An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product • Hacker News Board

Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

#21

Post by kellyreid » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 12:25 AM UTC

Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to this. It's really valuable to have a community like HN, who have been here and done this all before. I took the advice of "get over it and just keep hacking" and have just emailed the first batch of beta testers.

I spent a while on the front-end so it feels more like a 'product'. That actually had a powerful emotional effect on me; now I look at it with pride. I know it's just a few lines of CSS and big pretty fonts, but it just 'feels' like its real now.

I got to watch a user see the site for the first time yesterday and watch him interact with it. It was a nice moment.

My hope is that, even if this guy launches a product before I do, that we'll steal the spotlight due to our size and existing customer base. We can also offer support and on-demand customization (for the biz customers).

Now I just have to hope that people will actually pay for this! They're paying for written content, so I can't imagine that they won't pay for this.

Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

#22

Post by kls » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 1:19 AM UTC

kellyreid wrote: post #18

kls wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you running a relational database? if so check all of your indexing. Unless you are doing some pretty crazy stuff indexing should reduce those queries to milliseconds.

Yes, mySQL. I'm sure I've made loads of mistakes in structuring things. I don't know where to start checking my indexes for mistakes though. Any resources you can point me at that are somewhat newbie friendly?

First thing to do is look at you where and order/group by clauses almost all of the items listed after them should have an index on them. Many should have a common index on the columns together, if they are used together a lot to filter information.

Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

#23

Post by kellyreid » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 4:17 AM UTC

kls wrote: post #22

kellyreid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, mySQL. I'm sure I've made loads of mistakes in structuring things. I don't know where to start checking my indexes for mistakes though. Any resources you can point me at that are somewhat newbie friendly?

First thing to do is look at you where and order/group by clauses almost all of the items listed after them should have an index on them. Many should have a common index on the columns together, if they are used together a lot to filter information.

hmm. that makes a lot of sense. can you suggest some reading that can help me understand which types to use? I'm almost entirely self-taught on SQL so the result is "functional" code that's just not well-designed or optimal

Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

#24

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 4:52 PM UTC

kellyreid wrote: post #23

kls wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thing to do is look at you where and order/group by clauses almost all of the items listed after them should have an index on them. Many should have a common index on the columns together, if they are used together a lot to filter information.

hmm. that makes a lot of sense. can you suggest some reading that can help me understand which types to use? I'm almost entirely self-taught on SQL so the result is "functional" code that's just not well-designed or optimal

[deleted]

Re: An Obscure Competitor is Giving Away My Product

#25

Post by kls » Thu, Dec 08, 2011, 4:52 PM UTC

kellyreid wrote: post #23

kls wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thing to do is look at you where and order/group by clauses almost all of the items listed after them should have an index on them. Many should have a common index on the columns together, if they are used together a lot to filter information.

hmm. that makes a lot of sense. can you suggest some reading that can help me understand which types to use? I'm almost entirely self-taught on SQL so the result is "functional" code that's just not well-designed or optimal

I don't do much mySQL but indexing should be similar to other platforms, I found this slide deck that covers the basics for mySQL http://www.slideshare.net/osscube/indexing-the-mysql-index-k... . It will get you started down the path and from there you can use Google to expand on the concepts. At it's basis though indexing is pretty easy, it makes a map of items that are used to filter a query, think of them as shortcuts to the rows you are looking for. If there is no index their is no map and therefore the DB has to table spool through each record to find it. Composite indexes are where you have two or more columns that need to be search on, so say you have a WHERE gender = 'M' and age = 18 an composite index builds a map for both columns together. So you may have multipal indexes on your table based on your requirements, you may have a single index on gender to improve a query that gets all males in the system, while you may also have an index on age and gender to aid in querying all males that are 18. Most DB have a index tuning engine, that when turned on will analyze queries that come in and make recommendation as to how to tune the DB. I have not used mySQL in a long time so I don't know if they do, if so it would be worth, turning it on, running through the entirety of your app and collecting the data.

If you need further recommendations, just hit me up on Skype, and I can give you a hand in real time, it will be much easier than using HN to help you out. My info is in my profile.