Forem: Charlie Reese 🦖

Clientelify Featured on BetaList Front Page!

Charlie Reese 🦖 — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 18:57:03 +0000

Getting Listed on BetaList

Yesterday the Clientelify team received an email from BetaList saying we'd be listed in roughly 30 days! As such, we were very surprised to learn a couple hours ago that we had been listed late this morning!

¯\(ツ)/¯

We shared the news with our subscriber base at CharlieReese (~200 subscribers) as well as friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, IndieHackers, and dev.to (I have a tiny Twitter following).

Our BetaList launch included a waitlist for our appointment reminder / scheduling application (we are offering users who join the waitlist 20% off when we launch) as well as two Sketch prototypes of envisioned functionality (links available below).

Getting Featured on BetaList

Two days after Clientelify was listed, we were featured as a trending startup at the top of BetaList! We've seen our traffic pick up since, and we couldn't be happier!

What is Clientelify?

Clientelify is a HIPAA compliant message and appointment scheduling application. It is perfect for reminding customers of upcoming appointments, reminding customers to leave reviews, or for prompting customer action.

It also features a public appointment scheduling page, which allows interested customers to book their own appointments whenever is best for them (check it out in the Sketch prototype below).

How We Built Clientelify

We built Clientelify using Rails, as well as the blog_boi and terra_boi gems (which we created for Clientelify and then open sourced).

BlogBoi is a rails engine for creating and editing blog posts.

TerraBoi is a rails gem for generating infrastructure as code files (i.e. Terraform, Packer, and Docker) for your rails app. It allows you to immediately deploy a basic rails application to AWS staging and production environments with zero downtime deployments and customizable infrastructure (vs less flexible, more expensive solutions like Heroku).

We created the UI for the application using Sketch. Sketch is a great tool for quickly creating and sharing prototype applications before writing code (it is even more useful if you can't code!). I learned how to use Sketch roughly 6 months ago largely through the Sketch docs, which are really good! I think Sketch still offers a free month trial. Definitely check it out!

Where You Can Learn More About Clientelify

Please check out our page (Clientelify) on BetaList, check out our Sketch prototypes below (you can click through them), or ask us a question on dev.to!

Cheers,

Charlie

Links & Resources:

Sketch application prototype

Sketch public facing scheduling prototype

The DEVpreneur Podcast

Charlie Reese 🦖 — Sat, 13 Jul 2019 02:26:11 +0000

This week I released a podcast with my good friend and former co-worker Tom Zaragoza called The DEVpreneur. Tom and I met 18 months ago while working as software developers at Tulip Retail. We quickly learned we had similar interests; we both enjoyed building SaaS products in our spare time.

We started The DEVpreneur podcast to talk about our common passion for where entrepreneurship and software development intersect. We cover things like common misconceptions, how to quickly build a product users want, and more. Our first episode had a bit of an echo, but I think we've since gotten rid of it. Who knew audio was such a tricky business - not me.

Further, we are hosting the podcast's media files and RSS feed on my personal website. If you are interested in how to do this for your own podcast, I wrote about how to host your own podcast RSS feed on my blog - you should check it out!

Do you have a favourite podcasts that you listen to, or do you host your own podcast? I'd love any tips or resources!

How to build a (Drake) Twitter bot

Charlie Reese 🦖 — Fri, 23 Nov 2018 18:12:53 +0000

I was at a bar with an old group of friends over the 2017 holidays. While we were waiting in line, one of them mentioned that he heard about a Twitter-bot that replied to tweets containing Biggie Smalls lyrics with other Biggie Smalls lyrics.

I thought the idea was hilarious, and after one or six beers decided it was something I had to build! However, I wanted to do things a little differently:

~~I rep the 6~~ I live in Toronto, so the Twitter-bot would be for Drake - a.k.a the DrizzyBot
The DrizzyBot should reply to tweets containing Drake lyrics with the next line of the song
The DrizzyBot should run at regular intervals with no human interaction

After a day of programming, tinkering, and giggling, the DrizzyBot was born.

Follow the DrizzyBot here: @The110God (Note: 6 in binary is 110) 😏

View the source code for the DrizzyBot here. Note: the source code is in ruby and is only ~100 lines