sayem khan / blog

I haven’t blogged in a while and I’ve actually decided that I’m going to take a break from it for a while.

I took a year off from Facebook and just got back on last week. Doing so allowed me to lay low, not get distracted, and just hit it hard day-in, day-out. In retrospect, I’m glad I did it, it totally worked out — I got a lot done, crossed off several milestones, and executed accordingly.

Now I’m going to do the opposite though… I’m going to take a break from blogging and tweeting, and just go all out with Github and Facebook.

I’m in a good place now. I feel lucky to have an awesome job at a pretty sweet company, I feel lucky to be working alongside some cool people I could hang out with outside the office and could see myself being friends with long-term, and I feel lucky to be living blocks away from the beach in San Diego… especially considering that we’re in a double-dip recession and that things aren’t going to get any better anytime soon, or at least I wouldn’t bet on it.

I’m going to really live it up in San Diego and enjoy my 20s while I still can, but I’m also going all out and being hardcore and productive with my work life and overall Regimen too. I want to kick ass at Zeeto Media, develop myself into a strong front-end hacker and pick up Node.js, make cool iPhone apps, crush it at bridge tournaments, be in the best shape of my life, party a lot, make good friends, date cute girls, chill on the beach and surf every once in a while, and take lots of pictures in the process.

And 6 months from now or so, I want to come back to blogging and say I did all that in the previous paragraph.

I’ll be back. You’re mine, 2013.

I’m finishing up a simple Backbone.js app for an admin interface we’re having for our site’s redesign at Zeeto. The API has different structures for GET and POST requests for various endpoints, and what’s neat about Backbone is its flexibility for these sort of situations.

This goes for reading responses you retrieve from a REST API using the parse() method.

And it’s especially true for customizing the URLs you set for models by overriding Backbone.sync():

- Overriding url and fetch in Backbone.js collections

- Modifying your URLs on the fly using the request method with sync in Backbone.js

I went surfing for the first time this past weekend. It was awesome and it definitely won’t be my last time.

It reminds me of a quote I read from an interview done with Peter Thiel a long while ago on going after the right opportunities in life:

“It’s like surfing. The goal is to catch a big wave. If you think a big wave is coming, you paddle really hard. Sometimes there’s actually no wave, and that sucks.

But you can’t just wait to be sure there’s a wave before you start paddling. You’ll miss it entirely. You have to paddle early, and then let the wave catch you. The question is, how do you figure out when the next big wave is likely to come?

It’s a hard question. At the margins, it’s better err on the side of paddling where there’s no wave than paddling too late and missing a good wave… So the bias should be to err toward the future. Then again, the bigger bias should be to not err at all.”

Zeeto’s bread and butter, GetitFree.us, was built using the Symfony PHP framework on top of MongoDB. We’re going through a major redesign and I’m familiarizing myself with the code.

I first started programming in PHP before I got into Ruby on Rails, so it brings back memories. I’ve used CodeIgniter a bit and a lot of my buddies at the time were big fans of CakePHP, but never really got into Symfony until now. A lot of RoR devs hate on PHP… sure, it definitely is a lot uglier in comparison, but whatever, I’ve been coding iOS apps in Objective-C for the past few months, which has an infinitely uglier syntax than any other language I’ve come across. And at the end of the day, really, who cares… so long as it gets the job done, performs well, and everyone’s making money.

Here’s how to get started with Symfony: http://symfony.com/doc/current/quick_tour/the_big_picture.html

And Fabien Potencier, creator of the framework, on why you should use it: http://fabien.potencier.org/article/65/why-symfony

Also familiarizing myself with Twig, which is the templating language built-in with Symfony.

This is a really cool Chrome extension I came across recently for debugging Backbone.js apps: https://github.com/spect88/backbone-devtools

Recent thread on HN for learning Meteor.js: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591259

Also pretty interesting that Airbnb recently open-sourced Rendr. One of the really cool things about Meteor.js and a handful of other frameworks springing up is that they’re trying to link rich Javascript apps both on the server-side and client-side, but Meteor.js is also handling the data too. Rendr seems like a flexible solution to have a lot of the front-end and templating logic handled on both the client and server while still not messing around with your database architecture.