Jamie Thingelstad

My book club just finished reading Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West. This was a dense book focused on the concept of scaling, in the abstract. The author did a lot of research and shows some surprising scaling views to look at different animals, cities, and even companies. He identifies some amazing correlations that show how entities scale.

I felt like this book was profound, and important. However I wasn’t sure how I would action any of it. 🤔

3D Printing custom Valentine’s Day things for the kids to give their friends! 💕

I’ve been enjoying Blot a lot. I’ve enjoyed its approach to blogging. There is plenty of power there, and it’s dead simple to add new content. I’ve now moved most of my websites to Blot, and it supports RSS automatically, but I also wanted to support JSONFeed. When I tried to set that up I could not make it work. I hit a brick wall 🧱 with the Mustache templates that Blot provides, with no ability to safely encode HTML into JSON. I sent an email to David who runs Blot. He replied right away that he was going to add something to make this work. He sent me an email today to let me know he added a {{#encodeJSON}} capability. I plugged it into my view and it worked like a charm.

I’ve spent a bit of time making sure this template works as it should and I think I got it. If you would like to add support for JSONFeed to your Blot site, you can create a new view in a custom template, I used the name jsonfeed.json. Beware that you cannot use the same basename for two different views, so you cannot make feed.xml and feed.json for no good reason. For now, use a different name.

{ {{! First build the header for the feed. }}
  "version": "[jsonfeed.org/version/1](https://jsonfeed.org/version/1)",
  "title": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{{title}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
  "description": "{{#encodeJSON}}Feed for {{{title}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
  "home_page_url": "{{{blogURL}}}",
  "feed_url": "{{{blogURL}}}/jsonfeed.json",
  "items": [
    {{#recentEntries}}
    { {{! Now create an entry for each post }}
      "id": "{{{blogURL}}}{{{url}}}",
      "title": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{{title}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
      {{#summary}}"summary": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{{summary}}}{{/encodeJSON}}",{{/summary}}
      {{#thumbnail.large.url}}"image": "{{{blogURL}}}{{{thumbnail.large.url}}}",{{/thumbnail.large.url}}
      "content_html": "{{#encodeJSON}}{{#absoluteURLs}}{{{body}}}{{/absoluteURLs}}{{/encodeJSON}}",
      "date_published": "{{#formatDate}}YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ{{/formatDate}}",
      {{#metadata.externalurl}}"external_url": "{{{metadata.externalurl}}}",{{/metadata.externalurl}}
      "url": "{{{blogURL}}}{{{url}}}"
    }{{^last}},{{/last}}
    {{/recentEntries}}
  ]
}

Once I got this setup Feedbin, which supports JSONFeed, was able to once again see my feeds and pulled in new content right away. It works great! Thanks to David for such a great service as Blot, and for adding this capability to support JSONFeed! 👏

I visited Minnehack tonight and introduced SPS Commerce to 300+ students before we fed them a mountain of pizza! 🍕

Schools cancelled. Kids are rejoicing. 🥳

Hack the Gap hosted their 5th annual Hackathon for women and non-binary individuals this weekend. I was able to attend the demo event today where each team showcased what they created. There were cool ideas, with a lot of progress in such a short period of time.

The organizers kicked the demos off.

Securiosity!

Security education for non-technical people. Built with React. They worked as a group to get the initial things running, then split into feature teams. Design friendly focus. Humaaans free and inclusive image library. Accessibility focused.

🏆 I put my voting coin in for this team. I liked their design and approach to security education.

whenIneedU

Helping people break out of episodes of anxiety or depression. Used JavaScript, Java, Android, Twilio. Sends personalized affirmations, relaxing activities, and helps you connect with friends and family. Watches your location and detect if you haven’t gone anywhere for a long time. Uses text messages to reach out and request connections on your behalf.

Ready Play

Help navigate family daycare, activities and camps for kids, focused on summer activities. Complexity around logistics, themes, and costs. Built using React.js and Elastic Search backend. Framework provided fast mocking, and allowed easy acquisition of real data.

Hack the Bra

Help with sizing and determining best fit for bras. Focusing on measurement for fit. Built with React.js. The “BRA-culator” with video walk-through to guide you through measurement. Discovery, rapid prototyping and co-creation were the focus for the team. Not focusing on e-commerce, but instead education.

Make Friends Minnesota

Connect the 5.6 million people in Minnesota. Meet people, make friends, and have fun. Recommends friends. Focused on starting connections safe and easy. Uses Facebook for login. Builds a profile using an interest survey. Built using Node and Express with EJS templating engine.

Seshat Swap

Making access to books written by people of color more accessible, focusing on very long hold times at the library. Try to get more access without having to purchase the book. Allow users to exchange, or indicate wish lists of books, in marginalized communities. Built with React with Firebase. Non-profit effort to pay for shipping costs. Sort of a virtual, crowd funded library.

Cat Flat

Small, connected DIY cat shelter that detects health of the cat and provides shelter, warmth and a place for stray cats to stay safe. React app with Express server and SQL database. Particle Photon and Particle Cloud in cat shelter to run sensors. Node server to send data to the server. Revenue by selling the flats pre-made.

A bit to my surprise, I almost voted for this team. I really liked how they used the IoT stuff to make this a smart device.

Little Free Library

Leveraging the existing library of micro-libraries. Largest predictor of kids reading levels is the quantity of books in the home. Goal is to make it possible to get 100 books in every home. Card catalog of free libraries close to you, with inventory capabilities to check out or indicate that you are going to keep it. Allow steward to manage their inventory.

Sweat Connect

Need a workout friend? Increase frequency and help friends with anxiety about going to the gym. Create profile and facilitate connecting with others to workout. Built with Angular 7, to allow for desktop and mobile. Gather specific data around your gym, time preferences and goals.

I think this team could have put a go-to-market strategy of partnering with gyms and offering a white-label version of their service.

Planet

Planning tools for coordinating gatherings. Event planning templates, collaborate on tasks, and good for discovery. Built React and Node. Google Maps for location.

Give Back

It makes me happy that we at SPS Commerce have been able to support Hack the Gap for a number of years now!

Everyone had a lot of fun at iFly.

Made my signature lasagna tonight. Delicious. 🤤🍽

Checking out iFly Indoor Skydiving. Wow!

Delightful dinner tonight at Oceanaire with my brother and his wife. Yum!

Ordered End of Trust, McSweeney’s Issue 54 done in collaboration with the EFF! 💜