New web host, platform, bugs, features and meta

By Randell | Published: June 21, 2010

Last week, we migrated our site to a new web host. It took about an hour, which was longer than what we expected, because we encountered bugs that came with the latest OSQA updates.  But the good news is that we didn’t lose any data in the process. You still have your questions, answers, reputation points, badges, and profile information or least until somebody reports that they lost something.

Right after the migration, we received reports from users who can’t login to their accounts using Google OpenID.  The quick fix is to send your myOpenID username to info@nullpointer.com or http://twitter.com/NullPointerPH. We will replace the OpenID provider that you are using for your existing NullPointer.ph account so you can login using your myOpenID account. It’s an ugly solution, especially to those who don’t have myOpenID accounts, but it’s our only fix until we find the root of the problem. After logging in, you can simply add Google as a new provider under the User Tools in your NullPointer.ph profile.

Since OSQA is still under development and because we are currently updating the site directly from the OSQA trunk, we will be expecting bugs, bug fixes, and new features almost everyday. In order to help us fix those bugs faster, we turned the debug mode on so you can easily copy and paste the stack trace and provide us with the pertinent information. We’ve setup Meta NullPointer.ph so all of us can easily track the bug reports and avoid duplicates.

Speaking of Meta NullPointer.ph, we would like to hear more from our community. Aside from posting bug reports, you can also propose features that you want to be implemented for NullPointer.ph. If you feel like we need to change the reputation point gains and losses, voting rules and badges configuration, we can discuss it at Meta NullPointer.ph.

We also don’t want to limit the site to just questions and answers. We’ve already setup the NullPointer.ph Job Board, to help companies find awesome Filipino developers and help Filipino developers find better jobs. We want our community to grow more than that and we want you to play a huge part in it, so if you have awesome ideas, feel free to post them at Meta NullPointer.ph so the whole community can share their thoughts about it.

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Migration day

By Randell | Published: June 2, 2010

We announced in our previous post that we are migrating the site to a different platform and web host. We have evaluated several question and answer platforms including OSQA, Shapado, Askbot, and Reddit’s platform. Among those platforms, we chose OSQA and it will be hosted under WebFaction.

OSQA has the closest look and feel to Stack Exchange. Our migration tests on OSQA instances preserved all important data including questions, answers, tags, user profiles, reputation points, and badges. OSQA also has a public work plan where everyone can login, vote, and comment on issues. And since OSQA is open-source, everybody can also help with the development.

WebFaction was recommended by the guys working on OSQA, so we’ll take their word for it. Other OSQA sites have also been hosted under WebFaction, and so far we haven’t heard any complaints, which is a good thing.

So here’s the plan: we will start the migration on June 11, 2010 at 10pm, Manila time. That means only the questions and answers posted before that time will be migrated to the new server. To make sure that no content is posted during migration, we will bring the site down and put up a page saying “undergoing system maintenance.” If everything goes as planned, the site should be up again in less than 30 minutes. One clue that the site has been migrated successfully is the repositioned search field (this will be modified in future releases).

And just to make sure that we can all log in to our accounts after the migration, add an alternate OpenID to your accounts using myOpenID. To do that, go to your profile page, click the edit link and add your myOpenID url to the Alt OpenID field.

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We’re moving!

By Randell | Published: April 15, 2010

As you may have already read from the recent Stack Exchange blog, there has been a couple changes to the platform, which will directly affect NullPointer.ph. The most important of which is under Q: What happens with existing Stack Exchange sites? which says

Existing Stack Exchange sites will be kept open, under existing rules, for at least three months, and at least one year if you have an active site.

We already mentioned that NullPointer.ph already has a shut down notice and will remain operational from the Stack Exchange servers at least until July 13, 2010 (that’s 3 months from now).

As customers subscribing to a service, we’ve decided that it is in our best interest that we don’t put the fate of our site and our community on the hands of service providers that are still very much in flux. Right now, our plan is to migrate NullPointer.ph to one of the existing Stack Exchange clones to keep the site running without losing any data. (Yes, you will still have your shiny badges.)

We’ll keep you posted on the date and time of the migration.

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Introducing the Null Pointer Job Board

By Randell | Published: January 20, 2010

In our previous blog post, we mentioned that we’re cooking things up for 2010.  So we’re kick-starting the year off with something awesome.  Today, we introduce to you the Null Pointer Job Board.

We know that the idea of this niche job board, focusing on programmers and developers, is not our own.  If you’ve been spending a bit of time on the internet and being active on several developer communities, you should be familiar with Stack Overflow Jobs.  Since Stack Overflow has a job board, and Null Pointer is the local version of Stack Overflow, then it is just right for Null Pointer to have its own job board.  Null Pointer Job Board will bring together the best local (and several foreign) companies seeking the best programmers from our country.  We all want the best, right?

