Launch Academy is one of the best force multipliers available to entrepreneurs and the Vancouver tech community. I signed up with the allure of funding, mentorship and follow-on traction. Entrepreneurs here are abuzz with energy and ideas for experiments. Did you try Facebook Ads? Are you doing content marketing? Did you try outbound email, and the list goes on… Little did I know how hard the startup game is. The struggle is real. As an early stage startup, there were too many possible experiments to try. Not all advice you hear is applicable. The mentors don’t know your business – but if you can build a rapport with them, magic can happen. I’m going to share one such powerful idea that has worked well for us. We were able to grow our website traffic by 3,000%. But behind the numbers is a strategy and a set of tactics to help you achieve similar results.

With the tax season on the horizon, money, deductions and refunds are on everyone’s minds. As data -eating, -sleeping and -talking people we were compelled to show our fellow Canadians what their neighbors were doing (but not in a creepy way!) We pored over the Canadian open data portal and found the perfect data set – extensive, aggregated year over year TFSA data. But … What could we possibly show with this data? We didn’t want to write another financial advice article. We didn’t want to write another article touting the pros and cons of the TFSA program. We didn’t want to stir the government -vs- the people debate any further. Just the data, Ma’am. We faithfully tried to discover novel and interesting facts about Canadians and their savings patterns, alas it was not meant to be. Read on further for the full story.

In Canada, we often believe that the relationship between the English and French languages is central to our identity. Since 1967 (the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Confederation,) both English and French have had official federal status throughout the country. According to the 2011 census, the divide between English-French as a mother tongue is 60%-21%. What’s often missed is a narrative around other non-official languages spoken by us Canadians. As we dig deeper into the data from the census program, we find far more interesting facts about: Canadians and the languages we speak where we are geographically dispersed the biggest factors contributing to our diversity what changes we’ll see in the makeup of languages in the coming years, etc.

Before you can deploy Elasticsearch in production, you will need to understand the data you are trying to index. Understanding the data includes how data flows into the system, and how it is going to be queried. Here are some tips to classify you data and make effective use of Elasticsearch…

So, your boss just walked up to you and asked you to use Elasticsearch for full-text search. How would you go about introducing Elasticsearch in your stack? Some ideas…

One of the core maintainers (Matthew Fisher) of Deis, gave the Docker community in Vancouver a talk last week. He walked us through the internals of Deis and how they integrated with Docker to create the first multi-host Docker PaaS. Some notes from the meetup…

My RESTful API design talk is a popular one and I often give it at various meetups around town. Over the course of time, I’ve collected some questions from the audience and aggregated them here. As with any design, tastes differ. Nevertheless, here’s my take…

You can now make a legit business case targeting developers as a market as the success of Twilio, Stripe, Github and others show. If you’re providing Anything-as-a-Service, an API is a must. Here are some qualities of a well designed API…

Percentiles are often used to find outliers and explore the distribution of data. For instance, you want to make sure 95% (and a stricter 99%) of your website visitors meet a certain response time. Let’s look at some of the challenges of computing percentiles on big data…

Salesforce.com experienced some downtime last week. This caused panic amongst sales folks, it being the last week of the month. Downtime can be catastrophic for your customers. Besides lost revenue opportunities, it can also tarnish your company’s reputation. A tip to architecture your application for downtime…

Your team may be investing a lot of time designing the most idiomatic API experience out there for developers. That’s not enough these days — you also need to provide an API client. Here are 6 reasons why…

One of our most frequently asked for and used feature is a custom query parser. Beyond simple prefix and term matching, we can also parse custom queries that lets you add filters and restrict the search to specific fields. Let’s look into why we built this and how it works…

Whether you are building for the web, mobile, or devices yet to be invented, the enabling technology behind them are APIs. In this introductory talk, I will introduce APIs, describe what makes them possible, the process for creating APIs and supporting them.

I love the Linux development model. It works like this: you have two classes of developers. First, a distributed group of developers focus exclusively on the Linux kernel. All communication and design decisions are made through a channel known as Linux Kernel Mailing List. Occasionally, they also have conferences where collaborators meet face to face. It’s fascinating to watch this evolutionary process at work.

The Software As A Service industry is pretty young, and it’s easy to get confused with all the acronyms floating around. Here’s a handy guide to make sense of it all, organized into the three stages of a customer’s life: acquisition, monetization and retention.

I recently gave a talk at the Vancouver Python Day on the fundamentals of building a REST API with django and django-rest-framework. The target was new developers and explores some best practices. Basic knowledge of Python is nice to have, but the concepts are transferable.

Your google analytics account lets you measure page views, clickthrough rates, bounce rates and other quantitative numbers. This is click stream data. It’s all numbers. It tells you the “What.” What if you want to find out the “Why?”

I was recently shopping for a dashboard that looks nice on a big screen TV. Putting up key metrics up on a screen is a great way to remind me of numbers that matter. I happen to have a compulsive nature of measuring and observing everything I do. As an experiment, I recorded the entire buying process specifically the search queries I used…

Life would be a lot easier if we had a vast memory and could remember hundreds of website addresses. Just need to type in the URL and get the job done. Except for maybe the savants, the rest of us have been programmed to use search on the web, either directly through a search engine or on your website. Most days I’m just scanning and if I can’t find a search box, I just hit the back button.

You’re familiar with metrics like visits, unique visitors, pageviews, pages per visit and bounce rate. But our beloved tool, Google Analytics has much more advanced features than that. Let’s see how we can push it to do other things besides pageviews, all for free…

Seems just like yesterday that I was planning for a major event in my life: a backpacking trip through the jungles and highlands of South America. I was both budget conscious and time constrained. I needed travel insurance. I needed backup credit cards. I had browser tabs open with the websites of vendors I was interested in, but had to make decisions fast…