After taking care of May’s HK Christians event, patching up some loose ends on the registration flow, the second week of May is starting to get pretty quiet.

Fortunately I also have my HKC admin help start to learn programming and help me with some coding stuff as well. In return I’m teaching him the coding stuff I know. Pretty good deal for both of us.

Continue reading →

yeah so turned out getting the apps all done by end of april is way too ambitious.

It’s been a week and half since I had any progress on the mobile apps part. Turned out hosting the first HK Christians event on the new app was more work than I thought:

• building, testing new event reg system
• iterating after real people using it
• getting my admin help up to speed on everything (thank god I have someone, helping me 5-10hrs/wk)
• cleaning up old contact list, setting up admin backend system on the app, so my admin help can easily notify users about event, and track notification statuses

Continue reading →

First post of the series here, read more about my current startups

Today someone subscribed for a 6-month membership on HK Christians!

First sale is always exciting… although HK Christians technically isn’t a startup, and had always been making some money, it’s still good to see it coming through the new web app I built!

Continue reading →

Well OS finally upgraded, Xcode running my meteor (cordova) project ok, got the test app on my phone, whew!

Good news someone already did a lot of work into wrapping push notifications in meteor into a nice package, raix:push, and along with a pretty detailed documentation too. Bad news it’s still not that easy.

Continue reading →

sigh another unproductive day as I wrestle with weird tech shit … this time is the mac.

Apparently my Xcode needed to be upgraded to a version which only the latest OSX El Capitan supports, so o wells upgrade OS, no big deal, 1-2 hours max right? WRONG.

I’m not sure if it’s because I selected some ‘yes, please encrypt my hard drive’ option … but once the new OS booted up, it just shows a grey stop sign. HOLY SHIT.

Continue reading →

Here I am, practically finished with HK Christians, which basically consumed 80% of my working hours in the past 3-4 months. Event registration with payment, membership subscription and recurring payment, all with PayPal’s ancient-holy-crap HTML form and IPN.

Now that I don’t need to be bogged down by development for HK Christians, I’ll be spending the time with following in the next three months:

Continue reading →

Well after two days of face-palming and some slow-as-hell site period, the last 24 hours seems to be pretty okay … speed back to normal. Deployment is still showing error messages, but it’s bearable I guess, and their support emailed me and said would help me look into it.

I was totally going to try using self-serve hosting on Digital Ocean, which I’m slightly dreading because I’m really clueless about server stuff. There seems to be decent documentation and also a nice tool call Meteor Up to help.

Anyways though I guess if the site speed is normal, I’ll deal with the deployment error thing, and not switch for now. If and when that deployment error goes away, then I’d be VERY happy with modulus!

Sigh … modulus has been really giving me hell lately.

So basically I use a service call modulus, which allows me to deploy my Meteor apps super easy, without configuration needs and such. It’s been really wonderful for me as a semi-noob at web dev and server stuff.

Until about 1-2 weeks ago, the deployment start to fail … but it fails only sometime. So I have to deploy maybe 2-3 times, or 4-5 times before it works. O wells annoying but bearable at least.

Then today they released a their new CLI (command line interface, the program to deploy). The newly updated one does not work AT ALL. I deployed a failed app on production, had to frantically downgrade and fortunately can deploy successfully again.

However now it just runs SUPER slow, a profile update takes like 10sec (2-3sec is barely minimum acceptable in my opinion). It’s so slow it’s almost not usable.

Modulus has been really wonderful for me, and I don’t really want to have to bother to switch, but if they don’t pick up their game, I might just work on learning how to self-host on more complicated environment, but at least it’ll be cheaper and I think more stable.