Feldfix

Feldfix is an online marketplace that brings together extraordinary farmers and their conscientious customers, allowing them to communicate and do business directly, just like a local farmer’s market.

Through innovative packaging and delivery, customers receive field fresh food at their doorstep from farmers who take pride in their craft, all while enjoying a unique and simple shopping experience that is founded on honesty.

As a result, customers get better food, shipped with a real story, from a farmer they know and trust.

We are currently Live and taking orders in Germany, and will soon expand to Austria.   Here at Burningpony we helped Feldfix extend and modified the Spree ecommerce platform into a marketplace, built marketing websites, and help drive the international team towards a successful launch.

Checkout the site and store at feldfix.com.   Though beware most of the products are in german only :/

That feature took how long?!?

Every programmer at one point or another is going to be asked by a manager to keep track of their time, be it for a particular client, or cost management exercise or just a time management tool. We all dream up beautiful schedules to block off our time to make it easy to bill to our clients and to help us focus, and boy is it wonderful when it plays out that way.   But in the reality of a consultancy, your phone rings at the worst time, and you have to answer it, the person calling pays for your house.

Personally this has been a battle of mine, from Profit Train, to Billable, to Money Tracker, to Timecard, to Pay Dirt, to Fresh Books, and finally Quickbooks.   Nothing was perfect, either time it was to hard to enter or it was a total pain to get the company books up to date.  Something had to change.

Then I found this.

Screenshot 2015-02-12 23.09.59

It’s concept was simple, Wakatime plugs into your text editor and sends heartbeats containing the files I am working on, including the Git project and branch. Suddenly I had all the data I needed to build the effortless time tracking software.  The idea was simple,  use wakatime’s data to determine how much time I spent on each commit, and use the commit messages to build a entry into Quickbooks, add a little cron, profit.

Correlating the data of wakatime was no where near as simple as I thought. The first attempt which focused on the time spent between each commit was clearly flawed and produced large commit times after a few hours hacking on a feature. I realized this approach was too simplistic, people might forget to commit, or work on two separate things before doing a two separate commits (rapid fire commits).

So the next solution was designed for the “rapid fire commits”, since Wakatime stores data by file we have the information we need to establish “Time per File” and use that to build “Time per Commit”.  This took a commit’s modified files, and determines when each of the file was last committed, and establishes a ‘last_modified_at’ time for that file.  We use this to get heartbeat data from Wakatime for how much time was spent on that file for that time frame, culminating in “Time per Commit” and “Time per Day per Project”.  Time per File massively improved the “rapid fire commit” issue and produced much more believeable data, but when run against my large repo’s produced very strange results.

5db7ef62b 2015-02-06 17:47:06 -0500 28 hours 5 secs         Adding ability to add documents to proposals.
        275d6d630                                  app/controllers/documents_controller
        c78df01c1                                  app/models/document.rb
        c0b5dc90a                                  app/models/invoice.rb
        c78df01c1                                  app/models/proposal.rb
        92b4f8e3f                                  app/views/documents/_documents.html
        4a4a2c462            1 sec                 app/views/documents/_files.html.haml
        3e0ff455a            4 secs                app/views/documents/index.js.erb
        932e8dcb0                                  app/views/invoices/show.html.haml
        a83734121                                  app/views/proposals/_form.html.haml
        b6eff8597                                  app/views/proposals/show.html.haml
        36e5aa268                                  config/routes.rb

Eventually we found at least one issue, diagramed below, which I will refer to as the “Split Tree” problem. In our below example, the highlighted commits have either added or modified a file titled “Readme” this file was modified in a separate branch that was later merged into master. While mapping the git tree commit 1, and commit 2 both belong to the commit at 5:05am.  Which caused this time to be counted twice. This example was solved by checking for any 2 committed files, with the same path dependent on the same SHA, we then split the difference given the time between 8:05 -> 8:20 to the “Added Feature A” commit.

split-tree

Results


a95f65cda 2015-02-10 8:20:11 -0500                                Added Feature A
                9bcccb12b        8 minutes 10 seconds                         README.md
6444dd692 2015-02-10 08:05:35 -0500                                Fixing Bug
                9bcccb12b        3 minutes 3 seconds                          README.md
9bcccb12b 2015-02-10 05:05:11 -0500                                Added Readme
                                20 minutes 48 seconds                        README.md

Obviously this is just one of the many possible issues that could arise from complex git trees, but it yields much better granular results that lends itself to further use, but this lays a foundation of truly actionable data.   In a world of noise a useable a signal is few and far between.  With Wakatime and GitWakatime you can fundamentally understand how much time was spent and where.  Make business choices and bill your clients

You can try this out on your repo right now,  if you use wakatime.   Install the code to produce these reports from https://github.com/rposborne/gitwakatime it currently outputs in text and json for further use, and has facilities to produce enumerable’s in ruby.