Companies looking for the ideal candidate find it difficult to sift through all the applications they receive from posting on huge job boards and sorting the best from the acceptable-but-not-outstanding programmers is really quite a chore.  Wouldn’t it be easier if the applications came from a filtered set of the best programmers?

For the applicants, searching for jobs in huge jobs boards can be quite overwhelming.  Receiving job recommendations that don’t quite fit their career path can even be annoying at times.  Getting job recommendations for a Java Programmer position when the CV says you’re a .NET developer isn’t quite what they want.  While we believe there is some merit to headhunters’ work, we put more value on the companies themselves posting giving out their introduction and basic information so that the job applicants can decide for themselves if they want to apply.

With Null Pointer Job Board we reduce the amount of spam for board parties.  Companies only receive applicants from those who are more than just the regular programmer (the Null Pointer users) while programmers only see the posts from the best companies to work for.

So your job board is better. How much would it cost us?

To help us maintain the quality of job posts, this service will not be free.  We don’t want some second-rate company taking advantage of good developers, do we? So we are charging $150 per job post.  That allows job posts to be shown for 30 days publicly at jobs.nullpointer.ph after it has been posted.  The job posts will also be rotatingly shown at the side bar of Null Pointer.

So if you’re a company looking for excellent Filipino programmers, email us at info@nullpointer.ph.  We’ll give you 3 credits for free so you can try it out the beta!  For the developers, you can already subscribe to the Null Pointer Job Board RSS feed and watch out for your dream job.

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Rounding up the sheep

By Randell | Published: January 10, 2010

During the last quarter of 2009, we brought you Null Pointer.  We watched the spike on the number of visitors during the first few weeks and watched those numbers stabilize during the first month.  We also saw one user, an active member of PinoyJUG,  get the first ever Null Pointer Enlightened Badge!

Our community is still growing everyday and as promised, we gathered more users before 2009 ended by promoting Null Pointer to these events:

November 27, 2009 – GeekUp!
We were invited by Sherwin Sowy, Head of Future Applications of Globe Labs, to present the site to this informal gathering of tech enthusiasts, bloggers, and developers where 7 other projects were presented.

December 1, 2009 – IBM Developer Nights Party
Thanks to James Faeldon of IBM Philippines, we had the chance to promote Null Pointer in front of 150+ students from the top universities in Manila.

December 11, 2009 – CPS Week Symposium
We visited UPLB during The CPS Triangle’s  symposium on Technology Optimization: Innovations for Building a Greener Future.  Unfair to the other speakers, we didn’t really give a talk about the theme, but shamelessly promoted Null Pointer instead.  We also gave away Null Pointer shirts to the early birds.

Null Pointer shirts!

Null Pointer shirts!

Cool, huh?

We’re still cooking things up for Null Pointer in 2010.  In the mean time, you can also help us spread the word about Null Pointer by following and RT-ing us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/NullPointerPH) and joining our Facebook fan page and suggesting it to your friends.

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Hello world!

By Randell | Published: November 3, 2009

Welcome to the official NullPointer.ph blog!

First of all, the NullPointer.ph team would like to thank all the users who have visited and registered with the site.  We are assuming that most of the users are members of our local developer mailing-list, which we shamelessly spammed with our invitation.  For that, we apologize.  But hey, all of them qualify under “Filipino Developers”, which is our target audience, and we didn’t want any Filipino developers left behind so we sent the invitation to everyone.  Where else are we supposed to plug the site, right?

As of  November 2, 2009 (25 days since site launch), we already got 4,870 visits with 26,871 pageviews.  Most of the traffic are coming from Philippines, Singapore, United States and New Zealand.  NullPointer.ph also already has 142 users, 64 of which already got the Teacher badge.

We are still busy cooking things up for the site.  The following things are still in our priority queue:

  • Gather more users to make the site more active than it already is.  The more, the merrier! As mentioned in the message that we sent out to the Filipino developer mailing-lists, we are planning to visit the top universities in the country.   We would like to reach those aspiring developers early so the our country’s expert developers can answer their newbie questions.
  • Get targeted ads.  No, it’s not just for the profit.  We’ve been getting comments that not all of the ads being shown are relevant to software developers.  Of course, we want to see ads that are most relevant to our specializations.  Don’t worry, there won’t be any annoying political ads.

If you have suggestions, questions, problems or other concerns that you want to tell us, feel free to send us your feedback through our Feedback Form.  You can also follow us on Twitter.

Again, we thank you all for the support and feel free to tell your friends and colleagues about NullPointer.ph – The Knowledge Exchange Platform for the Filipino Developer Community!

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