want save up for these and other toys.

One of the unique things about this group is that there is a large number of freelancers. (Can a copy of a 6 month contract help secure a loan? I don’t see why not.)

I’ve been looking into how to start a CU and honestly I’ve got a ton of questions like:

• Does it really matter whether I go for a State or Federal charter?
• How much in assets does the CU need in order to do…anything?
• Do I need a physical address?
• Oh yeah, how do you run a CU with 0 staff?
• Is this whole thing even feasible?

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg I’m sure.

If anyone is interested in imparting CU wisdom my direction, please do. I know many in the CU world have been talking about a new kind of credit union, I think it’s time to start seeing if that can be a reality.

Call me, email me, twitter me. (469.226.9488, markmcspadden [at] gmail, markmcspadden)

Note: To me this all sounds like a great fit for a credit union, but I’m also open to looking other FI models if they would serve this model better. (A prosper group may be able to achieve much of what I’m talking about.)

Last night I gave a presentation to the Dallas.rb group on Ruby message queues. If you’re interested, download the pdf or the demo apps and have a look. (Note: I’m also in the process of producing a voice over version of the presentation. Mostly just to see if it can be done.)

• Ruby Distributed Processing and Message Queues: Dallas.Rb March 2008

Demo Apps from the Meeting. These apps assume you have the starling and memcache-client gems installed.

Checkout doc/README_FOR_APP for some explanation of what’s going on.

• starling_demo
• starling_demo_workling

If you’ve got questions or corrections to anything you see, feel free to give me a shout!

If you’re a developer, you know what I’m talking about. You’re doing something seemingly trivial, when you see something, you’re not sure what it is, but it doesn’t look quite right. You squint at it. Then you realize, this is something bad, something big, something really big and bad.

1. Denial: “No, my code isn’t really doing that.”
2. Anger: “Why is my stinking code doing this!”
3. Blame: “It’s got to be something wrong with a library or a bad default setting.”
4. Generalization: “I can’t be the only person this is happening to. Is this is happening on every site?”
5. Acceptance: “Ok, this is wrong and it needs to be fixed.”

It happened to me yesterday, while scanning the logs of an internal app looking for bugs. I started noticing something that didn’t seem quite right. My application was logging all the details of login requests, including passwords. That’s right, passwords and their associated usernames were just sitting in my log files, clear text for the world to see.

So I started the panic…all the stages flew by in a matter of minutes. Then I did the constructive thing and hit up Google for an answer. And one was right there for the taking.

filter_parameter_logging :password, :password_confirmation

What does this do? Well as you probably guessed, it filters the given parameters from being logged in your log files. The request will still be logged, only the specified parameters will be logged as “[FILTERED]” instead of their actual values.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “Why isn’t this taken care of by default?” or “How did I miss this?” The first is valid, the second, well you can console yourself in the fact that for some reason it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge among rails people. Let’s fix that shall we…

Special thanks to Baldur Gudbjornsson’s blog for stopping the panic for me!

I was doing more normal feed scan on Tuesday, when I came across an article by Robbie Wright titled Making RSS Easy. Little did I know it would steal half of my week.

What Robbie and the world didn’t know is that at my day job I’ve been hacking away at a community site for bankers that is all about making industry specific information easier to find and use. With that in mind I started hacking away trying to aggregate FI feeds. The results are as follows:

• Six compiled FI feeds
• A splash page for Banktastic complete with Google Analytics
• A mailing list for the Banktastic Beta Launch
• A deadline for Banktastic Beta

The moral of the story: Don’t read Robbie’s blog :)

Seriously who talks like that? Unfortunately too many of us that build web apps speak this way through the copy we use on our sites. Trey Reeme recently re-inspired me to stop talking like a techie and start talking like a human.

So I’m trying to do better, but it’s not all that easy. I’ve been in tech-land a long time. So I thought I’d start a personal “techie to human dictionary” to help me out. You can checkout this page to see where I’m at. (Don’t get your hopes up, there’s only 4 entries.)

I’d much appreciate any feedback or ideas! I’d really like to see this thing be a real resource…so let’s get started.

A feeble attempt to make my copy more human

• API = tool for programs to talk to each other
• CLI = text only, no mouse
• GUI (gooey) = better looking page
• Post = ?
• Submit = ?
• Thread = Conversation
• User = Person or Member

I was knee deep in an old php form this week, trying to clean it up a bit, hiding and showing certain questions based on the responses of earlier questions. In addition this form had over 400 lines of JS validation that I had to turn on and off based on a questions visibility. Did I mention most of the fields and labels were stuck in a table?

(Ok…I can’t complain too much, it was marked up very nice and clean.)

So I’m hacking away at this validation and I need to only validate visible fields. So naturally I try something like this:

if($('fieldId').visible() && oldConditions) {
  throw an error;
}

Seemed pretty simple to me…until it wasn’t working. Fields that I could not see in my browser were still being validated. If I can’t see it, doesn’t that mean it is NOT visible.

