stevoski

As a database person, this was hard to read. I wanted to find out what the problems are and solve them.

A db table with only 10k rows? Even a full table scan should be extremely fast.

And with SQLite - which I assumed runs in-process, but even if not, surely is running on the same physical server? Faster still.

Of course, the magic phrase in my head is “create index”.

I hope Julia posts an update!

Edit: I highly suspect the “slow deletes” problem is a classic “n+1” problem suffered by many ORM users, until they come to understand more about the underlying db interactions.

To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.

It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:

I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…

Congrats on writing a book, big accomplishment!

Thank you!

The point is that you must make sure your product has the “CarPlay” type of features in order to get new customers for whom those features are must-haves.

Beware of spending your time only on adding new “cupholder” style features, which make existing customers slightly happier but don’t attract new customers.

Especially be aware that when you launched your product X years ago, some of today’s “CarPlay”-style features didn’t even exist. Your current customers are not asking for them, because they are mostly happy with your product as it is.

If you only listen to what existing customers are asking for, you might not even realise that these new “CarPlay” features are stopping you from getting certain new customers.

I have a chapter in my book Kill the HiPPO titled “Cupholders vs CarPlay”.

The premise of the chapter is that some features in software are like CarPlay when looking for a new car - they become an important must-have for the buying decision - as opposed to “cupholder” features, those features which are a mere minor improvement for existing users.

https://killthehippo.com/

Linear was simple and fast. Unfortunately it is has become an example of creeping complexity.

They keep adding new features at a steady pace, each slowly making the UI more confusing.

We switched to Valkey after the Redis license kerfuffle happened, discovered we were saving money on our AWS bill, and have no motivation to go back to Redis.

So we’ve stayed with Valkey.

Actual SQL: joins, subqueries, window functions, query plans

And indexes. Many times in my career, adding the right SQL index has solved a serious performance problem.

I’ve been evaluating PostHog for our company.

I’ve now made our decision. We won’t be using them.

If they are going to position yourself as the non-slimy no-BS guys, they can’t pull this nonsense.

What are those decent alternatives to Akismet?

I went looking earlier this year and found nothing even close to Akismet on a price-to-effectiveness basis.

Well-written article, manages not to sound rant-y while describing the problem well.

I feel like part of the blame for the situation is that JavaScript has always lacked a standard library which contains the "atomic architecture" style packages. (A standard library wouldn't solve everything, of course.)

Flickr was the first site I saw where you could edit some text on the screen inline, without a complete page reload to get an “edit” form.

Today this is utterly ordinary. At the time, it was remarkable.

I think this “story” started when The Economist did a filler article about it. The Economist article was based on some pretty weak understanding and knowledge of Kiwis and their culture of spending time abroad.

From there the usual YouTube “experts” started stories on it. You know the type - they sound authoritative but they are basically regurgitating stuff from Wikipedia (or some Economist article) with some pretty screens and clickbaity thumbnails.

Ultimately, there’s nothing behind this story. As has been the case since Pakehas arrived, lots of Kiwis go abroad and spend lots of time abroad, some go back, and some don’t, and meanwhile NZ’s population continues to grow.

The trends grow and shrink based on relative health of the Aus and NZ economies.

My daughter spoke four languages at age 3. Not because she is gifted, but because she grew up in an immigrant environment. One language with me, another with my partner who speaks a different mother tongue than I do, and the two local languages where we live.

And this is utterly unremarkable where I live.

When we visit my family (who are all monolingual), they think she is a prodigy.

She’s not. She’s just a normal kid.

Oh those Slicehost articles were excellent. I felt like I could actually do my own sys admin by following them.

Fogbugz, if the first version even existed in 2000, was not a SaaS. Nor was Jira, by the way.

Both products were initially once-off purchases that you had to install and run on your own infrastructure, and with new, major versions packed with new features that you had to buy if you wanted, but could ignore if you didn’t.

The move to a SaaS model came years later for both products.

For many of us, the way we manage software projects has changed has changed so much since the days when Joel wrote this.

It was a different age, with different products. I’m sure there are still products built the old ways, but Joel was writing before SaaS and CI/CD and endless roadmaps.

What surprised me was how much the ugly first version taught me that planning never could.

Fred Brooks, author of “The Mythical Man Month” wrote an essay called “Plan to Throw One Away” in 1975.

He argues much what you’ve described.

Of course, in reality we seldom do actually throw away the first version. We’ve got the tools and skills and processes now to iterate, iterate, iterate.

“Damn”, this is good.

It takes me right back to 1998, making my first few web pages - with a hand-rolled index page. I probably used NotePad.

And how easy it was - I went from reading a “how to HTML” guide to having a page about whatever hobby I was into at the time in a single session. Can’t have been much more than an hour.

I guess I deployed via FTP, into the space my ISP provided.

A fine time to acknowledge Scott Adams’ remarkably simple and clear financial advice: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/

I think it is pretty good.

You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.

Right, but you can do a one-off purchase to get the product as it existed at the time. Instead they offered all future improvements in the price.

This is not sustainable once your customer growth dies down, as it eventually did.

As a fellow business owner, I’ll always feel bad when business owners need to make these types of decisions.

I bought Tailwind UI - I always thought it was a critically bad business decision from their end to keep giving me additional new stuff for free. It seemed to me that it should have been a subscription.

However, knowing nothing about the inside of their business, I have no idea how that would have affected their viability.

What a great writer!

Slightly off-topic, but when learning to speak a new language, it is helpful to actually speak the language as often as you can.

There are a couple of websites that make it easy to book short conversation practice with native speakers. The one I use to practice Spanish is italki.

I find the practice of actually speaking, no matter how badly, helps way more than any app.

If you enjoy these types of stories from video game industry veterans, I recommend the My Perfect Console podcast.

https://www.myperfectconsole.com/

I wrote up my thoughts on this into a longer post: https://killthehippo.com/posts/fix-bugs-or-add-new-features

I’m a strong believer in “fix bugs first” - especially in the modern age of “always be deploying” web apps.

(I run a small SaaS product - a micro-SaaS as some call it.)

We’ll stop work on a new feature to fix a newly reported bug, even if it is a minor problem affecting just one person.

Once you have been following a “fix bugs first” approach for a while, the newly discovered bugs tend to be few, and straight forward to reproduce and fix.

This is not necessarily the best approach from a business perspective.

But from the perspective of being proud of what we do, of making high quality software, and treating our customers well, it is a great approach.

Oh, and customers love it when the bug they reported is fixed within hours or days.

The premise of this article is 100% incorrect.

Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.

Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.

This is a good write-up.

If you’ve never run a hiring process, it’s hard to get a feel for just how difficult and time-consuming it is.

And risky - hiring someone wrong for the role is very expensive and disruptive. And yet more likely to happen that you’d think, even with a rigorous selection process.

I'm not writing from the POV of a consumer of software. I'm writing from the POV of a seller of software.

If you are selling software, don't be the person charging $10/month. It's hard to make that business work.

Be the person charging $50/month. It's still hard - any business is - but it's much easier to make a software business financially viable if you charge decent money.

Anyone used GitKraken?

I haven’t, but for reasons, I’m interested to hear about your experience with it.

Lots of people feel the same.

Which leads me to another piece of advice: don’t do B2C. Sell to businesses who will be far more willing to pay higher prices, will churn at a lower rate, and will - in general - require less support.