ihumanableusable in any place a human can be used

too literal

Yesterday I released my new library Prosper (in case you hadn’t noticed the new menu entry at the top of this blog). It was a ton of work, way more work than I ever expected, but it was worth it. Prosper is now out the door and ready for human consumption, I’ve been using it all day on a fun little project, mostly playing around with the twitter API (which I’ve done before but never from php).

I was talking the other day with the esteemed Rick Kierner about the upcoming CodeMash convention. Since I work for an amazing company that is sponsoring the event, I get to go for just about free. I plan on going to the precompiler sessions and that day comes out of my pocket, but its a small price to pay. Rick is taking care of the nitty gritty details but in the end I will have to give him some cash money to pay for the precompiler and the first night’s hotel room, he decided to use BillMonk to record the debt and keep everything straight.

After perusing BillMonk for a while I decided that I really liked the site, its a cool idea, and I thought to myself, “hey self, now that tipjoy is defunct could there be a space for me to make my mark.” (Side note, I often think hyperlinks at myself). Rick and I bounced some ideas off each other and at the end of the day decided that there really wasn’t a good business in what we wanted to do, so we abandoned the thought and moved on, c’est la vie.

Today though the idea kept bouncing around in my head, really its been bouncing since we first started talking. Today I finished my proof of concept for my new minimalist bill tracking system, currently dubbed cha-tweet (a portmanteau of cha-ching and tweet). I’ll outline quickly the concept behind it, a rough approximation of its implementation, its status, and what the title has to do with anything so far in the post.

The idea is basically this, you can tweet a specially formed tweet and cha-tweet will aggregate those into a nice little summary of who owes you cash and who you owe cash. The tweets look like this

The debt cha-tweet

@I_owe_this_guy_money > $5 lunch: delicious sandwich!

The give cha-tweet

@I_gave_this_guy_money < $5 lunch: mcdelicious

The basic idea is that money comes out of or goes into the username to or from you, respectively. It’s a simple syntax that lets you sort by debtor/debtee and by type of debt. Since it starts off with the @username syntax it only gets displayed (by default) to people that know both of you and would maybe care, and its easy to find by the service because it is treated by twitter as a reply. The system works fairly well, and I’m happy enough with the concept.

The problem was that to create an accurate summary it had to go get and process the entire tweet stream, which can take a long while, and assuming that most of the tweets in a users tweet stream will not be cha-tweets, there is no need to do all this processing everytime (and in steps sexy miss rdbms). So, throw a database at the problem, store the seen cha-tweets and operate on them, this has now been implemented, it took one hour, and I used prosper to do it.

So how was it? Really easy, I stole the configuration from the todo list project, switched around the credentials and the schema name, and was off and running. Everything was working well until I tried to update something and Prosper spit up a bunch of non-sense at me, and my heart sank. Did I just release some library full of horrible bugs and will be mocked endlessly, the cries of n00b and pwned reverberating so loudly as to drive me mad?! No, I just don’t know how to type so instead of writing this

Prosper\Query::update('user')
  ->set(array('since' => $since))
  ->where('id = :id', $_POST)
  ->execute();

I wrote

Prosper\Query::update('user')
  ->set(array('since' , $since))  //WHOA!
  ->where('id = :id', $_POST)
  ->execute();

Changing that double arrow to a comma makes a big difference, and causes prosper to correctly try to set `0` to 'since' and `1` to 'some_huge_twitter_id_number' which is what I told it to do.

Crisis averted, my library still functions properly, hip hooray!

• Is it easy to use? Yes, I found that it cut down on my development time considerably.
• Is that because I wrote it and have no learning curve? Quite possibly, I’m not going to rule that out.
• Is the code easy to read? Yes, its fairly straightforward crud stuff, made much simpler by prosper.
• Did I learn anything eating my own dogfood? The verbose function is awesome! I wrote the verbose function in the beginning as a simple debug / sanity check of sorts to make sure that things were being translated and serialized correctly (pro tip: the magic __toString function will print the sql statement that will be executed). During development though it was incredibly useful to be able to switch the call to execute for a call to verbose and immediately see at a fairly granular level what was going on. This got me to thinking how much prosper needs some official documentation, and that will be my project for the next week or two.

In the end I have a nifty little twitter gadget, I will probably be hosting it somewhere soon so keep an eye out for that, but more over I have some more experience as an end-user with prosper and a renewed energy to write the official documentation.

I’m also adding some stuff to the blog, there are now social media icons, the rss feed link got a new friend mr. twitter link, and there are some backend changes for speed and stability. This is another round of blog tweaks and that is the best time to have your opinion incorporated into the blog’s overall look and feel, so comment away!