Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
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Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#2This seems to be the same talk given back in March 2010 and discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140596
Regardless, useful points worth keeping in mind.
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#3Great post.
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#4This seems to be the same talk given back in March 2010 and discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140596 Regardless, useful points worth keeping in mind.
Looking at this list again it makes me think that HN is not in the category of web sites Fred is talking about. It's obviously successful, but it doesn't follow a lot of these recommendations.
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#5Why is REST relevant to a web apps success?
In the comments he mentions "it makes the app shareable on blogs, email, social media if every resource/page has its own URL". That's true, unless of course when 75% of your URLs are behind authentication, which is true with every paid app.
So the connection between sharing and REST doesn't make much sense.
Why not just say: make it easy to share? Or provide clean URLs for APIs?
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#6Why is REST relevant to a web apps success? In the comments he mentions "it makes the app shareable on blogs, email, social media if every resource/page has its own URL". That's true, unless of course when 75% of your URLs are behind authentication, which is true with every paid app. So the connection between sharing and REST doesn't make much sense. Why not just say: make it easy to share? Or provide clean URLs for…
I think all he meant by REST was "Have an read/write api"
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#7Interesting article about principles for designing a successful web app... if you're the only user. There are zero references to security mentioned at all. As a security engineer, this bothers me a little bit.
A lot of people don't understand that security holes in their applications aren't usually caused by a 0day in their framework, but instead sloppy security practices in the application itself. I break web applications for a living, and although I appreciate the consistent business, entrepreneurs and developers on Hacker News should understand that a critical hole will cripple their business.
Take some time before you let other people use your app (other than internal testing) and do a few simple checks:
- Am I sanitizing user-supplied input in my application? Can I throw a ' in a userid form, or will it break my SQL statements?
- If I put ''"; in the search bar, and view source, are > and - Am I relying on security through obscurity? This is a big one. "Oh, no one will find the hardcoded password in this world-readable configuration file six directories deep" is how infrasctructures get destroyed.
- Am I handling credit card data myself? Do I need to be PCI-DSS compliant?
These few questions will prevent 90% of XSS, SQL injection and CSRF attacks if you carry them out thoroughly. Don't realease a buggy webapp just to get hacked.
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#8Why is REST relevant to a web apps success? In the comments he mentions "it makes the app shareable on blogs, email, social media if every resource/page has its own URL". That's true, unless of course when 75% of your URLs are behind authentication, which is true with every paid app. So the connection between sharing and REST doesn't make much sense. Why not just say: make it easy to share? Or provide clean URLs for…
I think all he meant by REST was "Have an read/write api"
I agree. Eat your own dog food. Use your own API. If you aren't doing that, in most spaces, then there's more friction to scaling.
Course technically it doesn't _have_ to be REST, but that's the buzz of the now.
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#9Interesting article about principles for designing a successful web app... if you're the only user. There are zero references to security mentioned at all. As a security engineer, this bothers me a little bit. A lot of people don't understand that security holes in their applications aren't usually caused by a 0day in their framework, but instead sloppy security practices in the application itself. I break web applic…
He's defining success in terms of potential popularity. I think security is important, but empirically, security seems irrelevant to most apps' popularity. Many apps have stayed popular after major security breaches.
Re: Fred Wilson's 10 Golden Principles for Successful Web Apps
#10This seems to be the same talk given back in March 2010 and discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1140596 Regardless, useful points worth keeping in mind.
It was the same talk, but re-given yesterday at Toronto DemoCamp #27. Fred mentioned that he had given it a few months back in NYC.