Just a comment on the site, why is the text so big? I had to zoom out to 60% to make reading comfortable on a laptop.
Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
81–90 of 142 posts
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#82Side note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?! I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable. This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen. When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong. Is it unreasonable…
The beauty of web clients is that you can control the font size if it looks bad on your device.
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#83Just a comment on the site, why is the text so big? I had to zoom out to 60% to make reading comfortable on a laptop.
I can second that. It looks fine on mobile, but awful on my work Macbook. Head's up to the author, you might want to check your CSS.
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#84I’m going to be cynical and applaud the author at one of the most effective S.E.O. efforts I have seen lately: including his own app on a list of effective and well-curated apps for startups.
That is brilliant. Here is a list of 10 experts in their field. #5 Self.
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#85If you feel trapped in Heroku or Netlify and you have a somewhat technical background I wrote an article recently on how to escape them using a DO droplet and Nginx. $200 a month seems high to me for what it is. https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a...
$200/mo sounds like a lot, but you have to realize your solution also incurs some serious operational/mental costs esp when you have more than one project. Where every successive project you develop does thing slightly different as you improve, and every time you ssh into a given project server you go `cat ~/README.md` to remember all the idiosyncrasies with this specific project and its deployment. And you still don't have a solution for things like logging and piping logs to a service like PaperTrail. And your deploys have downtime, and if you have a zero-downtime solution you will likely have to debug it here and there, or figure out why your rollback broke.
How many people running their own DO droplet even have a convenient way
One of the main perks of Heroku that makes it worth the cost imo is having a standard way to do everything whether you have one or 100 projects. You certainly don't have to go all the way in either, you can use Heroku just for your app servers and then host the rest of your infra on AWS like your DB (RDS).
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#86Just a comment on the site, why is the text so big? I had to zoom out to 60% to make reading comfortable on a laptop.
That's weird, I've never ever heard someone complain that a font was too big to be comfortable to read before. Do you have any sense what about it makes it more uncomfortable for you? Small fonts are easy to explain.
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mentality of DIY and self hosting is the default for most hackers, and in my opinion its the number 1 thing holding back most engineers who build businesses. I have a buddy who’s an amazing engineer, he takes pride in doing everything himself and spent years building a platform from the ground up. Elegant, fully automated, built in his favorite languages and frameworks. 3 years in it makes 50k a year. I have anot…
One is an engineer, the other is a businessman (salesman and fund raiser).
One is someone that over engineer, the other know where to put time and money to maximize returns.
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#88Side note, but why on earth is the body text set to 35 px?! I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable. This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen. When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong. Is it unreasonable…
The beauty of web clients is that you can control the font size if it looks bad on your device.
I already do, for what is the average body text size across mainstream sites.
There's nothing beautiful about individual blogs choosing text sizes wildly outside of the mainstream, so that I have to adjust my zoom on them individually. That's just an annoyance.
Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#89Just a comment on the site, why is the text so big? I had to zoom out to 60% to make reading comfortable on a laptop.
That's weird, I've never ever heard someone complain that a font was too big to be comfortable to read before. Do you have any sense what about it makes it more uncomfortable for you? Small fonts are easy to explain.
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Re: Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
#90My biggest concern is being dependent on these systems, the systems changing, and it breaking the process. I have the mentality of self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and imo more reliable. Most these services have a learning curve anyway. Are the services really worth it?
The mentality of DIY and self hosting is the default for most hackers, and in my opinion its the number 1 thing holding back most engineers who build businesses. I have a buddy who’s an amazing engineer, he takes pride in doing everything himself and spent years building a platform from the ground up. Elegant, fully automated, built in his favorite languages and frameworks. 3 years in it makes 50k a year. I have anot…
One of the problems that a lot of engineers have is failing to recognize that their time has a cost. Spending 4 extra hours of your own time setting up a mail server that will cost you $5/month to run instead of paying $10 per month for Office 365 or some other service is not really saving you money because that initial 4 hours of labor is time you could've spent doing other things for the business. It's not free time.
I find it really helps to put a dollar value on an hour of my time. In that context, if 1 hour of my time is worth $75 and I've spent 4 hours setting up this mail server, I've spent $300 on my labor in addition to the $60/year for the cost of the server. Obviously this doesn't work in all cases but it really helps me determine when it's worth it for me to spend my time doing something and when it's better to outsource it.