Team Engagement, Randomly Pick a member in Slack

Increasing team members’ engagement in meetings & discussions can be challenging, especially since many companies are practicing work from home in response to this pandemic. It’s not hard to spot the ninja members who are quiet in most of the meetings.

Have you ever found your team in a situation where you wanted to push those quiet members to engage more often in discussions, leading a meeting, or giving a presentation? What do you usually do in such times?

Or maybe you wanted a more fun way of starting your scrum meetings by randomizing the first person who speaks?

In our case, we’ve definitely tried giving round-robin, a try. to be even more simultaneous, we’ve tried random pickings too. 

I literary can remember our PO doing a Google search for a Random Picker online to pick a name for something we were up to in a screen share. 

So last night when I finished work, I decided to make this a bit easier for us, and maybe anyone else who uses Slack in their company by creating Random Member.

Random Member is a tiny Slack application that creates a command called /random, which you can run from any channel and group chats. 

To add this app to your workspace simply open the Random Member landing page and hit Add to Slack button.

 

/random command returns a randomly picked member of the current channel

It took me one day to build and deploy Random Member, I’m looking forward to seeing it in the Slack App Directory and get your feedback!

PS: I’ve tried to make sure everything works as expected, but I’d love you to break my app. if you find any bugs please let me know to fix them. 

Integrate Stripe into ResellerClub

Stripe, with no doubt, is my favorite payment gateway of all time. I’ve been integrating many payment gateways into my clients and my own systems and so far Stripe has beaten all of them.

Thankfully ResellerClub allows you to integrate your own payment gateways for your reseller. I’ve created a simple PHP script that lets you integrate Stripe in your ResellerClub Supersite and PartnerSite.

You can use this script for free and integrate Stripe payment gateway in ResellerClub in a couple of minutes.

The script is pretty simple and I’ve included an instruction file in the zip folder. Please note I’ve just created this for personal use and decided to release it to you guys for free. 

It requires PHP >= 7.2. in the zip package, you can also find support files for nginx and IIS web servers.

Download

I’ve made a Twitter Follower Exchange App! Here is why

I am supposed to be driving around the EU right now, I’ve been planning a road trip with some friends for some months, but sadly we were late and the new wave of Corona cases beat us to it, so I decided to stay home on my holidays and write this blog post.

Well, let’s get back to the title. I’ve created a FollowNinja Twitter Follower Exchange Platform and here is the story on how it all started. 

Aside from being bored at home after my travel plans were canceled, I was thinking about the changes that the internet has gone through for the past decade. It is really different than what I used to remember.

In short, we are stuck with the set of social media services we use, where we get our daily dose of content off them. The whole idea of discovering new content and cool websites is just fading away, at least for most of us. 

The more Social media platforms advance, they become more limited, you ask how is that? Content Curation!

You’re given a chance to choose your a bunch of favorite topic, follow things you like and these sites will do such a good job on delivering both monetized and free content on those subjects, that at some point of the time, you will never look for something more. But is this what we really want? To fill up the room with things we like and believe this is all that is out there.

That is how I decided to hack something up in a couple of off days from work. a complete random follow platform that lets you be heard and makes you hear others. 

How does it Work?

Simple. follow other users without knowing them, and they will follow you back in return. The process is completely mutual, if you unfollow someone or choose to do so, they will unfollow you too. So in short it gets you a random authentic audience. 

Let me know if you joined it, if you used it and if you have any suggestions that can make it better.

 

 

 

Laravel Auth::login() doesn’t work after registration

Are you one of those Laravel developers who is having trouble authenticating their freshly created users by calling Auth::login() method? Then continue reading this.

If you are using a non-incrementing primary key for your user table, there is a high chance that you have trouble with authentication sessions in Laravel. This is especially the case when you try to authenticate the User in code right after registration.

To solve this problem you need to add the following property to your User Model. 

it is also mentioned in Eloquent docs that you need to set this property in your models if you are not using an autoincrementing primary key.

Are Thomann Pianos good?

About 10 months ago when I was leaving Malaysia, I had to sell my Yamaha YDP-141 after almost 10 years. Although I was not playing often recently, it was heartbreaking and sad for me to sell it off.

Although I promised myself that I will buy a Piano again when I am settled here, I knew that would not happen any time soon, but thanks to Corona (Covid-19) some time ago during the quarantine I realized how much playing an instrument could help with the boredom and escaping the reality we were in. 

Continue reading “Are Thomann Pianos good?”