According to prototype, I’m way off. The ‘visible’ method only tests THE SINGLE ELEMENT it is called on for the “style.display == ‘none’” without regard to that element’s ancestors. The problem was, my fields were visible, but the cells that contained them were not. What to do?

Extend prototpye of course! After a google and a quick read of a short article this is what I came up with:

Element.Methods.truelyVisible = function(element) {
  var visibleBoolean = element.visible();
  element.ancestors().each(function(el){ 
    if(!el.visible()) { visibleBoolean = false; }
  });
  return visibleBoolean;
};

Element.addMethods();

Quickly, it runs through an element’s ancestor’s checking them for visibility and then returning where the element can actually be seen or not. Now you can do $('elementId').truelyVisible() and get whether or not an element can actually be seen in the browser. Hope you enjoy!

PS. Looking at it a day later, it could probably be more efficient like this:

Element.Methods.truelyVisible = function(element) {
  var visibleBoolean = element.visible();
  if(visibleBoolean) {
    element.ancestors().each(function(el){ 
      if(!el.visible()) { visibleBoolean = false; }
    });
  }
  return visibleBoolean;
};

Element.addMethods();

PPS. It gets even better…I should blog code more often:

Element.Methods.truelyVisible = function(element) {
  return (element.visible() && !element.ancestors().any(function(el){ return !el.visible(); })) 
};

Element.addMethods();

There are not enough exclamation marks in the world to follow that title. I’m so happy to finally have this app up and running and waiting for the world to embrace it.

Ok…so it’s really not targeted at the whole world…just the world of Financial Institutions and their Risk Assessments. (But that’s still a good sized world!)

Check out the full announcement at: blog.riskkey.com

I hope to follow this launch with several posts about my experience over the last month in trying to push this thing to launch. Should be some fun JS, RoR, and UI discussion!

Just wanted to post a quick note letting everyone know (all my 2 subscribers) that I’m back from the whirlwind that is SxSW. I had great time and heard a lot of great panelists…all leaving me inspired and fired up about what I do!

Over the next few days I hope to recap some of my thoughts from the conference…but right now I’m still letting it all soak in.

Special thanks to Brad Garland for invitig me to go, serving as my unofficial SxSW tour guide, and driving us to Austin and back.

Just confirmed today that I’ll be at SXSW in Austin! I’ll have more to say about the whole thing later…but I’m pretty stoked about going!

Maybe I’ll see you there….

Public Apology: I would like to tell Adam Keys that I am sorry for skipping Dallas.rb for the second month in which I planned on attending. The mailing list confirms that it was, as always, a stellar meeting and I am a lesser person having missed it. We’ll see if April can remedy my skipping streak.

I spent my Thursday evening in the company of about 30 other like-minded fellows (and one like-minded lady) at DemoCamp Dallas that was hosted by Sabre out in South Lake. Not gonna lie…little skeptical going in…but I had a great time and highly recommend you come with me to the next one!

There were six presentations of all-working-software-no-slides goodness that I just ate up. I just get stoked seeing people apply software technologies in ways that never have crossed my mind! Anyways…I’ll stop getting all nerd-giddy over here and just say the presentations were awesome.

As this was also my first “community” event, I also got to meet some really cool people. I am really looking forward to getting out from behind my desk more and becoming involved with people and events like this.

Bottom Line: If you like software, go to the next DemoCamp Dallas!

A Rails job to be exact. That’s right, after 18 months of freelancing and entrepreneurship I have decided to explore the options of full-time employment. I have very much enjoyed this past year and a half, but I also look forward to the new challenges that now lie before me.

I am currently looking for a Ruby on Rails job in the Dallas metroplex, so if you know anyone, feel free to pass my name along.

In conjunction with this search, I’ve set up a resume site at resume.markmcspadden.net. If you’ve ever wondered what I do or if you are just bored at work, go check it out and tell me what you think.

I’m excited about this next step and look forward to sharing it with all of you!

After spending the last few weeks buried in code, it felt great today to get out and connect face to face with the people that make small business….mom and pop business…keep on churning.

I’m setting up a Shopify account for a small business out in Garland that is looking to expand a piece of their printing business online. I feel like they have a good grasp on the expectation of a new online shop and that’s what I would expect, but what I can’t get over is their excitement. It’s contagious. It’s inspiring. It’s a good reminder of how rewarding small business can be for all parties involved.

A new PEW report out today takes give us some numbers on taggings. In December 2006, PEW found that 28% of internet users have used tagging and that 7% say tagging is part of their “typical day”.

The 28% is a little higher than I would have expected and there are some other interesting numbers in the full report about the demographics of tagging.

What’s it all mean? People are tagging…duh. What is encouraging though is some numbers that can be used to help guide development. It gives some fact in the “should we include tagging on this app” discussion, which has, up to now, been fueled and decided by statements like “I think”, “I like”, and “Everybody else”

Bold prediction: within 1 year asking someone if they use tagging daily will equivalent to asking someone today if they save or edit a computer file daily.

Happy Tagging!

(Yes I am just going to pretend like it hasn’t been 3 months+ since my last post.)