DarrenDev

EU sovereign clouds are taking off right now - especially when it comes to sensitive data (government, healthcare, etc.). Lots of players moving into the space. The common denominator - nothing touches the US.

AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, Schwarz Digits, SAP

Canva - I used it for simple designs but ChatGPT is better

Grammarly - ChatGPT and Claude are way better, and much more customizable. If I were a human editor I'd be very worried.

On the flip side, using ChatGPT for diagrams made me pay for Mermaid. It might only be a one year subscription.

I don't know where the recent idea that em dashes are difficult to type came from. MS Word automates turning a hyphen into an em dash as you type in the same way that it converts "teh" into "the" and has done so for as long as I can remember.

I find the whole AI / em dash thing frustrating as I used to used them all the time. They have meaning that hyphens don't. I've now had to stop using them because they are seen as AI generated, and structure my sentences differently as a result.

Have you considered slashing features in order to speed up your MVP release? Our own "must have" features are often not must haves for users. I was in the same boat a few years back and released a cut down version missing what I thought were must have features. Many years and 1,000+ users later no one has ever requested the missing "key features."

I switched off sales of my last desktop app a couple of months ago. It was still bringing in sales of about $600 a month, but it felt like a weight hanging around my neck. Despite shutting it down I expect I'll still get a couple of support emails a month for the next 10 years.

We're building a desktop / SaaS app right now that we'll be selling using a SaaS model. A combination of desktop app built with Electron and a web app for managing accounts and teams. I'd never touch a "once off" pricing model again.

Despite being a dev of 20+ years, I use Wordpress as a non-technical user, hosted on a paid for plan on Wordpress.com. I never deploy, never have to upgrade, never have to troubleshoot issues. Whatever monolithic and legacy complexity is part of Wordpress I don't see it.

I use it regularly - 3 or more posts a week - and it's as fast as I could hope for. So easy to create and edit posts. So many plugins for just about everything I want to do. And professional templates - with support - are so cheap I'm almost embarrassed to be paying for it.

I think a lot of people see Wordpress as it was back in the early 2000s, when amateur bloggers were liking each others posts and getting comments was the goal. And fighting spam was a daily chore.

I see it as a simple publishing platform where I can focus on writing and not on infrastructure. I really don't care what's under the covers. If your better solution is any more complicated than me signing up, I'm not interested.

LinkedIn have an automated rater for applications. Any that their tool consider to not be a fit is automatically tagged "Not a fit" and color coded accordingly, making it very obvious. It's probably based on the location of the applicant Vs the location the job specifies and the skills on their LinkedIn profile.

My own experience when posting jobs was that 70%+ of applicants were rated "Not a fit" and that it was an accurate rating.

This means that when the ad poster goes in to look at the applicants they can discount a huge proportion from the start as the list is already triaged.

100s does not really mean 100s.

I don't have a great story, but from my own experience I see the key as being a willingness to step outside your comfort zone. Do (if not embrace) the things you tend to avoid doing as a lone developer.

An example: I never liked meetings with new people, but I knew I needed to talk to people in my industry about what I was building and about what their problems were.

So I set up "office hours". Zoom meetings where I talk to one or two people a week. Randomly, anyone in my industry who wants to talk to me can book a slot using Calendly.

I promote this occasionally on LinkedIn and on my website, and it's led to many interesting conversations and collaborations.

Same with making videos, giving presentations, putting yourself out there and telling people what you're working on.

Generally, do (some of) the things you don't want to do.

Fastspring or Paddle.

Keep it just for the email addresses and accounts you may have opened using those email addresses. If you don't, there'll be something you've missed and you won't find out for 6 months. But drop the website.

I have a number of zombie domains that I keep just for that reason.

- Zero to One, Peter Thiel

Always makes me feel that I’m not ambitious enough. And that too many smart people are in the wrong industry (finance).

- The Dip, