nick quaranto ¤ coding with spice

Starting a food co-op: Year 2

2023-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

It’s time for an update on the Charles River Food Co-op, one year after the first. Just what is a food co-op, you ask? Well, it’s not a CSA/farm share, or a Farmers’ Market. We were lucky to be covered by Edible Boston in May and they produced this wonderful infographic explaining what a food co-op is:

Big shoutout to Tamra Carhart, who I wish could illustrate all my thoughts this nicely.

I can’t wait to blow this up so it’s poster or wall sized in the store when we get there. Speaking of, where are we in those early stages of planning? Here’s a timeline view of where we are based on the Food Co-op Initiative’s 4 stage model:

Why my answer for “when will the store open?” is complicated.

First up, a goal update. Last year, I set the following goals:

🌱

Personal Co-op Goals for 2022-2023:

Get to 1000 members!

Build out more outreach to the Spanish + Portuguese-speaking communities in our towns to get them involved.

Be a much-needed local example for democracy in action.

Here’s a quick status report on those:

We’re at 750 members.
No real progress here outside of experimenting with website translation.
Our first election is coming up this Fall!

Overall I think this was a year of learning - and after pushing hard on this for ~2 years, I had to set some personal boundaries with how I spent my time on this project. More on that as I break down each season and what we got done…

Fall 2022

Our big community events tend to happen in the Fall here, with a lot of towns holding their harvest/Fall fairs. To that end we produced a ton of swag, including:

Stickers
T-shirts!
Car Magnets
Buttons, so many buttons!

Our booth at the 2022 Newton Harvest Fair - we learned to hang the banner up with twine after this one!

I was lucky to be awarded a scholarship to attend a national co-op conference in DC, the 2022 Co-operative IMPACT Conference, and learn from other co-operative leaders (and scholars). This was very much an “insider” event for the co-op industry, and I learned it’s real tough to bring groups together across industries and make it successful. Despite some bumps in the programming that weren’t super relevant to our tiny food co-op, I was really proud to see the team at NBCA CLUSA take some direct feedback about the program and incorporate that into this year’s class.

Turns out the co-operative movement is a lot wider than just food co-ops: from home health care worker co-ops, to farmer/producer co-ops, credit unions, and more.

We made some big community pushes during the Fall, including bringing the Russo family into a board meeting to present our progress, and we even had a Public Service Announcement produced thanks to the wonderful crew at Watertown Cable Access News:

We also started our financial feasibility study with the experts at Columinate. Columinate is a group of consultants that help out food co-ops get started, and of course, is a co-op itself. Don Moffitt and Sarah Lebherz, who together have decades of experience on the finance side of the grocery industry, are helping us build a financial model for our co-op to help not just to opening day - but also for the years beyond.

Winter 2022

Winter was another slower month overall, but we hit 500 members in early November, and $100K in the bank. We need at least 1000 members to open the store - since there’s no “MVP” for a physical store, members are how we prove the co-op has enough momentum in the community to support the business.

Even with 1000 members with our $200 equity share, that’s sadly not enough to make our store a reality. Co-ops tend to have different “capital stacks” which look pretty different than most businesses. Here’s a few examples from other co-ops opening in Massachusetts this year, Assabet Co-op Market and Dorchester Food Co-op:

Assabet’s surrounding communities are very wealthy, and they were able to draw on members loaning them money on favorable terms for most of their financing.

Dorchester was able to raise a majority of their funding with state and city grants, which is a national trend for co-ops thanks to ARPA funds and municipalities that rally behind these efforts.

The ultimate constraint of co-ops is that we can’t trade equity for capital, which leads to creative fundraising like what we see above. How do food co-ops use that cash to build the store? Most of it goes towards construction efforts (70-80% usually), and the rest goes towards admin of the co-op along with salary for the GM before the doors open.

We also managed to get a quick feature in the Boston Globe about our effort, and I’m glad to finally be a “force”:

instagram.com embed

Some other quick updates from this season that made a difference:

Secured D&O insurance to help protect our directors from any legal issues
Held an auction for membership with the Watertown Co-operative Preschool. Principle 6 in action!
Built a “Gift a Membership” purchase flow…but only had one share purchased this way. (More soon, we hope!)
Approved money for a market study to help us nail down real data about how much money the store could make in our area
Sent thank you notes to everyone on the board for their effort over the year.

Spring 2023

Spring this year felt like we spun our wheels on a few fronts. When you’re leading an all-volunteer effort, burnout can happen. I set a boundary that I didn’t want to do as many in-person events as we ramped up planning for farmers’ market season, as our return on the time invested for those markets (usually, 5-6 hours for each) was pretty low (under 5 members signed up). Usually people don’t go to a farmers’ market expecting to drop $200 on something that isn’t food. Once we get further along in our project and we have a site picked out, I think it’ll make more sense to focus on regular in-person community events. Our wonderful community committee did pull off a few events during this season, and in the Fall too.

Kids tend to like our stickers and buttons more than their adults, but I’m ok with that!

The biggest event for the co-op over the Spring was holding an open house over Zoom. We engaged a real wide group of folks who wanted to hear about the co-op’s progress, and this has led to our next crop of organizers to make this project a reality. I think we need to hold these once a quarter - the energy coming out of this and hearing people step up is not just a relief, but necessary. Here’s what we presented, if you’d like to watch!

To cap Spring off, our interview with Edible Boston was published which covers the rise of new food co-ops here in Boston. I’m so grateful that we have examples of other communities making this a reality close to us. It’s clear that more neighborhoods, towns, and cities need these - I can’t wait to help out the next group who wants to organize one.

Summer 2023

Summer felt like a breakthrough month for the co-op, and a big reset in our momentum. We hit 700 members, and brought our new volunteers from Open House into the fold. We formed two new committees out of all the interest, focused around Marketing and Finance / Business Development. Both of these committees are meeting every other week, on the off week from our board meetings. It’s been a huge increase in our overall output - and feels like the co-op is moving forward at a pace we haven’t seen before.

Our Marketing committee made some big strides over the summer, including:

Running social media campaigns on Facebook + Instagram which resulted in dozens of new members
Publishing our newsletter on a monthly cadence
Building a calendar for marketing efforts throughout the year (and making great new visuals like the one below!)

instagram.com embed

Our Finance / Biz Dev committee pushed forward on a few different projects:

Building a budget for the co-op for our 2023—2024 Fiscal Year
Handling + helping submit our 2023 filings with the Commonwealth
Vetting out some exciting ideas, such as cheese delivery or allowing smaller vendors to have booths in our future store
Authoring an RFP for our Market Study, which we’ve gotten a few compliments on:

CRFC Market Study RFP (PDF)

We wrapped up the Summer figuring out our events planning for Fall, and starting to get our first elections planned. Finally, in response to a few board members officially stepping away during this season, we documented our expectations and onboarding for new board members.

Goals for Year 3

I’m now in my third year of trying to manifest a food store from emails, and I’m still excited to be learning about my community, a new industry, and how to lead a co-operative effort. It has its ups and downs: but I firmly believe that nothing worth doing is easy.

Setting 3 goals again for 2023-2024:

Train up our new board members after our election this Fall
Bring in “Solidarity Shares” to enable lower-income folks to join the co-op for at a more affordable entry point
Move onto Stage 2B: Planning!

Thanks for reading - and a huge thanks to everyone who is helping organize this effort with me. I couldn’t do this alone, and that’s the point of building a co-operative! If you’d like to be a member of the Charles River Food Co-op, join us here. Also if you’re thinking of starting one of these yourself - let’s co-operate.

🌲🌲

Starting a food co-op: Year 1

2022-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

Ever miss a grocery store so much that you try to manifest its replacement for your community by sending a lot of emails? That’s been my last 12 months or so. In the spirit of Mike Perham’s annual posts on Sidekiq, here’s Year 1 for what is now known as the Charles River Food Co-op.

Fall 2021

A local, family owned grocery store for 100 years, Russo’s, announced they were closing on Instagram. The land got bought for $36.5M to a real estate developer to build out labs, and sadly 200 employees were laid off as the business shuttered. The store had been a normal part of my shopping routine since I moved back to Boston in 2018, and for thousands of families a staple for everything from weeknight veggies to holiday specials. Russo’s had an immense selection of produce thanks to their distribution business, an impeccable cheese counter, a bakery, florist, a small nursery, but not much in the way of dry goods or paper products. It wasn’t a store you could get everything at, but what it was…well, it was unlike other chain groceries or farm stands:

A typical display at Russo’s

In the checkout lines on my last few visits to the store, I started wondering why there weren’t any community-owned grocery stores nearby. After some quick searching, I learned that there were no open food co-operatives in all of Eastern or Central Massachusetts. Two groups had been organizing for over 9 years each in Maynard and Dorchester - and both broke ground over the summer as Assabet Co-op Market and Dorchester Food Co-op. I had my first call with the Food Co-op Initiative in late August - which gave me some great pointers for how to get started.

🗳️

WHY a co-op? Why is this model of building a business not more popular? Here’s my simple take: it’s harder. It’s harder to build consensus and practice democracy in action to get something done. The results of equal and shared ownership are immense though: you build up real power for those who don’t have access to it and along the way provide a ton of great food and jobs to your neighbors. We need more of these in our communities.

A few Facebook groups cropped up as shoppers lamented and rallied around trying to save the store. I quickly found my first co-operator, Tim, and we set off trying to see if anyone at the store wanted to start a co-op, but we didn’t get far with that approach. Tim ran food co-ops in the 70s in Florida and Philadelphia, and has been involved in political organizing for years. He suggested we get some tables at local events and try to see if there was interest in starting a new food co-op. I had registered a domain and built a small site for the “Watertown Food Co-op” so we ran with that name and booked us some spots at two fall-themed fairs in Watertown and Newton.

Tim and I at our first event, Watertown’s Faire on the Square

These initial events proved to be a huge success for us - we got around 500 emails and names as pledges to be members. We clearly were on to something the community needed! Coupled with around 1500 emails from an ActionNetwork.org petition to save the old store, we had built the beginning of a movement.

So, how do we build a store from just emails? Luckily, the Food Co-op Initiative wrote an entire playbook on how to do this:

Startup Guide2017 (PDF)

We got the most basic to-do list for our startup from Greg Brodsky of Start.coop, an incubator for co-ops:

Form steering committee
Get to 1000 people (members $100-200) interested
Get 1 million in commitments at a 3-4% dividend with a matching loan from either CFNE or LEAF
Start building!

Winter 2021

We got into the swing of organizing over the winter months, with our cadence of bi-weekly Zoom calls for our steering committee in full swing. We figured out quite a lot in this period:

Built a steering committee of ~10-15 interested and committed folks
Decided on a more town-inclusive name: the Charles River Food Co-op
Sent out a survey to 2000+ emails to help identify what the co-op’s share price, focus, and other community needs were
Became associate members of the Neighboring Food Co-op Association, our regional association of startup + open food co-ops
Joined a peer group of food co-ops led by JQ Hannah at Food Co-op Initiative (HUGELY helpful!)
Tons of learning about co-operatives, governance, equity models, and more
First drafts of and subcommittee to decide our mission + vision, now focused around diversity, sustainability, and community

The dive into governance at this stage was most important for us. We settled on becoming a “hybrid” multi-stakeholder co-op - where the consumers and workers of the store are both owners. Our board will eventually have:

4 consumer-owner representatives
4 worker-owner representatives
1 seat that the 8 above can elect to bring a specific skill set or need into the co-op

One regret I have from this phase is not publishing the work we were doing publicly. Luckily, we kept good meeting notes in a running Google Doc - make sure to do this in some fashion so you don’t forget what was discussed!

Spring 2022

We filed our Articles of Organization to become an official corporation in late March. At our first meeting in April we became a real co-op by moving to adopt our by-laws. These were modeled after Dorchester Food Co-op’s by-laws, and we are very grateful for Co-operative Principle 6 which encourages co-ops to cooperate among other co-ops. We were lucky to win a grant to attend the Up & Coming Conference in Madison, WI - a 2 day event dedicated entirely to this space.

🇺🇸

Bureaucracy alert! If you are seeking to form a new co-operative in Massachusetts. You cannot use the online form provided by the Secretary of the Commonwealth to create your corporation.

We learned this the hard way, by first using the online form and then needing to request a refund by filling out a PDF manually and emailing it. Next, after DocuSigning and printing out our Articles, I tried to file in-person in downtown Boston. Filing in-person was rejected for a few reasons, the most egregious of which included that my 8 other co-operators did not sign the document physically with a pen. On our third attempt, we faxed it and that worked.

Please support any legislation to make this process easier for more co-ops in MA - making it possible to file online in 2022 should not be controversial.

Thanks to the wonderful Jacob Waites, a Watertown based designer, we also came up a new brand and identity during this season:

Our logo - complete with the river inside it

I also whipped up a quick Squarespace website and included one of the store renderings that Jacob made, which we have consistently gotten feedback that seeing a store, even if fake, is a huge signal that we are serious about building one.

An important decision made during this season was also to use Mailchimp as our email/newsletter software as well as our CRM. Being able to leave notes and input custom data about each member in a structured fashion is way better than an Excel/Google Sheets approach.

Summer 2022

Next step: build a membership drive. We laid the groundwork for this thanks once again to advice from FCI, and the basic process went like this:

“Prime the pump” email newsletter ~1 week before about the membership drive campaign
“Launch” email newsletter and press release to local publications (some just directly posted this on our behalf!)
“Hey, remember us?” email newsletter ~1 week after “Launch”

We saw an immense response to this campaign - over 200 members bought into the co-op in June alone. We allow members to pay $200 up-front or $25 over 8 months for a share which is good for life. Stripe Checkout made building this out extremely easy, and we saw great uptake with allowing members to cover the credit card processing fee for us as an add-on. We recently hit 400 members and I built this visualization of our growth curve out, which has been tapering a bit but still impressive:

A huge start and momentum!

Our first committees started forming around this time as well, and it will be interesting to see these evolve through the years:

Community/Outreach
Marketing
Finance/Biz Dev
Membership
Governance

These are the basic categories of work we have to do as a board. Giving each board member and committed volunteers the power to get things done under their purview without requiring a full vote from the board is a big deal. If we don’t delegate work, the co-op stops moving! I have been trying to instill that early, but I’m still learning this skill too.

We also spent the summer struggling to make meetings work as normal due to vacations and more - a good reminder for next year that we should consider our cadence in advance. Of note, our community + outreach committees invested a ton of time in getting us into a few farmers’ markets and Fall events. Our goal of 500 members by end of October is quickly becoming a realistic and achievable one!

Board members Christina, myself, Jen, and Tim at Waltham Riverfest in June, with our tent that almost blew away.

Reflections

As of today, October 10th, the co-op has 422 members. I want to challenge the notion that building a community-owned grocery store needs to take 7-10 years to start up - a fact that I hope predates organizing via Zoom. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us so far, my wonderful board members and volunteers for putting hours of (unpaid!) work into this effort, and all of those co-operators who have been patient as I have asked a ton of questions about how co-ops work.

8️⃣

DE&I: If you aware of co-ops, you may have heard about the 7 Co-operative Principles that guide them, but you may not have heard that there’s an 8th Co-operative Principle focused around Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion. I just learned about this last week and I’m in full support. It’s a bit shocking that this is still an open question for the co-op movement, especially given that the national groups are just now starting to recognize the work done by African-Americans in co-ops throughout our country’s history.

I’m going to try and set some personal goals for Year 2 here, let’s see how they go:

Get to 1000 members!
Build out more outreach to the Spanish + Portuguese-speaking communities in our towns to get them involved.
Be a much-needed local example for democracy in action.

Thanks for reading, and co-operating! If you’d like to be a member of the Charles River Food Co-op, join us here.

🌲🌲

Upgrade PostgreSQL from 12 to 13 with Homebrew

2021-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to point out some straightforward commands for doing this database upgrade on your Mac, if you, like me, have ignored doing so. This post from Olivier Lacan was a great help and I just wanted to make it even clearer that it’s this easy:

brew services stop postgresql
brew postgresql-upgrade-database
brew services start postgresql

Glorious! Here’s what the original error looked like for me, for SEO juice and future reference:

💚 pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start
waiting for server to start....2021-01-17 17:03:03.686 EST [13710] FATAL:  database files are incompatible with server
2021-01-17 17:03:03.686 EST [13710] DETAIL:  The data directory was initialized by PostgreSQL version 12, which is not compatible with this version 13.1.
 stopped waiting
pg_ctl: could not start server
Examine the log output

So, I ran the above commands - here’s the full output in case you’re curious.

💚 brew services stop postgresql
Stopping `postgresql`... (might take a while)
==> Successfully stopped `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)

💚  brew postgresql-upgrade-database
==> brew install postgresql@12
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/postgresql%4012-12.5.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
==> Downloading from https://d29vzk4ow07wi7.cloudfront.net/6e1717130028267c3f8c3910e10909fde608892da4af2669842da0dca386392a?response-content-disposition=attac
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> Pouring postgresql@12-12.5.big_sur.bottle.tar.gz
==> /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql@12/12.5/bin/initdb --locale=C -E UTF-8 /usr/local/var/postgresql@12
==> Caveats
Previous versions of this formula used the same data directory as
the regular PostgreSQL formula. This causes a conflict if you
try to use both at the same time.

In order to avoid this conflict, you should make sure that the
postgresql@12 data directory is located at:
  /usr/local/var/postgresql@12

This formula has created a default database cluster with:
  initdb --locale=C -E UTF-8 /usr/local/var/postgresql@12
For more details, read:
  https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/app-initdb.html

postgresql@12 is keg-only, which means it was not symlinked into /usr/local,
because this is an alternate version of another formula.

If you need to have postgresql@12 first in your PATH run:
  echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/postgresql@12/bin:$PATH"' >> /Users/qrush/.bash_profile

For compilers to find postgresql@12 you may need to set:
  export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/postgresql@12/lib"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/postgresql@12/include"

For pkg-config to find postgresql@12 you may need to set:
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/postgresql@12/lib/pkgconfig"


To have launchd start postgresql@12 now and restart at login:
  brew services start postgresql@12
Or, if you don't want/need a background service you can just run:
  pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres@12 start
==> Summary
🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql@12/12.5: 3,224 files, 41.6MB
==> Upgrading postgresql data from 12 to 13...
waiting for server to start....2021-01-17 17:06:21.437 EST [14867] LOG:  starting PostgreSQL 12.5 on x86_64-apple-darwin20.1.0, compiled by Apple clang version 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.27), 64-bit
2021-01-17 17:06:21.439 EST [14867] LOG:  listening on IPv6 address "::1", port 5432
2021-01-17 17:06:21.439 EST [14867] LOG:  listening on IPv4 address "127.0.0.1", port 5432
2021-01-17 17:06:21.440 EST [14867] LOG:  listening on Unix socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"
2021-01-17 17:06:21.477 EST [14868] LOG:  database system was shut down at 2021-01-01 20:11:19 EST
2021-01-17 17:06:21.484 EST [14867] LOG:  database system is ready to accept connections
 done
server started
waiting for server to shut down....2021-01-17 17:06:21.900 EST [14867] LOG:  received fast shutdown request
2021-01-17 17:06:21.900 EST [14867] LOG:  aborting any active transactions
2021-01-17 17:06:21.901 EST [14867] LOG:  background worker "logical replication launcher" (PID 14874) exited with exit code 1
2021-01-17 17:06:21.902 EST [14869] LOG:  shutting down
2021-01-17 17:06:21.908 EST [14867] LOG:  database system is shut down
 done
server stopped
==> Moving postgresql data from /usr/local/var/postgres to /usr/local/var/postgres.old...
==> Creating database...
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "qrush".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale "C".
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

Data page checksums are disabled.

fixing permissions on existing directory /usr/local/var/postgres ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting dynamic shared memory implementation ... posix
selecting default max_connections ... 100
selecting default shared_buffers ... 128MB
selecting default time zone ... America/New_York
creating configuration files ... ok
running bootstrap script ... ok
performing post-bootstrap initialization ... ok
syncing data to disk ... ok

initdb: warning: enabling "trust" authentication for local connections
You can change this by editing pg_hba.conf or using the option -A, or
--auth-local and --auth-host, the next time you run initdb.

Success. You can now start the database server using:

    /usr/local/opt/postgresql/bin/pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l logfile start

==> Migrating and upgrading data...
Performing Consistency Checks
-----------------------------
Checking cluster versions                                   ok
Checking database user is the install user                  ok
Checking database connection settings                       ok
Checking for prepared transactions                          ok
Checking for reg* data types in user tables                 ok
Checking for contrib/isn with bigint-passing mismatch       ok
Creating dump of global objects                             ok
Creating dump of database schemas
                                                            ok
Checking for presence of required libraries                 ok
Checking database user is the install user                  ok
Checking for prepared transactions                          ok
Checking for new cluster tablespace directories             ok

If pg_upgrade fails after this point, you must re-initdb the
new cluster before continuing.

Performing Upgrade
------------------
Analyzing all rows in the new cluster                       ok
Freezing all rows in the new cluster                        ok
Deleting files from new pg_xact                             ok
Copying old pg_xact to new server                           ok
Setting next transaction ID and epoch for new cluster       ok
Deleting files from new pg_multixact/offsets                ok
Copying old pg_multixact/offsets to new server              ok
Deleting files from new pg_multixact/members                ok
Copying old pg_multixact/members to new server              ok
Setting next multixact ID and offset for new cluster        ok
Resetting WAL archives                                      ok
Setting frozenxid and minmxid counters in new cluster       ok
Restoring global objects in the new cluster                 ok
Restoring database schemas in the new cluster
                                                            ok
Copying user relation files
                                                            ok
Setting next OID for new cluster                            ok
Sync data directory to disk                                 ok
Creating script to analyze new cluster                      ok
Creating script to delete old cluster                       ok

Upgrade Complete
----------------
Optimizer statistics are not transferred by pg_upgrade so,
once you start the new server, consider running:
    ./analyze_new_cluster.sh

Running this script will delete the old cluster's data files:
    ./delete_old_cluster.sh
==> Upgraded postgresql data from 12 to 13!
==> Your postgresql 12 data remains at /usr/local/var/postgres.old

💚 brew services start postgresql
==> Successfully started `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)

I hope that helps someone in the future!

P.S.: Cleanup!

If your app works well once you’ve upgraded - your “old” Postgres 12 might take up a ton of space:

💚 du -ksh /usr/local/var/postgres.old
672M	/usr/local/var/postgres.old

You can clean that up with:

💚 rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres.old

¤ @qrush

Notion + Super Blogging

2020-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

My blog has now had 3 phases over 13 years (😱):

Wordpress (2007-2009)

Not sure what the stylesheet looked like, but it’s long gone now.

Jekyll / GitHub Pages (2009-2020)

I miss subtle patterns tiled backgrounds.

Notion / Super (2020-?)

Woof!

My writing tapered off immensely in recent years, and I didn’t find my old site built with Jekyll to be interesting to work on anymore. I’ve now swung back to the land of a managed platform that frees me from:

Worrying about Ruby dependency updates (No JavaScript, what a concept!)
An ancient CSS template that still uses 960.css (and fully learning flexbox still, sorry I haven’t done this yet)
Needing to think about mobile design / accessibility (I hope Notion is doing so…)
Having to jump to GitHub (or my editor) to make changes. (Now it’s all in browser!)

I haven’t switched my entire blog over, as most of my ⏳Archive is hosted on other sites. Since the majority of the posts were on external sites I didn’t feel beholden to correct URLs that may be broken, but I may do that too soon!

I’ve been using Super to host my site off Notion, which is only $4/month and allows me to stop worrying about all of the above. I get a great little writing and note-taking platform that allows for HTML import + export, and then Super scrapes all of that and wraps it up in a beautiful CDN-enabled package for any internet denizen to browse.

The Super setup is quite straightforward! Here’s the basic steps once you sign up for Notion, and then sign up for Super:

Site Method

Do you want suped-up pages for SEO or just publish your Notion document on the web? I’ve been using Super Static and it works quite wonderfully.

Site Settings

The basics and the “root” of your site.

Pretty URLs

This section needs some work. It would be nice to use Notion itself for this via a “database” page, or use tags on pages to create their pretty URLs. This is a bit annoying to make for every post, and I hope this gets fixed soon. If I was moving over a blog with 100s of entries this would be a nonstarter, or I’d have to choose a new domain. For now, I punted on the old posts.

DNS Records

There’s nice walkthroughs for the “big” DNS providers, but setting this up with DNSimple was pretty easy to do.

Super Options

I’ve decided to not track visits/readership via analytics for now but it’s nice that there’s an option. I’d rather have readers engage me via Twitter instead of a comments feed anyhow, and I’m not sure what I would learn from analytics on my blog other than it gets less traffic than I’d like.

The end game

So one might think: what happens when Super, or Notion, breaks this setup or disallows publishing? Yes, that’s a risk I have assumed with this project. I can export any Notion document as HTML or Markdown, so once this setup stops working I’ll just move on, just like I did twice before. This time it’ll cost $4/mo for the time being, but honestly that’s motivation to get me to write more. I guess we’ll see in a few years!

The TL;DR:

Sign up for both Notion + Super

Configure DNS

Don’t stop writing

If you enjoyed this, you can use my referral link to sign up for Super and that’d just lovely:

💸

https://super.so?via=qrush

¤ @qrush

Data export, or die

2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

This talk from Simon Willison is wonderful, and I daresay it may become required viewing for anyone in tech:

I’ve been backing up my data on various social networks in mostly terrible ways, but this is a new take on it that focuses on keeping costs down and personal privacy. My personal hacks have included:

Backing up memory cards of photos to S3 buckets w/ Glacier
Pushing archives to GitHub from Twitter, etc
Continuing to pay Apple to keep years of photos around (which does have the nice side effect of iOS Memories)
Hoping Google never locks me out of my Gmail, or else my online life is effectively over

datasette and dogsheep might be the next logical step for my personal data warehousing. Allowing people (and not just power users/techies) to own their data should be the default for all online services. To take a page from Benjamin Franklin…

Another reason not to mess with Philadelphia

“Data warehousing for all” could be summed up easier as:

🐍

Data export, or die.

Wouldn’t it be nice if this was enforceable somehow? In the meantime, software that helps others own their own data will continue to flourish. Sites that won’t allow exports to happen should be punished in some way - at the very least with less customers because of their policies to keep their own users’ information away from them.

¤ @qrush

JSON is our standard gauge railway

2020-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

via Linda Hall Library

I used to think for a long time my job as a programmer was mostly about translating numbers or strings, into different numbers or strings. My job looked something this:

       +-------+      Data      +-----------+      Data      +-----------+ 
       | Human |   --------->   |   Metal   |   --------->   |  Human(s) |
       +-------+      Code      +-----------+      Code      +-----------+

Roughly speaking:

💡

Human inputs Data (via Code); stored in Metal. Eventually this Data is retrieved (via Code), and then shown to more Humans.

Sometimes the Metal has many loops, it can have little H→M→H loops in itself too. It’s turtles all the way down!

For most applications we are building a communication system between Humans. The Data asked for and retrieved changes rapidly, the Code shifts in waves depending on the velocity of those (also Humans with real biases) working on it. The Metal (hopefully) shifts glacially. Unless, of course:

This never gets old.

Humans and Code are going to vary drastically from system to system. The Data though: chances are it’s going to be JSON at some point in the process. JSON as the major Data transport format is here to stay, possibly for the rest of our careers. Yes, there have been precursors: SGML, CSV, XML. Upstarts like YAML (gasp!) and MsgPack continue to challenge the status quo, but only JSON remains.

I’m certain that 10, 20, 30+ years from now, JSON will not only still exist, but will continue to be the standard gauge for all data. What can you do on a daily basis to make sure that you know how to best work with our industry’s standard gauge? Here’s what I’m doing:

Discover what standard tools exist for JSON (json_pp on every OSX for example)
Learn and use jq to slice and dice JSON data
Implement new static configuration in JSON wherever possible
Prefer databases that have native JSON types
Know your language(s)’ JSON libraries APIs well (and why they can be slow!)

I’m sure that I’m missing more tools here, and I’d love to know what they are (please @ me). Also if you’re reading this in 2050 and we aren’t writing JSON, please tell me why; and how any of us managed to get through the year 2020.

