171–180 of 208 posts
Here's a brief list! * Wakeup.io - Simple Phone Wake-up Calls @ https://wakeup.io and it is fully automated and runs itself with actually really good profits. It was built in 2-3 days. * GetProve, Simple Phone Verification @ https://getprove.com and it is fully automated and runs itself with again, really good profits. It was built in a week or so. * Teelaunch, Kickstarter/Indiegogo Fulfillment Service (exited/sold)…
https://rebrickable.com - A LEGO database that shows you which sets you can build from your existing collection, also includes thousands of fan-submitted designs. I built the original site in a few months, but have been steadily expanding it for 5 years now.
That's cool, I think there are probably several fields that you can apply this approach to - the obvious one which has been done is cooking. I.e. if you have so many ingredients, what can you make that also maximises your use of leftovers etc. I wonder if electronics would work the same way. I have a lot of random crap in my component bin, odd sensors and things that need projects. I guess a curated list of e.g. proj…
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Sorry to hear that. I'm sure, though, that the Sauce folks would want to hear more detail about the issues you saw.
It was just really slow. No real bugs, just insanely slow and difficult to use because of it.
Currently building AppsUlagam.com (apps world) as a mobile app discovery site for apps with Tamil language content.
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Still scraping. If you use their API, you need to submit your app for evaluation and there are a bunch of restrictions and other things you need to comply with. I'd need to do a whole lot of work and remove some of the features. The level of effort has never felt worth it. It means there are occasional breakages every 6 months or so but it's usually the work of half an hour to fix it and push out an update. My users…
Can I ask you what you are using to scrape with? I am finding that Amazon's anti-bot strategies change every so often, so unless I use phantom.js or Selenium, I have to change odd things like headers and various things every so often. I finally reworked my code to just download the html files using phantom.js and parse it with perl so that I can run this on a headless server, and this method hasn't broken lately. I f…
With regards to the anti-bot problem, this isn't running on any server, it's running on the user's computer. The number of requests they make per second doesn't seem to trigger any anti-bot measures. I'm just using plain Java URLConnections.
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Could you go deeper into this? The fact that you got bullied by a F100 company means you had the potential to go big, what was your project about?
My product was not a competitive threat. It operated within their ecosystem and was only used to help people give them money faster. A lot of people were pretty confused when they decided to shut it down. The project's operation depended on accessing factual information published on the F100's web site (things like event times, maintenance status, etc). Since this is data that originates with the F100, there is no re…
Excellent analogy. Totally agree. The reality is that big companies just bully whomever they don't like and simply win because all they need to do is threaten.
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I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g. restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything. I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over time). I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tr…
I'm always on call, technically Do you have a partner who can do support when you need time away? I run a small game website. A couple of years ago it experienced an outage while I was away from home on a 2-day climbing trip. I didn't learn about it until I checked email the first evening. It was a terrible feeling to realize I'd been out having fun, and the site had been down for most of the day. I had to drive home…
4 months. I built a Slack bot called Standup Jack ( https://standupjack.com ). It's a ton of work upfront but if you launch early, keep an open dialog with your users, iterate on their feedback and keep your costs low, it's a nice way to earn some side income each month. Udemy is a pretty easy way to start since they do the marketing for you (for a pretty big cut).
How does Udemy market for you? All I knew was they were a course-learning company. Would love to hear!
1) Direct marketing - Udemy drives a ton of traffic to their website, so people just naturally see your course(s) and buy it.
2) Affiliate marketing - Udemy advertises your course(s) via things like Google Adwords. You make a very measly cut on these sales.
3) Personal marketing - You can promote your course through your own channels / reputation. You make like 98% of the sale when people purchase it this way.
Without doing your own marketing, you can easily earn decent side income though.
I wrote https://leanpub.com/trellodojo in about 4 months to start, and periodically spend several hours a month updating it. It earns ~100 to ~300 a month. I do have some ideas for software and other digital content that I can't seem to get traction on. Reading the rest of this is motivating though. Keep up the good work everybody!
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I learned early on, it's all about proactive monitoring, 'self healing' (e.g. restart on fail) services, and simplicity in everything. I've been running between 300-500 Apache Solr search cores continuously for almost 5 years, starting with 1.4, migrating up to now 4.10.4 (5 and 6 are in the works), all with around 99.98% uptime (averaged on all the servers over time). I have detailed logs and per-search-core stat tr…
I'm always on call, technically Do you have a partner who can do support when you need time away? I run a small game website. A couple of years ago it experienced an outage while I was away from home on a 2-day climbing trip. I didn't learn about it until I checked email the first evening. It was a terrible feeling to realize I'd been out having fun, and the site had been down for most of the day. I had to drive home…
That goes along with the 'keep it simple' philosophy; since the service has a very small public API and surface area, it's easy enough to diagnose issues quickly with limited analysis of log data and simple monitoring.
But no, I don't have any partner actively, but I do have a contingency/succession plan in case anything would happen to me (for the sake of my customers).