Michael Bianco

Sending Dokku Container Logs to Papertrail

I’m a huge fan of Heroku. Although it’s expensive compared to a raw DigitalOcean droplet or EC2 instance, it’s so easy and it just works. However, there are some use-cases that Heroku doesn’t handle well. Business integration systems (eCommerce NetSuite integration, for example) often require handling requests that may take longer than the 30 second request timeout. Dokku is the next-best alternative to using heroku (if you don’t have enormous scaling needs: dokku apps are restricted to a single host). Here’s how to push your dokku app logs running to PaperTrail, or another syslog-compatible cloud hosting provider (I’m sure this approach would work for Loggly or CloudWatch)…

3 Email Efficiency Tips

I wanted to share a couple quick email efficiency tips that have been helpful over the last couple weeks. When scheduling a meeting, instead of asking “What time would be good to meet?” suggest a exact time and day with two alternatives that work for you. Also provide a link to your full public calendar with event details hidden (I use ScheduleShare for this). For example: Would 2-2:30pm on Thursday the 12th work for you? If not, would Wednesday at 10:00am or Thursday at 11:00am work?..

Steps to Refocus, Regroup, and Get Productive

After a series of unrelated meetings or going through a full inbox, it’s easy to feel scattered, unfocused, and distracted. This has happened to enough times, that I’ve written out an instruction manual for myself to enable me to quickly get refocused and back on the right track: Record everything in your head. Dump all tasks into your favorite task manager (ToDoist is mine!). Don’t attempt to label, prioritize, or organize tasks. Collect scattered tasks. Get all tasks, ideas, or unorganized bits of information in a centralized location. Run through any written information and transcribe any actionable items. I’d recommend setting up a “paper inbox” to throw all paper, notes, mail, etc so it’s easy to process…

Action Steps for Doubling Morning Productivity

Here’s my system for engineering an incredibly productive distraction-free work block from when you wake up to 12:30pm. Although I don’t follow this routine all of the time, when I do I’ve hugely increased my ability to cut through the urgent and ensure that most important tasks for the day get completed. Download Focus App. Setup a weekly schedule to block all distractions from 4:30am to 12:30pm on all weekdays. If you want to impress your friends, block all distractions everyday. In addition to the stock list of websites, here are some applications I block: Mail. If you use the gmail web interface, download MailPlane so you can easily block it…

Depositing Transaction Records in NetSuite

Moving transactions in NetSuite from "Not Deposited" to "Deposited" is not straightforward when using NetSuite SuiteTalk. You need to ensure that undocumented requirements for each record type are met. After you’ve validated that your records are properly configured, you can include them in a new deposit using the following structure: Note that you don’t need doc, type, or any of the other fields available on the a DepositPayment item. It’s also important to note that the other fields on the DepositPayment don’t actually effect how NetSuite handles the referenced transaction record. deposit, id, and payment_amount are the only fields that matter when referencing a NetSuite transaction on a deposit.

Using Browser Sync with Rails and Local SSL

I’ve always been a fan of LiveReload since I first saw it years ago. However, the rack-livereload gem hasn’t been updated in a long while, and the livereload parent project seems to have died out too. rack-liveload doesn’t support reloading on local HTTPS connections, which was a requirement on a recent project—I needed a new tool. BrowserSync came to the rescue. In most cases, using BrowserSync’s proxy mode to reverse proxy a rails app running via a *.dev pow domain works well. For this particular project, there were a couple of specific issues: Many pages on the project force HTTPS…

Using HTTPS Locally: Pow, SSL, Rails, and Apache

Using HTTPS local development or testing environments is a hassle. A common practice is to disable SSL in development, but I’ve had too many cases of minor bugs creeping in when routing works differently between environments. I also don’t like manually having to let my browsers know that a self-signed certificate is valid. Here’s the configuration that I use to easily add https support on my development machine to any application served—or proxied—through port 80. Pow I use Pow as my development rails server. However, because I often work with other languages as well, I run Apache (you could just as easily use nginx) and reverse proxy Rails application requests to Pow. To do this, you’ll need Pow to bind to a port that is not port 80…

How to Refund a Customer Deposit using NetSuite SuiteTalk

When refunding a NetSuite CustomerRefund or CashSale you’ll add it to apply_list: Refunding a CustomerDeposit works a bit differently. If you inspect the SuiteTalk XML response for a CustomerRefund created for a CustomerDeposit it will appear under the apply_list XML tag. If you use that XML tag when creating the CustomerRefund you’ll get the following error: Instead, you need to use the deposit_list tag:

7 Categories to Help Guide Your 2016 Goals

Results follow clarity, and clarity comes from clear definition. Writing is the best way to clearly define your thoughts (one of the reasons you should start a blog!). Here are my goal categories, in order of long-term priority. Explicitly defining these categories has helped me during my goal planning process to identify which categories needs the most attention this upcoming year, and ensure that my goals align against these categories: Spiritual Marriage Health Intellectual Financial Work Relationships This ordering doesn’t mean that work won’t come before my intellectual life (i.e. reading, conferences, learning, etc)…

2015 Goals Retrospective

I’ve been making intentional yearly goals using Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever program for the last couple years. The simple workbook that Michael provides is effective in reviewing the past year, and defining goals for the upcoming year. A "retrospective" is a process common in Agile Software Development, but I’ve started applying it my personal life planning lately. I made a lot of progress on key goals this past year, but still made a lot of mistakes; below is a retrospective on my 2015 goals. Here’s what worked: Getting clear on my goals, and the reasons (or motivation) behind those goals. Adjusting my actions and strategies to align against my goals…

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