drchiu

I personally prefer it. I'm fairly detailed oriented, and honestly if I had to talk, I'm probably the guy who ends up taking more than my share of time (sorry folks).

With a text-based standup, I organize my thoughts, ping people who might find the update relevant (to bump it to their attention), and can follow up with a reply-in-thread option (for blockers and such).

Would love for them to have a free tier. Example: 25 hours free per month, just to play around.

This might be very resource intensive though.

I tried out the beta as well as the precursor to this product (to learn Vim). Learning programming works best when one can interactively learn.

Congrats on the launch.

I built something like this where it allowed me to basically "live on the beach". The hardest part was as one gets older and has more responsibilities (family), that lifestyle wasn't sustainable. The kids need a stable environment where they can see their friends, play sports... that sort of thing. As well, it helps to be around family and to help them out when they need help, rather than finding out about family members having health problems or needing assistance and can't do anything about it.

I do think that if one is able to and afforded this lucky opportunity, it is a great experience to have. I never experienced the "living on the beach" part, but can see how operating a business like mine (and the author's) is a requisite for potentially having that kind of lifestyle. Just need to be young and have less responsibilities.

Is this in USD?

This is correct. Also tends to be more expensive as well.

I think managers and business decision makers underestimate how much benefit we bring with our unique set of skills.

A great developer can fix the codebase with a single line of code. A mediocre developer adds hundreds of lines of code to achieve the same thing.

It's definitely hard to measure, and requires some level of understanding before it's even possible to properly valuate.

Well, when they bought it, the share price was sub $100k. Some even lower. The B shares didn't exist before either (pre 1996), so some of these are legacy shares.

The higher share price serves as a mechanism to stabilize the share prices as well. I have a few friends who disdain at the idea of selling even a single share because they don't want to bother converting it to B shares and/or don't want to trigger a tax on the capital gain.

Something about "Don't deploy no Fridays."

Looks like it is. For anything else, I would have went to Twitter to find out if anyone else was experiencing the same.

Could you share the link of the projector technique? I’m learning sewing and finding preparing the pattern to be the most time consuming.

I wished there's an indication of how much this costs. Because this seems like the target market may also be startup teams who can't afford 1000s per month (ie. enterprise) but whose APIs are getting hammered.

> From what I can tell their API deprecation strategy is quite hostile to developers.

Yes, every 3 months you need to revisit the API. It's good and bad. It means that if you're casually developing an app, this will consume a lot of time. Good because if forces you to update and keep your app relevant.

My biggest problem with the ecosystem is how Shopify tries to deflect their own customer problems onto their partners to solve. And oftentimes, these same customers expect the partners to solve it for free.

Examples:

- Their default theme (provided by Shopify) has problems. Blame it on the app developer. "It's the app's fault." Yes, there are some poorly developed apps, but this lumps together the good with the bad.

- Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review."

- Shopify's customer service reps says, "It must be the app that's causing this." Reading the CSR's emails, it is clear that this person does not understand the (technical) issues and is only trying to close the ticket. Customer takes what the CSR says as gospel and you, as the developer, spends a lot of time trying to fight that mindset.

I can't help but feel a big part of Shopify's early strategy was that the demographic of customers they were trying to attract just weren't a great type of customer, and that the partner program allowed them to enlist a lot of hungry developers willing to work for free (or next to nothing).

There is definitely room for improvement. I have mixed feelings about it, as their ecosystem provided me with a way to make a living many years ago. I don't depend on them anymore, but I wouldn't argue against trying your luck out there if you're starting out. Just recognize that there is a certain culture and way of practice there.

Yes, this is true. There's a lot of pressure, I suspect, since they've come out as a publicly traded company.

I've built on Shopify before. While they're great, you'll find that it's hard to grow your company in it (save for a few notable exceptions). And then there's the platform dependent nature of it all.

I would not build a business on top of another company's platform.

Subscriptions is now available as part of their API. It does require a bit of time* to understand it though.

* - May vary depending on your level of experience with GraphQL

I think selling a product that doesn't yet exist may work without an MVP, especially if it's a completely novel idea where none exists. We launched recently (and got paid customers on day 1, no mailing list, no large # of followers, no marketing spend) in a relatively established market niche and didn't run into the problems of finding customers, because customers were already looking for that solution and liked what they saw. We also needed to build out the whole product before the first revenue dollar.

I think strategies differ depending on:

- How new the market is for that particular product

- How big of a risk is it to adopt your product vs alternatives

- How polished it looks (inverse relationship to how many solutions already exist)

In some cases, you may need a much more polished MVP to get people to bring out their credit cards. If your product is the only one of its kind (and is in high demand), the UI is less important in v1.