¤ @qrush

BigDecimal#round always, please

2020-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

TIL that 27 digits of significance are possible in Ruby…why not? Here’s something that should just be 0.009:

>> 19120.01.to_d / 2124445
=> 0.9000002353555869886017289e-2

Say you were estimating how many significant digits this way:

>> (19120.01.to_d / 2124445).to_s.split(".")[1].size
=> 27

This digit estimation works great for small, cleaner divisions. But it falls apart, since floating point math never truly escapes us. As usual, #round to the rescue:

>> (19120.01.to_d / 2124445).round(5)
=> 0.9e-2
>> (19120.01.to_d / 2124445).round(5).to_s
=> "0.009"

Just a friendly reminder that you’ll probably, always, want to #round your BigDecimal’s when dividing. Thank me later.

¤ @qrush

Starting this off

2020-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

Trying out Notion! Pretty cool. Also:

View the tweet

¤ @qrush

pickaxe.club: Weekend 2

2014-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Shipping Basecamp for iOS 2.0

2014-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

An ecosystem, fragmented

2014-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

Essential new dad stuff

2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

We’re 51 weeks into my little one’s life so far. I’ve had a few expecting dads ask me about what they should know about or get before the baby comes.

There’s a lot of terrible books out there just for dads. Awful “baby center” websites enumerate neverending lists of stuff to acquire. Most contain an inventory of what to get for the little one, the mom, and everything in between. That’s fine: you’ll most likely need all of that stuff and more.

What there isn’t enough of is what specifically to pick up for dads. Here’s 3 things I have been recommending to new dads I’ve met:

Happiest Baby on the Block

This book changed my life. It’s pretty repetitive, but worth the read. You could skim it in an hour or so.

It’s a tactical guide to caretaking that you can use from literally the first night on. The “5 S’s” stop working after a few months, but it’s one of the few books I found that offer actual and actionable advice for after the baby comes.

There’s a sequel as well for toddlers that I just finished, and we’re starting to implement too.

Earplugs

I didn’t really discover earplugs until around 6 months. I wish I would have earlier.

Why earplugs? Simple: Babies are fucking loud. I have a tendency to get migraines, and piercing screams at 3am break me easily.

To me, these are defense mechanisms. They’re the towers on your fortress. Your shield as you enter the fray. We’re lucky to have a good sleeper, but when I need to head in with the earplugs, I just smile now no matter how upset the situation has him.

Just grab a big 50 pack of cheap earplugs and you’ll be set for a while. Obviously don’t use these as a way to ignore your kid’s wailing on a normal basis. That’s dumb.

White Noise Generator

Maybe you’ve got one of these already if you live (or sleep in) in a noisy area. I downloaded White Noise Ambience Lite the first night in the hospital, and it just worked. After a few nights we found the “Rain on Car” setting to be the least annoying out of all of them, and we’ve stuck through using it for the entire year so far.

This thing does wonders for associating when it’s time to sleep, no matter where you are - the car, in the crib, pack ‘n play, a friends’ house, and so on. Happiest Baby definitely mentions white noise, but there’s no concrete recommendations for which to get. Chances are you’re going to have your phone or tablet on you most the time. Have the app ready to go, and you won’t need to buy a more expensive standalone device.

I hope this stuff helps you out. If you have a similar list for toddlers I’d love to see it.

Dynos are done

2014-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

I’m tired of having to pay a premium to keep more than one process alive. Dynos are done. DONE!

It’s time for something new. That new thing is Dokku. It’s the same workflow you are most likely used to: git push to deploy. Follow this tutorial. In a nutshell you:

Launch a droplet (cloudspeak for VPS)
Configure your SSH key to push to the box
Setup PostgreSQL
Deploy your app via git push

Great! But your app might need more than just a database, unicorn, and nginx. Here’s a few helpful notes while you’re moving an app onto Dokku/DO:

Enable backups on the droplet

This increases the price a little. Peace of mind is worth it.

Bring in memcached

Another bonus: it’s free! Just install dokku-memcached and you’re set.

Need a www redirect?

You might hate www subdomains too. Redirect them with dokku-redirects.

Shell in

How do you find your logs? They’re in a docker container, so it’s not fully obvious how to find them. Dokku provides a way to get them, though:

ssh root@example.com dokku logs yourappname

If you want to poke around the filesystem for other reasons, or run commands:

ssh root@example.com dokku run yourappname bash

I’m sure these could be aliases too you could set up per app. This is begging to be a gem.

Restarting sucks

Right now, I don’t have my dokku setup to restart when the box restarts. This sucks, but there’s a dokku-supervisord plugin for dealing with this.

You’re a sysadmin again

Obviously, that was the premium you were paying. However, I don’t mind it that much. Plus, docker/dokku has been pretty fun and enjoyable to work with, and you still get that sweet git push experience.

If this helped you out, I’d appreciate if you signed up for DigitalOcean with my referral link. Thanks.

Too many streams

2014-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

There’s just too many things to pay attention to. I get questioned pretty frequently about this: how do you pay attention to nearly 1,500 people on your Twitter timeline? Here’s an easy answer:

I don’t.

