My journey in Mindvalley is definitely an interesting one. When I first joined the company, I’ve been working on CustomerHugs — which is a web service for users to collect reviews and testimonials from Facebook users.

Unfortunately it is a service that didn’t caught on and was now being in hibernation mode and isn’t actively being supported at the moment¹. So in October last year, I was being assigned to my second solo project.

The Second Act

The original idea is to come up with a supplementary API service that complements with UrbanAirship‘s in-app purchase service — to be more specific about it, I’m assigned to come up with an API service that would provide just enough tools to create a more flexible in-app purchase store front for mobile apps, while …

Let’s see… it’s been close to three weeks I’ve migrated this blog from Wordpress to Hyde. And ever since then I have been constantly fixing bugs in my template.

Let’s run down the commit history and show you some of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way :).

[Note: I’ll be referencing my own template]

Multiple Layouts with Template Inheritance

For my site, I needed two different layouts that shares the same base design: a two-column layout for my blog and full page layout for other static pages.

This is easily achieved by using template inheritance using the extends feature. In my current template, you can refer to the following three files:

• layout/base.j2 — The overall site design, acts as base template
• layout/blog.j2 — (child template) The …

The whole ordeal started a month ago when my server decided to have temper tantrums and PHP and Nginx just mysteriously decided not to talk to each other again. And with that my Wordpress blogs are taken down with it.

Ouch.

Stress levels rising at an inopportune time when my workload was at an all time high. And it was additional salt rubbed on the injury as I was still scrambling to salvage deleted data from the only backup drive that I have. I totally don’t want to get into specifics, it’d probably stress you out as well.

Then again, I’ve had enough dealing with PHP so that makes the perfect time to migrate my blog away from Wordpress to Hyde - a static site generator. Yes, you read me correctly, it generates …

Yahoo! Mail just launched a beta for their latest user interface, which looks like the screenshot above. I have to say that I kind of liked the new skin but the heading just looks awful in my opinion: it’s too large, too loud and, honestly, pretty useless. With such a loud purple and a lot of whitespace, they are a complete distraction and annoyance when I’m reading emails.

So I took matters in my own hands and made some restyling tweaks to really make the heading compact, and the result were way better than what Yahoo does (in my own biased opinion :-)):

I took away the Beta badge, latest trending topic, the button to Yahoo’s homepage and the Search Web button as they didn’t really serve any utility to me and …

Five years ago, I just stepped out from university and immediately transitioned into my first job. It was a time when I’m brimming with youth and confidence to a point close to being boastful (and I wasn’t arrogant at that time). It’s a time full of dreams and unfounded ambition, which I would gladly tell friends that one day I’m going to write a great application which people would use. Even better, I’ll write a framework or a content management system that people could reuse and implement.

Five years later, my accomplishments: nothing. Zip, nada, zero. Talk about not being able to live up to my own expectations.

Despite programmer’s tendency to be optimistic and believes that all problems could be solved using a computer, there are lots of …