Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Bizo Job - Designer



Position: Web / UI / UX Designer (San Francisco)


Summary:
We’re looking for an out-of-the-box thinker with a good sense-of-humor and a great attitude to join our product development team. As the first in-house Web / UI / UX Designer for Bizo, you will take responsibility for developing easy, powerful, consistent and high velocity web and interaction designs across all Bizo web products as well as marketing materials related to the Bizographic Targeting Platform, a revolutionary new way to target business advertising online. You will be a key player on an incredible team as we build our world-beating, game-changing, and massively scalable bizographic advertising and targeting platform. In a nutshell, you will be the voice of reason in all design and usability aspects of Bizo.

The Team:
We’re a small team of very talented people (if we do say so ourselves!). We use Agile development methodologies. We care about high quality results, not how many hours you’re in the office. We believe in strong design that helps people get stuff done!

The Ideal Candidate:

  • Self-motivated
  • Entrepreneurial / Hacker spirit
  • Experience/Expertise with Adobe Illustrator (and/or similar design tools)
  • Strong CSS skills
  • Strong HTML skills
  • Strong Javascript skills
  • Understands the value of mock-ups (points for Balsamiq experience)
  • Flash experience (bonus but not required)
  • Enjoys working on teams
  • Educational background or industry experience in Design or related field – points for advanced degrees
  • Gets stuff done!


Please send a resume, cover letter and link to online portfolio to: donnie@bizo.com





Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Introducing Cloudviz

Amazon CloudWatch exposes a variety of useful metrics for EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, and more. Unfortunately, it is tedious to query directly and the results can be difficult to interpret.

Like most operational metrics, CloudWatch data provides the most insight when graphed. While there are existing tools to graph CloudWatch data, they are only available as part of a proprietary suite or service and, generally, they sacrifice customization and flexibility for ease-of-use.

Here at Bizo, we wanted to incorporate CloudWatch data into operational dashboards. Nothing we found was flexible enough to meet our needs, so we decided to write our own. We are now releasing it to for all to use.

I'm pleased to introduce cloudviz, an open source tool for creating embeddable CloudWatch graphs.

Specifically, cloudviz is a data source that exposes CloudWatch data for graphing by Google Interactive Charts (formerly Visualization API). It's written in Python using Google's Data Source library and Mitch Garnaat's excellent AWS interface, boto.

With cloudviz, it's easy to create graphs like these:



I encourage you to check out the project on GitHub here. There's a fairly detailed README and plenty of examples, but feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions, mike@bizo.com.

Happy graphing!

Friday, March 5, 2010

SSH to EC2 instance ID

I often find myself looking up EC2 nodes by instance ID so I can grab the external DNS name and SSH in. Fed up with the extra “ec2-describe-instance , copy, paste” layer, I threw together a function (basically a fancy alias) to SSH into an EC2 instance referenced by ID.

Assuming you’re on Mac OS X / Linux, just put this somewhere in ~/.profile, reload your terminal, and you’re good to go.

Alternatively, you can use the shell script version.


(note: cross-posted here)

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Example git/git-sh config

I've been using git, git-svn, and git-sh while working on Bizo's internal projects and really enjoying it. Per requests from some other devs, here is my git/git-sh config.

First, you should start with git-sh. It adds some bash shell customizations like a nice `PS1` prompt, tab completion, and incredibly short git-specific aliases. I'll cover some of the aliases later, but this is the thing that started me down the "how cool can I get my git environment" path.

I've included commented versions of my .gitconfig and .gitshrc below, but you can find raw versions here and here. I also cross-posted this on my personal blog if you're so inclined as to read it twice.

Example Shell Session



A lot of my customizations are around aliases, so this is a quick overview, and then the aliases are defined/explained below.

Here is a made up example bash session with some of the commands:


# show we're in a basic java/whatever project
$ ls
src/ tests/

# start git-sh to get into a git-specific bash environment
$ git sh

# change some things
$ echo "file1" > src/package1/file1
$ echo "file2" > src/package2/file2
$ echo "file3" > src/package3/file2

# see all of our changes
$ d
# runs: git diff

# see only the changes in package1
$ dg package1
# runs: git diff src/package1/file1

# stage any path with 'package' in it
$ ag package
# runs: git add src/package1/file1 src/package2/file2 src/package3/file3

# we only wanted package1, reset package2 and package3
$ rsg package2
# runs: git reset src/package2/file2
$ rsg package3
# runs: git reset src/package3/file3

# see what we have staged now (only package1)
$ p
# runs: git diff --cached

# commit it
$ commit -m "Changed stuff in package1"
# runs: git commit -m "..."


That is the basic idea.

Most of the magic is from the [alias] section of .gitconfig, along with my .gitshrc allowing the git prefix to be dropped.

.gitconfig



The .gitconfig file is in your home directory and is for user-wide settings.

