Confoo 2017 Takeaways

Last week Confoo took place in Montreal. This has always been a good conference in that there's quite a bit of variety in talks offered. No matter your interests, there will be talks of interest for you. It's a pretty pricey conference though but normal compared to many larger conferences. This post covers some of the main points that I took away from the talks I attended. Mainly for my own long term reference but maybe it'll be useful to others.

I won't go into details on implementation below as there's a lot of information out there on each subject already. From the talks at Confoo, I aimed for ones that were more architecture focused with as little language specific info as possible. This provided a lot of theoretical information leaving the practical information flexible for whatever implantation is desired.

Setting currency when using Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager for Ecommerce

After some frustrations with conflicting documentation, I figured I'd make the blog post I wished I had at the start of this all. This forum post is what finally led me in the correct direction.

If you're using Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager and are tracking Standard Ecommerce transactions in multiple currencies, you'll need some extra setup beyond the documentation they provide. You'll notice there's no mention of setting the currency when sending a standard ecommerce transaction because the Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager doesn't support it. Thankfully, it's easy to add.

Qleek - An interesting physical future for digital media

Starting as an Indiegogo campaign over 2 years ago, Qleek is a successfully crowdfunded media player focused on giving your digital media a presence in the physical world. Through a player, NFC connected hexagons called "Qleeks", and a device hooked up to your speakers or TV, you can instantly start playing music from any playlist you have connected.

Qleek Player Photo

On the surface this seems pretty simple, and it's very hard to describe what it's like using a Qleek Player. One would think that hooking up a console like a PS4 to play Spotify would be better than this device which requires you to physically change playlists. I would definitely liken the experience of using a Qleek Player to that of sitting down to play a record. Sure, you can hook up your phone to a Bluetooth speaker and play the same music, but there's something different about the deliberate physical act of choosing music and setting it in the player to play. It feels more intimate.

In this post I cover what the Qleek and currently do and what some of my hopes and dreams are for it.

Caching Assetic Asset Collections

Recently I was working with Assetic for combining and minifying CSS and JS files but ran into an issue with regards to caching the created asset collection. The resulting minified file was being rewritten on every page load which was no good at all.

TL;DR: Get the asset collection's "last modified" property and compare it to the written minified file to determine if it needs updating.

I just can't find the right photo service or solution

As a hobbyist photographer, often the hardest part after shooting and editing is sorting out where to host my photos. I've tried a multitude of online services over the years but have never found one that I liked mostly due to the fact that I'm not in 100% control of the life of that service. Are they closing down tomorrow, next week, next year? Who knows. This has led me to search far and wide for self-hosted photo solutions but I've yet to find one that hits the mark.

Light The Night Walk 2014

Last September, my father in law passed away from a rare form of Lymphoma. He was a loving father, husband, brother, son, uncle, friend, and was a true role model to everyone around him.

As we did last year, we will be partaking in the Light The Night Walk organized by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of Canada on October 25th, 2014.

Dev Diary #5 - Adding autocomplete for metadata

Over the past few weeks I've been testing a fairly major change to Logger OSX that adds autocomplete to the type and project inputs. I've spent a while sitting on this change as to make it happen, there were some large, behind the scenes, changes that needed to be made. There's a few bugs that were caught, like adding extra blank lines to log files, that were uncovered throughout this process.

Geolicious - The Private Location History I’ve Always Wanted

Over the past few days I've been testing out an app that I've always wanted and even thought about creating myself. I've always loved tracking my location over time but had been unable to find a good method of doing so. For a while I used Foursquare but never liked the public nature of the check-ins and my circle of friends never really got into it making its social features useless.

Getting started with Logger-TXT OSX Alpha

Welcome to the Alpha of OSX version of Logger-TXT. This OSX app is still really early in development so be careful with using it as there may be versions that mess with your existing log file. I'm personally using this on my own, 45K line log file so I try my hardest not to mess anything up, but still, use at your own risk. Dropbox versioning is good for recovering from mistakes. If you don't have access to the Alpha yet, I am always looking for more testers so get in touch!

Logger-TXT OSX Dev Diary #4 - Alpha Announcement & Rethinking The NSPopover

Since Dev Diary #3, a fair amount of work has been done due to trying to get NSPopovers to work reliably with the rest of OSX. Though in its previous state it worked, the overall user experience was unacceptable due to too many unreliable behaviours stemming from trying to use a popover from a menu bar status item. A few issues that were present with the popover implementation were:

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