pirsquare

"prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp."

YES! Everyone should read this. Google Cloud will shutdown your servers for the slightest stupid reason. NEVER EVER run any production apps with Google Cloud. -

"gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues"

YES this is my experience except in my case they didn't gaslight me and instead avoid giving a resolution. -

I run a business that hundreds of paying customers (ecom stores) relies on and I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud.

They shutdown all my servers last Friday for the slightest stupid reason and don't give a fuck to rectify things fast. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

On paper, my servers were shutdown for at least more than 72 hrs and it's still ongoing.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

Yes in my case I was a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they abruptly shutdown all my servers last friday.

Any decent human being would at least try to rectify things ASAP, except for Google. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

They're the most dysfunctional organization I've seen in my life. It's like communications between teams goes with a "none of my business" attitude.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

Remember Stadia? Google doesn't give a fuck about their users or customers. I would rather trust my money with Bernie Madoff than Google.

I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud and they shutdown all my servers last friday. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

Thanks! Link updated to my own tweet. I don't know why my post got removed. It's no diff from previous gcloud horror stories.

Google Map 10X their price on a single price change.

Never trust Google Cloud or run any production servers with them. They have zero empathy for you.

Just today, we got screwed by Google Cloud (as a 4 yrs customer) when they abruptly shutdown our production servers just because we didn't fill up a form on-time.

My story: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Liao/status/1634103410525077504 (happens today) [Link Updated]

Congrats for the launch! My startup also provide email marketing but we're not in similar vertical.

The biggest headache in this business is dealing with spammers. Trust me, you will get more signups from spammers than actual users. So you need to have a process in place to handle them. Personally I've tried many automated methods and rules to validate spammers but nothing works as well as manual verification.

Postmark is the gold standard for transactional emails. They have the best deliverability since they don't mix marketing emails.

FWIW, I wouldn't recommend Constant Contact to anyone. Simple reason is that you need to call their support line to cancel subscription.

Source: https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Get-Help/Billing-FA...

they are moving into ecommerce. They've acquired tradegecko last yr and rebranded it as quickbooks commerce.

Also, if you look at mailchimp recent product changes with addition of MC stores, they are positioning themselves to compete against ecommerce platforms. This could be planned beforehand to be part of the package for the acquisition.

This is the problem with usage based pricing. It is very lucrative pricing strategy because it works for lower end of market as well as enterprise users. One way to resolve this is to offer fixed tier based pricing for customers who may be more sensitive to prices and usage based pricing for enterprise clients.

For example.

Starter ($5/mo) - Use up to 100,000 API calls each month.

Growth ($30/mo) - Use up to 1,000,000 API calls each month.

Enterprise ($149/mo) - Use up to 10,000,000 API calls each month. After that, $10 for every 1 million calls.

"I find IP based mail blacklist services such as BRBL obsolete and possibly harmful"

Fully agree to this. I've always wonder why spam filters don't place more importance on domain reputation. So many senders runs on the same IP for deliveries and it's really silly to blatantly block someone based on IP.

For example, $89.95/mo is the starting price to get a dedicated IP for sending with Sendgrid.

Couldn't agree more. The reason why CEOs are so well paid is to come up with processes to prevent such things from happening in the first place.

The management team should be the first to be blamed when such incidents arise.

FWIW, Pieter Levels just started using Git last week. https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1327451757975375874

This is one-man who made > $1million a year.

"Twilio was a surprise acquirer. Many expected Segment to be picked off by one of the usual suspects like Adobe or Salesforce."

In terms of culture, Twilio would be a better fit, given their focus on developer evangelism in user acquisition which is similar to Segment's strategy. In fact, if you look at Sendgrid, which Twilio has acquired 2 years ago, it also adopts a similar strategy.

That happens if email is opened via clients like Thunderbird. For gmail, image will be served via google proxy servers.

"but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification"

It doesn't work for gmail users. Tracking pixel will only be fired the first time the email is opened. After that, images will be served via google proxy servers.

Source: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

Great! This sort of "interactive link" is polite and what I wish more websites would adopt instead of cluttering their site with fixed positioned widgets.

A good example is chat widget. Instead of using a fixed positioned chat widget that annoys your users (esp those on mobile), why not stick to good old "Contact Us" link that opens your chat widget only when it is clicked.

Messaging and live chat

Awesome - Didn't know about this trick. I'm reconfiguring most of the my extensions to this.

Gracias!

Great research! I'm a user of evernote web clipper and seeing that they're adding 3mb to every page that I'm using is extremely discouraging. My browse to clip ratio is around 1000:1 and I'm probably removing the extension after this.

Just wondering, can browser extensions codesplit their bundles? If it's possible, then it is really disappointing to see these large companies loading huge bundles on initial load.

Solarized Color Scheme - You spent more time looking at your code than you see your spouse. A good color scheme reduces fatigue especially when you are working through your code for long periods.

I think the movie is Snowpiercer? Great movie by the way.

In most cases, you can simply just return 204 status code (for empty response) to shave away the bytes used to serve 1X1 pixel.

The pixel is simply there to make the request.

I've worked with plenty of APIs (> 50). The biggest headaches I came across are bureaucratic stuffs rather than poor API designs. For example, there are vendors (like ConstantContact) that requires you to provide your credit card to get an account for API testing. You know what, they auto-bill your card after X number of days and require you to call them up to cancel your subscription. Because I'm on the other side of the world, I've to drop them a call in the middle of the night just to cancel billing.

Singaporean here - I don't think they are faked. It's just that we don't have strong opposition party. Many opposition parties here spent majority of their time complaining every single decision the government makes instead of making actual contribution to the society.

Thanks - you certainly made a good point. But there's one problem with enforcement of explicit sort and this the problem I constantly have with my projects.

By default, most tables that I have are sorted by "created_datetime" but this is the column that won't be shown to the end-user since most of the time it is redundant information for them. If we're implementing explicit sort, I need to add an additional column which would be useless to them.

Having the ability to easily reset back to default sort makes everything so much cleaner as an end-user (for me). I won't have to experience another "How the heck do I go back".

Regarding table columns sorting - are there anyone else who thinks that clicking on the same column the third time should remove the sort? For example:

  • First Click: Sort ASC

  • Second Click: Sort DESC

  • Third Click: Remove Column Sort

This allows me to go back to the initial state where the tables have been loaded. Currently, most data tables don't support "resetting" of column sorting and are implemented in this manner:

  • First Click: Sort ASC

  • Second Click: Sort DESC

  • Third Click: Sort ASC

Seems like an extension app rather than a built-in product which I think made alot sense since existing pure-play vendors like Klaviyo have a far superior product. Also, it gives merchants the options to evaluate email marketing tool on a more-even ground since releasing as an app means that it will be reviewed just like others.

"Sales are 95% about relationships and 5% about Product."

Seen this so many times - not just in sales but also in acquisition. Guy from startup joins MNC in decision making role, then proceeds to acquire startup.

Before anyone has any interest in replicating this - keep in mind that:

Trust is earned. Credibility is built.

Go long - don't create fake social proofs and ruin your own reputation. I can say with assurance that nobody in this thread will buy anything from OneTravel or their founders again.