Here is my current .gitconfig with comments:


[user]
name = Stephen Haberman
email = stephen@exigencecorp.com
[alias]
# 'add all' stages all new+changed+deleted files
aa = !git ls-files -d | xargs -r git rm && git ls-files -m -o --exclude-standard | xargs -r git add

# 'add grep' stages all new+changed that match $1
ag = "!sh -c 'git ls-files -m -o --exclude-standard | grep $1 | xargs -r git add' -"

# 'checkout grep' checkouts any files that match $1
cg = "!sh -c 'git ls-files -m | grep $1 | xargs -r git checkout' -"

# 'diff grep' diffs any files that match $1
dg = "!sh -c 'git ls-files -m | grep $1 | xargs -r git diff' -"

# 'patch grep' diff --cached any files that match $1
pg = "!sh -c 'git ls-files -m | grep $1 | xargs -r git diff --cached' -"

# 'remove grep' remove any files that match $1
rmg = "!sh -c 'git ls-files -d | grep $1 | xargs -r git rm' -"

# 'reset grep' reset any files that match $1
rsg = "!sh -c 'git ls-files -c | grep $1 | xargs -r git reset' -"

# nice log output
lg = log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate

# rerun svn show-ignore -> exclude
si = !git svn show-ignore > .git/info/exclude

# start git-sh
sh = !git-sh
[color]
# turn on color
diff = auto
status = auto
branch = auto
interactive = auto
ui = auto
[color "branch"]
# good looking colors i copy/pasted from somewhere
current = green bold
local = green
remote = red bold
[color "diff"]
# good looking colors i copy/pasted from somewhere
meta = yellow bold
frag = magenta bold
old = red bold
new = green bold
[color "status"]
# good looking colors i copy/pasted from somewhere
added = green bold
changed = yellow bold
untracked = red
[color "sh"]
branch = yellow
[core]
excludesfile = /home/stephen/.gitignore
# two-space tabs
pager = less -FXRS -x2
[push]
# 'git push' should only do the current branch, not all
default = current
[branch]
# always setup 'git pull' to rebase instead of merge
autosetuprebase = always
[diff]
renames = copies
mnemonicprefix = true
[svn]
# push empty directory removals back to svn at directory deletes
rmdir = true


.gitshrc



This is my .gitshrc file, heavily based off Ryan Tomayko's original.

Ryan's original comments are prefixed with #, I'll prefix my additions with ###, most of which are aliases to my [alias] entries above and some git-svn aliases.


#!/bin/bash
# rtomayko's ~/.gitshrc file
### With additions from stephenh

# git commit
gitalias commit='git commit --verbose'
gitalias amend='git commit --verbose --amend'
gitalias ci='git commit --verbose'
gitalias ca='git commit --verbose --all'
gitalias n='git commit --verbose --amend'

# git branch and remote
gitalias b='git branch -av' ### Added -av parameter
gitalias rv='git remote -v'

# git add
gitalias a='git add'
gitalias au='git add --update'
gitalias ap='git add --patch'
### Added entries for my .gitconfig aliases
alias aa='git aa' # add all updated/new/deleted
alias ag='git ag' # add with grep
alias agp='git agp' # add with grep -p
alias cg='git cg' # checkout with grep
alias dg='git dg' # diff with grep
alias pg='git pg' # patch with grep
alias rsg='git rsg' # reset with grep
alias rmg='git rmg' # remove with grep

# git checkout
gitalias c='git checkout'

# git fetch
gitalias f='git fetch'

# basic interactive rebase of last 10 commits
gitalias r='git rebase --interactive HEAD~10'
alias cont='git rebase --continue'

# git diff
gitalias d='git diff'
gitalias p='git diff --cached' # mnemonic: "patch"

# git ls-files
### Added o to list other files that aren't ignored
gitalias o='git ls-files -o --exclude-standard' # "other"

# git status
alias s='git status'

# git log
gitalias L='git log'
# gitalias l='git log --graph --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --decorate'
gitalias l="git log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative"
gitalias ll='git log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --max-count=15'

# misc
gitalias pick='git cherry-pick'

# experimental
gitalias mirror='git reset --hard'
gitalias stage='git add'
gitalias unstage='git reset HEAD'
gitalias pop='git reset --soft HEAD^'
gitalias review='git log -p --max-count=1'

### Added git svn asliases
gitalias si='git si' # update svn ignore > exclude
gitalias sr='git svn rebase'
gitalias sp='git svn dcommit'
gitalias sf='git svn fetch'

### Added call to git-wtf tool
gitalias wtf='git-wtf'


Since I defined most of the interesting aliases in the .gitconfig [alias] section, it means they're all usable via git xxx, e.g. git ag foo, but listing alias ag='git ag' in .gitshrc means you can also just use ag foo, assuming you've started the git-sh environment.

It results in some duplication, but means they're usable from both inside and outside of git-sh, which I think is useful.

Get Your Speed Tracer On!

I first saw Speed Tracer in action at Google I/O 2009 and was pretty amped about it. While we have been using GWT 2.0 features for a few months now (e.g. OOPHM, UiBinder, ClientBundle), I had not tried out Speed Tracer until tonight. Speed Tracer is a Chrome plugin that is as a web performance profiling tool on steroids. The level of profiling information that you can get from this tool is truly amazing. If you develop web apps then I highly recommend that you check it out. I guarantee it will be something you will want to have in your toolbox. Installation instructions can be found here.