marwann

Has everyone really become so stupid now?

I wouldn't mistake stupidity for ignorance. A lot of "tech-sensitive", yet non-technical people are using agents/vibe coding these days. Their level of understanding is very basic ("JSON is structured data", "I need to reformat this to fit my need"), but they wouldn't get that the best way of doing things does not necessitate burning tokens.

I believe many non-technical people are spinning up AI agents nowadays without having a basic understanding of what happens behind the scenes, and usually, with no interest in learning. They prompt, watch the agent work and see the magic, without questioning the structure even a little.

I don't think we should blame them, as they are non-technical, but either educate them or put guardrails at the system prompt level.

My European stack: - OVH for object storage, domain names and simple Wordpress websites - Scalingo/3DS Outscale for PaaS (looking for alternatives here!) - Mailjet used to be EU but they've been acquired by Mailgun - don't know if that's an issue. Brevo is okay as an email service provider but they could be way better.

I am working on a document collection app called Superdocu (https://www.superdocu.com), currently adding automated validation features for specific document types.

Good to see Frenchies/Europeans innovate for more sovereignty

Very impurrtant work

https://www.superdocu.com

Trying to make document collection a breeze for the last 5 years. Still not quite there, although we're making progress.

Neat. You might want to either filter words or blur NSFW pictures that were generated :P

I wanted to spend less time looking for my next trip and decided to create myself a Chrome Extension that shows me cheap flights at random dates from the nearest airport.

Finally decided to submit it on both Chrome and Firefox [1] extension stores. The app is made with Vanilla JS and jQuery and is currently translated into English and French.

I used Skyscanner's API for the flights, Google's Geocoding API to get the location, Lufthansa's API to get the nearest airport IATA code and Unsplash for the background pictures.

I'm pretty sure there is much to improve, so looking for feedback!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/your-next-tri...

Site is minimalist, which is something I like. I wish the search would accept synonyms for technologies/languages, like "js" or "node.js" would be accepted for respectively Javascript and Node.

Thanks a bunch!

Thanks. Do you know more about the actual flaws of the architecture in the early days?

As I recall, they used to be hosted on Akamai and in colocation centres, but I don't know much about the rest.

Didn't know about Friendster's backstory, thanks. Did JSP make the site so slow it made people flee to Myspace?

I used to work a lot with Wordpress in the past, but as projects tend to be more and more specific, I found Middleman[1] more flexible and for structured content (eg. directories) or for generating pages automatically, using a YAML structure is very convenient.

For my online shop, I use Shopify[2] as it is a side project and I did not want to spend a lot of time writing / setting it up. Shopify proves very convenient and includes a blog if needed.

[1] Middleman - https://middlemanapp.com

[2] Shopify - https://www.shopify.com

The border between hilarious and disgusting is sometimes tenuous. When I read these comments by MBAs or any other type of "educated" people, I wonder what their student loans helped them with

Just made a small calculation: for 3,000,000 subscribers, our costs are moving from 1,500$ to about 13,000$ if we go through Mailchimp. I don't understand why they're making us pay for only storing an email list.

It's both about local laws and local accounting customs. They are so different depending on countries that you almost have to develop a separate system if you want to enter another country. Or you keep it so simple that the value added is close to none...

I suggest you have a look at this article we wrote about Slack as a platform: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...

I think it's hard to give people the big picture of what the thought process looked inside the company in a 5-mn read. We've cut through some info to focus on a unique message, but we know our target market, researched as much as we could, conducted (literally) hundreds of interviews, tried to determine painpoints, use/edge cases, etc.

It's a decision that may seem obvious for many, many product categories.

But I can assure you that regarding anything finance-wise, it's simply impossible to launch an app that that complies with local laws everywhere at the same time, especially without proper funding. Take Quickbooks, it exists for 5-10 years, and they're still postponing their launch in the French market. We've gone global since then, and we've grown in 10 weeks way faster than we did in 1 year.

The app was only distributed on the French app stores, which is why you may not have heard about it. We're not trying to prevent anyone from creating mobile apps, but after spending a year doing so (and sure, making many mistakes on the way), we're just sharing our humble piece of advice

Yes they do, and I think it's also because of the "emotional" factors. People talk to a bot and have this feeling they have a personal assistant guiding them through the process.

Sorry you feel this way. It would be nice to update the article with actual figures indeed.

And if I had to squeeze down the article, that'd be : "if you app doesn't imply repeated use, doesn't leverage context, takes room in your phone, if you don't have the necessary resources to develop it and update it on all platforms, and if it has to be integrated to a professional workflow for many users at once, don't go for it"

If all of our users were like you, we would have kept it I guess, but figures showed batch uses once a month instead

True that. Before moving to an "invisible app", we were developing integrations for such accounting software, and we had an email forwarding function as Uber was also a big part of the expenses filed on our app. Still, a SaaS like ours had a hard time living only on mobile, and through our own mobile app

I think you're one of the exceptions, figures showed people were mostly opening it once a month, and not contextually as we wanted them to. We're still on mobile, but without an app now! More about it here: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/there-s-no-app-for-that-sla...

Every user received a monthly reminder, and it did help, but having an idle app on your phone for the other 29 days didn't, unfortunately

So this is basically how satellites already work, except the energy would be sent back to Earth through microwaves. What would be the room taken on Earth?

I'd love to see the ability to paste without using the keyboard too. Is that something possible/on the roadmap?

The part about distributed teams might help our company as well. I wished I spoke Russian now!

It's normal to check what the competition does, but in the case of a company performing really well, it's always of use to have the brightest people with you, not against; even when you know you can crush them with money & reputation..

I'll think about becoming an advisor, looks like a great way to have a better footprint on society.