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Category: Experience

Dear Professor,

Published by ianjennings on July 21, 2016

11/26/11

Professor,

Attached is my business week paper summary.

As I mentioned in my note turned in when this paper was intended to be submitted, I have been very busy starting a company from the website I showed you in class. I am taking trips up to New York more than twice a week; sleeping over friends houses or offices where hacakthons are thrown.

Also note, because my final project proposal has changed so drastically from the beginning of the course, I have included a cover page with an updated proposal to provide context for articles relating to my proposal. Some of the articles I’ve read in Business Week have proven to be invaluable to me during this time. One article in particular got me very excited as it validates our business plan.

Although I have been slacking in class, I have been gaining real world entrepreneurship experience.

Best,
Ian Jennings Jablonowski

—

12/3/13

Professor,

Thanks for cutting me some slack a couple years ago.

The company I mentioned above sold to Intel today.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/03/hacker-league-mashery-intel/

Best,
Ian

Hack together Stripe after work

Published by ianjennings on September 11, 2012

This post is about my new experiment: http://rooster.am

I’ve heard a lot of Hype about Stripe. I have monetized two websites in the past with the infamous Paypal buttons. 

Both of those sites have shut down since, but I did learn a lot about installing Paypal buttons. It’s probably the most terrible part of any website I’ve ever built. 

In one case, I resold ventrilo servers. The worst part of this was rigging a Paypal button to a server cpanel. I might have been 15 or 16 when I resold them. It’s a terrible idea. 

Anyway, today I decided to install Stripe after work on a two year old hack called rooster.am. It’s a two year old winning HackNY hack that uses Twilo and various APIs to give you an awesome wake up call: http://rooster.am/

I have been paying for rooster.am for nearly 2 years, making no money just because I thought it was fun. It turns out that’s not really a good investment.

So today I spent the afternoon installing Stripe. I’ve been learning a lot about Google Analytics while working at the Hype Machine and was inspired by Bingo Card Creator guy.

It was really simple. I was able to use their Javacript API and PHP library and paste something together in an afternoon.

Whats impressive about this is that I haven’t really modified this code since NYTM in 2011. I’m at least a version outdated of everything, including CodeIgniter and jQuery and Google Analytics.

I used their extremely simple libraries, stripe.js and php-stripe (in CodeIgniter mode). I only had to add one field to my database.

Everything worked as promised. Stripe has a cool “test mode” where you can try out your payments with fake credit card numbers that always return some kind of error on your app. 

I did this on a server that has no staging environment, no build or deploy scripts, no nodejs backends, no tests or mongodbs.

Strip makes it super easy to do one of the most daunting tasks in web development. Making integration simple is really important and a genius business model. 

Next I need to do some front end updating. Site isn’t even responsive :/