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Always attempt to scale vertically first

I spent the weekend fretting because one of my servers was basically being DOS'd by paying customers. During the outage I started thinking about the best way to scale and how I could make the code-base more efficient.

Linux top reported high load, in the 20's. Eventually I figured out …

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Today I lost a customer

Today I lost a customer.

I added some new code to LinkPeek to accept coupons and I didn't think of an edge case. This ended up creating an uncaught exception in my server side code which ultimatly served the newly subscribing customer an HTTP 500 error page.

The damage was …

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LinkPeek.com, webpage to image, was a by-product

tldr; When faced with pivoting or killing a project, take a good look at all possible by-products. Don't miss the hidden gem in a project's slag!

Last year I built yoursitemakesmebarf.com, a novelty web application which allowed anonymous link submission. The software would automatically take screenshots of submitted links …

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I'm petrified of launching my web application


I'm petrified of launching my web application because I'm fearful that I won't ...
  • acquire users
  • support my users well
  • scale in a timely manner
  • react quickly to feedback
  • monetize the application

But most of all I'm scared that nobody will like me. I'm scared of failure.

Now that I got …

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© Russell Ballestrini.