The Quickbooks code that plugs into the gitwakatime gem is available on request but not quite ready for open sourcing, it may or may not have secret keys in it :).

Running Microsoft AD Primary Domain Controller on AWS

Everyone has aging servers, it seems they are old by the time they turn on.   Coupled with Microsofts complex licensing for server, when it came around that we needed some of the newer features naming custom certificates from Microsoft Certificate Authority we chose to spin up a simple EC2 server to make our lives easier vs jumping through hoops to upgrade our old server, or purchase new hardware.

This configuration requires a bit more than just an EC2 Instance.

  • A new Amazon VPC, if you run AD exposed to the public, you are insane.
  • A Direct VPN connection to our office
  • A Nat Instance for the private VPC to connect to the internet without having to pipe through the vpn.
  • A VPN connection, or a “bastion” instance to connect to the VPC if the primary VPN is down.
  • A security device, to act as a VPN endpoint on site. (Sonicwall TZ-210) in our case.

Below is what we came up withscilucent-ad

Bot the ELB and the Nat instance sit in a “Public” vpc subnet, while CA-1 sits in a private one.   Only the private subnet has access to the local network link in the direct VPN connection.

The Sonicwall providers monitoring via ping over the dual vpn connections to AWS and will attempt to rectify any issues by renegotiating the tunnel.  In reality this has been about 80% reliable.

For the AWS windows instance you must use an EBS backed instance or you will have a bad time.  Treat this like any other windows server you have, ensure your are backing it up properly, security is well configured and that you have a disaster plan in place.

 

 

eCTD Checker

A quick validation of the FDA eCTD spec to verify all md5’s.

This is not a full validation tool, but can save your team some hassle by rapidly checking the submission and correcting any invalid md5 Checksums.

https://github.com/rposborne/ectd_checker

Update:  We now have a cross platform version of this tool that can be used by everyday users.  Email us if you are interested!

 

Lumber

Lumber is Burningpony ‘s flagship, a End to End Sales, Customer Management and Inventory tool, built for the reclaimed lumber industry and the chaos that comes with the business. Built with a mobile and dynamic workforce in mind lumber brought a paper business into the 21st century, where on the road sales team don’t have to call in orders, or management doesn’t know what’ s happening in the shop. Lumber is our pride and joy and will become our first public facing product in mid 2013.

Features

  • Quickbooks Integration
  • Job Notifications
    for accounting and your shop.
  • A highly usable order interface built on proven but bleeding edge technology.
  • Scalable to thousands of workers.
  • Full Text Search
    for finding the job that you placed to some city in Korea 12 years ago.

NeuMedics

NeuMedics is a privately held drug development company formed in Washington State in 2008. Its three co-founders combine more than 60 years of experience in executive management, drug development, and regulatory approvals. The Company has created a proprietary new compound (NM108) that holds great promise as a preventative treatment to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia symptoms. The data from preliminary studies confirm that NM108 has the potential to become
“Lipitor
® for the Brain”for as many as eight million at-risk patients in the United States alone.


Olark + WordPress Better Together

We rebuilt the Olark For WordPress plugin to support some of the new fun stuff that the Olark guys have been working on.

The old Olark Plugin hadn’t been updated in almost two years. We just had to jump in a show off all the sweet new features Olark has been working on. The real feature improvement is the new integration with Olark’s JS Api. This lets an Olark Operator know if a user is logged into WordPress and their relevant information. This should work in BuddyPress as well so it could be a huge step forward in your ability to support your clients or product with Olark on a WordPress installation.

A quick blurb on Olark

Olark provides clean integration with tools you already know and love so you can actually focus on selling and support. In fact, we’re the only live help tool around that was built from the ground up to work with a host of standard instant messengers. But did we skimp on the power? No!

Features

  • In Plugin Olark Signup (v2.4.1)
  • One Click Chat Tab
  • WordPress user Information in Chat (Olark API)
  • Call Out Widget
  • Async Loader
  • **Planned Color/Customizing of the Chat Tab.

If you need support Write a comment below.

Get the latest code from WordPress Plugin Repo HERE