casperb

I don’t like the frame of “it costs the economy X billion”. Without piracy people would not have bought it. It is not a cost.

Maybe “street value” would be a better term? If it was payed for, it would have the value of X billion. But it costs nothing.

> …in the operation of our business

I don’t know what they mean with that, but they had 100M+ losses and 45M+ negative cashflow in only the last two years. So they used the money but not for “operating”, or got it from somewhere else that is not revenue.

I am always surprised when I realize this in conversations with entrepreneurs. They explain something to me about how they “control” their employees, then I say it out loud that it seems weird to me and then they try to explain it to me like it has nothing to do with control or with class but that it is necessary. Sure. It’s mostly bullshit, class and mistrust.

After 15 years of heavy restful API usage, building 10 restful API’s, using the GitHub and Shopify GraphQL API’s and providing our own GraphQL API in PHP, I think this article puts the nail on the head.

It is nice to only get the data you need as a client. The Graphiql explorer is very nice to try to get the right data. But that is mainly an advantage if the restful endpoints are badly designed. The Shopify API around inventory is very bad and became worse over time. You would need 15-20 rest requests or 1 complicated Graphql request to get the 3 fields you need together. But in most cases, even as a front end user, if the API is designed nicely it is not worth the complicated whole of the system of Graphql.

GitHub’s API works better as rest then as Graphql in my opinion. And the Stripe API is also very nice. I don’t need Graphql there as a user.

In the Netherlands, Europe. We had a small agency with 3 friends. We did around 250k a year in revenue.

Exactly the type of team that is super productive for these kinds of job imo.

In our agency 10 years ago we build such websites, it would cost 3000-5000 dollars max. Just with PHP and a simple self build CMS. Including a simple responsive design. We also hosted around 250 of such websites on a single dedicated server. It was very very fast.

> Let’s start with the fact that the M2 MacBook Air is most likely the most expensive Air ever.

The original Air was starting at 1799, with a hdd. Add an extra 1000 dollars for the SSD.

Just like then, this Air is not the most basic Mac anymore. It has different trade-offs.

I have the same feeling in a Range Rover. It is not about wind noise, but the sound of a running ICE that annoys me.

> "quiet ride" - I've never once in my life wished that the interior of my vehicle was quieter, this is such a superficial benefit to consider.

This is for me the single biggest reason I will never go back to an ICE car, after driving a Model X for 4 years now. My wife drives a small petrol car (Renault Clio) and I hate the sound of the engine so much.

Do you have experience driving an electric car as a daily? Or just countering all arguments as an exercise?

There are lots of use cases where you need a PDF document, without letting the user print to PDF it manually. For example sending PDF invoices per email, or generating reports and uploading it to a Dropbox directory.

We use wkhtmltopdf and it works fine for us. But I would like better support for newer CSS.

I like the functionality from Chrome to use it headless, but my main problem with it is that text is not selectable in the rendered PDF. It seems to be an screencapture as image or something. Anyone has this working? Selectable text is really needed for generating PDF invoices.

This was always the case with the Shopify App Store. They were more loose in using other payment systems, as long as you payed them their 20% by wire transfer. Since end of 2019 they give that permission to almost nobody.

It is also a big piece of the verification process for the App Store. So maybe you added Stripe later and now they found it?

Did you have a written waiver that you could charge another way? That is required at least since ~2015.

As far as I know, before these changes selling virtualized macOS was not allowed at all. That is what Brian was celebrating, to see some approval.

I met Bert a couple of times 10 years ago at meetups in the Netherlands, he is a wonderful person and a great mind.

I think it is great that he walks away when his hart is not in it anymore. I think a lot of big open source projects can become a big burden on its creators and some of them not daring to move on because of the feeling of responsibility. Same with the move of Redis’ founder it think these are great examples for the community.

Wow, that Wordpress blog is bad. I have seen a lot of projects add support for PHP 8 in recent weeks and they were all kind of easy. Mostly waiting for upstream packages to be ready.

You get nice warnings for years about stuff to fix. If you ignore them because that is easier, there comes a point where it is so bad that you cannot recover.

I know the Wordpress codebase is nasty. But how and when are they going to fix these things? It is going to be so hard.

It depends on the continent you live on.

Probably because they have 1600 employees and the 2500 branches are the active ones.

Like 60-70% of all internet users: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...

I am the cofounder of Picqer. We provide modern warehouse management software for e-commerce businesses. We are here for 8 years, bootstrapped and profitable. We have a modern and open API, see picqer.com/api.

Maybe a little, but if you want to acquire the business for the product than it is weird to let your product completely stagnate. If your team cannot keep shipping while other things happening, is it really worth to acquire?

That is a bold move. It is not easy as a warehouse to switch for your WMS software. So to give all your customers ~6-8 months to switch to something else is not a nice move.

They were pretty big on the Shopify App Store alone and had decent pricing, 500 dollar per month and up. Should be a perfectly nice business.

But seems that they did not do any new releases the last 8 months: https://stitch.releasenotes.io/

Luckily I handled it better (I think) when it happened to me in 2015. I forked a MIT licensed project and improved it because it was a mess but useful. Turned out that project was copied from another project that was LGPLv3 licensed but all license/copyright info was removed.

He was a bit aggressive about it, what I understand if someone steals your code without mentioning you.

The violation notice: https://github.com/picqer/php-barcode-generator/issues/3

Same here on a 4000 euro MBP 16”. I tried everything, but multiple times a day having kernel panics when starting up from sleep in clamshell mode.

I wonder if it is harder to let so many engineers go when you have so many microservices as Uber has/had. Seems to me that a monolith is easier to maintain when the amount of people working on it goes down, then with all those small microservices. They maybe/probably will have microservices running that now has no one to maintain them.

I used this 10+ years ago, was really cool to pair program in the office. We also used it to take notes in meetings. But liked TextMate better for programming and then sort of stopped using it.

Yes, they had private networking. Now with VPC’s it is basically multiple ‘private networks’ within one account. As mentioned in the article.

Is this the first step from Shopify to create an Amazon-like marketplace?

I loved it and would pay for it. But after 3 months of restarting it a couple of times a day since the 2018 Mac update, I switched to TablePlus.

I still miss SequelPro, as its search and export features where way better then TablePlus’ way.

Same here. We have provide a warehouse management system specifically for e-commerce warehouses, as SaaS. We are (one of) the biggest player in the Netherlands, and since "social distancing" started here 4 weeks ago we see Black Friday 2019 levels of orders every day, for 4 weeks straight now.

We have some customers that saw there orders come to a stop, even a few bankruptcies already. But almost all see a 30-40% bigger order flow. Some customers that sell DIY hair products see a doubling or tripling in orders per day and revenue.

When I talk to the biggest e-commerce players in the Netherlands and the top 3 parcel shippers, they all see (near) black friday levels of orders/shipments.

Seems like not the best proof to me: He takes the median and then is looking at the graphs like it should happen exactly at that point? His source[0] also shows it is 2-14 days, and he then uses 5 days. Weird.

Also, most of these countries in Europe did not do only 1 'lockdown' on a specific day. But increased the social distancing policies over 2-4 weeks, a bit stricter every few days. That is what I know from my country (The Netherlands) and what was widely reported about France and Italy as well.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...