From a purchaser’s perspective, I really do welcome more choices most of the time.

Reasons:

- more likely I’ll find the product that fits my budget and needs

- ability to switch out of an unfavourable technology stack that no longer works for me

- competition helps encourage the vendors to improve their products and fix bugs

We did that for a couple of SAAS. In fact, we even extracted this out to an internal library with a web UI. If anyone is interested, let me know and I’d be happy to open source it. It’ll have to be run in its own server and process.

But for full disclosure, my latest project just bit the bullet and accepted the extra 0.5%. Wanted to see how it goes. Could always switch if I found the need.

I read this with a lot of hope. The -80 degree cold storage part won’t be easy. Most vaccines stored at medical offices are nowhere near that and are only around ~0 degrees C.

Freezer temps are only ~18 deg C.

Possibly will only be able to be administered at special sites or if they find a way to stabilize it at warmer temp.

I’ve never met him, but having read his blog (before he took it down around the time Shopify IPO’ed) and his work in libraries like Liquid, Rails, and others, he’s an engineer/programmer at heart. Nice to see he’s able to hold onto some of that even after the journey his company has been through these 14-15 years.

Marketing software is really hard, as others have mentioned, due to switching costs, the number of niche verticals, and user to user requirements.

I also notice that in the past few years, there are a flurry of new products in this space offering lifetime deals as well. This makes it so that a traditional saas offering needs to incorporate some sort of up sell later on.

Interesting philosophical question. The blog post got me thinking as well. If by extension developers aim to please by releasing features as fast as I (the user) wants them, is the act of requesting feature a morally wrong? Therefore, my demanding the company (who puts pressure on the developers to churn out code) would therefore be in direct conflict with protecting the environment, as I am then the driving force behind this evil behaviour.

Moreover, the storage requirements continue to increase as I save more personal videos, photos, and other media content and save them to the cloud. This then produces even more data centres situated along dams, causing more local area flooding and environmental damages.

Of course, we know there's no right answer to all of this. My demanding of these products and services also help hundreds of thousands (if not millions as we work up the supply chain) as it employs them in the overall IT industry. The money they get is used to pay for bills, save for children's college funds, and more.

If we look at the scope of the argument within itself, it is possible that inefficient code is morally wrong. Weighing it against the factors that gave rise to that code (ie. real world), it is a byproduct of society's demand on technology -- of which one could argue there are many more morally questionable cogs in the machine.

Promox is great, as the other reply mentioned.

We don't use any virtualization like that. All bare metal as we are running a single app.

Yeah, I would avoid their VPS. I benchmarked their higher end VPS and they were still not great. Ran a few as well on Vultr, Linode, and DO and ended up going with none of them. Linode performed the best for VPS for me, but price-point wise, it was a better deal to head straight up to dedi's on OVH.

I still run small VPS instances for various workers and what-not, but straight up app and db servers go to OVH.

Nope, it's OVH for us as well as this point.

We have about 8 or 9 dedicated servers at OVH right now. Things we've noticed:

- Yes, UI sucks

- No autobilling

- Reboot times are slow (as the actual machines are reboooted, not a VPS)

- You need to upgrade to higher bandwidths for great speeds

- Some routing problems, very rarely

- You really need to know what your server needs are 6-12 months in advance

- Some product offerings way too expensive (eg. Loadbalancer)

Great things:

- Price. Net-net, still cheaper to buy 2-3 dedicated servers than a single beefy VPS

- A lot of sales, like every month

- You get the full resources of the whole server

- Reasonable support for network or hardware related issues

- Unlimited traffic (at least you don't need to worry about normal usage overages)

- DDoS protection

Other thoughts:

In terms of performance, dedi's work great. I've found their OVH Public Cloud instances (not the cheap one, but the more expensive ones) have not as great performance. Might as well buy a dedicated. The only pro is that you only pay for the time you use.

We tried running things on AWS and digital ocean. Yes, AWS offers a lot of extra value with all the other services. But at the same time, we had a relatively simple application. We ended up managing our own sets of dedicated servers for a fraction of the cost. Peformance is way higher. In the end, the cost difference was just too big to justify it when we were trying to be scrappy. We also realized that all the extra features offered weren’t being utilized as our infrastructure requirements were simple.

Wasn't the taxi industry also one where it had its own corruption and connections with people who may resort to guns to protect their turf? How did companies like Uber and Lyft gain marketshare without incurring some physical penalty?

My first thought was that this sounds like a joke, but thinking about it further I realized there are definitely some target cases for this kind of program.

I'm lucky to be able to work on my stuff full time, but it wasn't too long ago when I worked a full time job and couldn't find the time to balance things out to go 100% in my business.

I think this is great. I would think of it as "progressive onboarding" for future founders.