- If you enjoy these types of stories from video game industry veterans, I recommend the My Perfect Console podcast.
- 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.
- 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.
- Off-topic, but unlike the example pricing plans, don’t make your SaaS’s “standard” plan $10/month. If you want a place to start, start with $50/month.
Or, as Patrick McKenzie used to tell us over and over, “charge more”.
(Yes, yes, I know some situations, customers, product, thinking, etc are different. But with broad brushstrokes, my advice is to not even entertain such a low price.)
- > Thankfully, CloudFlare is able to handle the traffic with a simple WAF rule and 444 response to reduce the outbound traffic.
This is from your own post, and is almost the best answer I know of.
I recommending you configure a Cloudflare WAF rule to block the bot - and then move on with your life.
Simply block the bot and move on with your life.
- The story behind the Fernflower Java decompiler is here: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2024/11/in-memory-of-stiver/
- You could see this coming with his voice weakening over the years. It’s nice that he was able to continue for as long as he did.
My weekly dose of highbrow-ness from the UK:
1. In Our Time
2. University Challenge
I highly recommend the back catalog In Our Time if you want some good brain fodder on an amazingly wide range of subjects.
- Something missing from the article:
For the type of cache usage described in the article, cache lookups are almost always O(1). This is because a cache value is retrieved for a specific key.
Whereas db queries are often more complicated and therefore take longer. Yes, plenty of db queries are fetching a row by a key, and therefore fast. But many queries use a join and a somewhat complicated WHERE clause.
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.