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Breaking Down The Subscription Vs One-Time Purchase Debate

Evaluate immediate value vs long-term commitment * Customers with one-time purchases only need to evaluate its immediate value in relation to the cost. Subscriptions, on the other hand, require evaluation of the long-term value and can feel like a lifetime commitment. * Companies rarely encourage users to cancel after

Early thoughts on marketing from a developer

I am a developer and have built several products in the past. As creatives, we have the power to make incredible things, to solve our own problems and to turn ideas into reality. A common mistake made by developers building products though is that they never prioritise marketing. It doesn&

Lessons Learned From Failing My First Product Launch

Last Sunday, I launched my first ever product to the world. I've made several products before this one, but a fear of failure and perfectionism always prevented me from hitting the launch button. Looking back, I realize those fears only inhibited my learning and cost me potential revenue.

When life gives you lemons

I've always believed that there is no problem that exists without a solution. The solution might not be perfect, it might not be immediate, and it might not be ideal, but a problem without a solution is something that simply doesn't exist. Life is hard. It&

Beginning on a new Micro-SaaS journey

This year, I have decided to finally launch a few products. I've made several products in the past, but I never went ahead with launching them, always waiting for them to be "perfect", or, at least, having a pretty wild definition of "MVP". Some

SSO (Single Sign-on) between web app and Chrome Extension

I recently implemented authentication for a Chrome extension, and it was interesting.

Tiny Habits

Book Name Tiny Habits Author Dr. BJ Fogg Published 2019 Started Reading 5th May 2022 Finished Reading In Progress

How (and why) to archive web pages

The internet is a transient medium of information. Our reliance on the internet is greater than ever, for: Sourcing knowledge - from trivia to information essential to doing our work Entertainment - YouTube videos, Netflix, and eveything in between Staying Connected - With existing friends, making new friendships, finding our communities With so

Reflecting on 2020 and Plans for 2021

2020 has been a real roller-coaster of a year for all of us, and it's taught us a lot about ourselves–when you're sitting at home, you can't escape your thoughts. Sure, there were a lot of bad things, but let's

Parsing parameters with special characters in Ruby Grape

Recently I was building an API where I had to accept URLs as parameters in Grape routes. I URL-encoded the URL, but either my request would hit the wrong route, or it wouldn't capture anything after the second . in the URL, because it tries to parse that

Using default Rails authentication with a Grape API

Recently, I was working on a Chrome extension for a web app where I wanted to share the login state between the extension and the web app. Generally you'd roll with a token-based authentication system or relying on API keys, but neither of those approaches are acceptable

Considering different strategies for archiving web pages

I'm working on a project that has an aspect of archiving web pages for posterity. This is to fight the problem of link rot. There's already sites like archive.org and archive.today. But the problem with them is that they save the content as they

How to learn deep learning on the cheap

Deep learning is something that needs a discrete graphics card. Running deep learning programs on a CPU is just too slow, it can take days upon days to run even the most basic deep learning programs on a CPU. Also, CUDA by NVIDIA is what's most often used,

Why I don't blog on Medium anymore - and you shouldn't either

I've blogged on Medium in the past, and was at one point even paying them every month for their membership. They have a large network of high quality blogs, all in one place, and they have one of the best writing experiences on the web. But I will

How to use iFramely as a Node library

iFramely is a service that can be used to extract data from web pages from meta tags, opengraph tags, twitter cards, and to generate oEmbeds when possible. I've put some examples of the same below. iFramely provides this functionality in a subscription service online, which I'd

How to detect if a page is an article

If you've ever used a service like Pocket or Instapaper (Safari and Firefox also provide this, both powered by the now-defunct Readability parser code), you will have used a feature called "Readability" or "Reader View". What is does is that it takes a

mkdir -p and file copying in Node.js

mkdir -p, wherein you create a directory, including all its parent directories if they don't exist, is functionality that is not provided out of the box by Node, but is required fairly commonly. There's a Node package node-fs-extra that comes to our rescue! To

How to disable console.log in JavaScript

Sometimes you might want to disable console.log in JavaScript, because, say, you have a library performing excessive logging, or for any other reason. This is how you can do it: console.log = function () {}; In case you want to preserve the console.log functionality under a different function, you can

Media category classifications

There's this very interesting system for classifying the category a piece of text belongs to, called IPTC Media Topics. It helps you determine what subject topic a particular document / text piece belongs to. Here's an example of the hierarchy categorization offered by Media Topics: Media Topics

JavaScript - how to "await" in a callback

With ES6, JavaScript has added some powerful new features, one of them being async/await. What async/await basically does is it lets you write asynchronous code that looks like synchronous code, making it much easier to reason about, and saving you from the callback pyramid of doom and promise

Using libraries from one language in another language

I was recently faced with a challenge where I was building an application in Ruby, and for one specific task that I wanted to accomplish, there were no libraries for it in Ruby, there were only libraries in JavaScript. Obviously I could not rewrite the entire application in JavaScript for

JavaScript - One language to rule them all!

If there is one programming language that you should learn that will cover the highest amount of bases for you, which one should it be? JavaScript, of course! JavaScript is still the only choice you have when building front-end web applications, although WebAssembly is changing that. We have NodeJS,

web dev

Meteor framework review

Over the last few years, I've worked extensively with the Meteor web framework. After developing and maintaining a production Meteor application for several years, here's my take on it: The Good Get started quickly Meteor is a really quick framework to get started with. Normally in

Reduce MySQL memory usage for low-end servers

Are you trying to run some MySQL based software on a server with low memory (AWS micro, Vultr micro) and keep running out of memory? If you're running this application on a server with very low memory, it's safe to assume you don't have

How to add syntax highlighting to Posthaven

I recently gave Posthaven a shot for hosting my blog. While ultimately I decided to go with Ghost instead due to the lack of a few features (syntax highlighting, custom URLs, image headers, markdown support), I tried to dirty my hands and hack together a solution that would allow me