It’s impossible to. Here’s a short selection of the “feeds” I had open today, at some point or another.

Twitter
Facebook
IRCCloud
Campfire
Basecamp
Work Gmail
Home Gmail
Reddit
Skype

This is just awful. It’s addicting though. Several of them I can’t shut off…for work and other reasons. Others I could probably spend a lot less time on. I don’t have a “life hack” for this. However there are some things I’ve found that help:

Cancel your (LinkedIn, especially) account
Stop/disable all notifications on apps
Just put the fucking phone down

I’m going to try and remind myself of the third point as much as possible.

5x5 Lego Carcassone

2014-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

I came across this post on making a Carcassone tile set out of Lego bricks yesterday. The post talks about how the individual tiles were designed and rendered, and ends with a sad conclusion: a real set would cost over $2,000. To make matters worse, the Lego Digital Designer (LDD)’s DESIGN byME site has been out of commission for a while now.

The post was updated with a 7x7 tileset, and I thought it could go even smaller, which would result in a more realistic price. I fired up the LDD, and several hours later:

It’s a functioning set of all 24 tiles! It was a ton of fun to build this. Playing with the LDD is like having an infinite pile of Legos, and there’s no diving through looking for that one piece: you can just search for it!

I borrowed a few design elements from other sets:

“Layered” effect like the 7x7 set
Fantastic color choices from the 9x9 set
Shrunk shield from 7x7 set down
One blue base, so The River could be added later

I connected the tiles together and it looks like a real game would not only work, but it definitely gives the “map” feel that Carcassone is great at:

If you generated a set of all 72 tiles, it clocks in at 975 pieces. Toss in 40 microfigs and a scoreboard, and this could be an actual Lego set:

LDD even generates instructions for you, too! Read the play-by-play of building this set, and check out the models for yourself on GitHub. I’d love to play a game on one of these someday.

So, how could that happen? Cuusoo? Kickstarter? Hunting down the pieces individually via Bricklink feels like a huge hassle. Also, the colors chosen are all not available, so it might be impossible to order this in the current color palette. If you have suggestions, let me know on Twitter!

Sync and edit files on two iPhones

2013-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Need to sync a file between two iPhones and edit it on both? Here’s what you need:

PlainText installed on both phones
Two Dropbox accounts (free will do!)

It’s a little tricky to get going once installed, so here’s what I did:

Share a folder between both accounts. Don’t share an individual file.
When linking your Dropbox account, choose Link to Entire Dropbox.
Create a file in the shared folder, and edit away!

That should really be it. Your file should now be synced on each phone after you edit it, and you won’t lose it since it’s in Dropbox! Here’s a screenshot of PlainText in action:

Some great things about this setup:

It’s free.
It’s simple!
Conflicts cause a copy of the file to be saved, so they’re not lost.

Consider this my first dad tech blog post! 11/12/13 was an awesome day for Amanda and me:

Cameron Richard, 8lbs 3oz. 11/12/13 11:15PM. 👶🚀 pic.twitter.com/XdaKfkc1zd
— Nick Quaranto (@qrush) November 13, 2013

We were starting to track feedings, wet diapers, and more in just Notes. However, I wanted to edit it too, and have a backup. I couldn’t believe how difficult to this was to get set up. There’s plenty of baby apps that do this (on one phone), and of course we could have used paper…but who wants to do that?

Thanks to Dan Gigante for suggesting this approach out. I hope this helps out someone else, even if it’s not for syncing baby logs. Let me know if it does!

Keeping it in-house

2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Diverse Conference

2013-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Intention revealing methods

2013-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Current status

2013-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

nick quaranto ¤ coding with spice

Starting a food co-op: Year 2

Fall 2022

Winter 2022

Spring 2023

Summer 2023

Goals for Year 3

Starting a food co-op: Year 1

Fall 2021

Winter 2021

Spring 2022

Summer 2022

Reflections

Upgrade PostgreSQL from 12 to 13 with Homebrew

P.S.: Cleanup!

Notion + Super Blogging

Wordpress (2007-2009)

Jekyll / GitHub Pages (2009-2020)

Notion / Super (2020-?)

Site Method

Site Settings

Pretty URLs

DNS Records

Super Options

The end game

Data export, or die

JSON is our standard gauge railway

BigDecimal#round always, please

Starting this off

pickaxe.club: Weekend 2

Shipping Basecamp for iOS 2.0

An ecosystem, fragmented

Essential new dad stuff

Happiest Baby on the Block

Earplugs

White Noise Generator

Dynos are done

Enable backups on the droplet

Bring in memcached

Need a www redirect?

Shell in

Restarting sucks

You’re a sysadmin again

Too many streams

5x5 Lego Carcassone

Sync and edit files on two iPhones

What’s with the baby related emojis?

Keeping it in-house

A Diverse Conference

Intention revealing methods

Current status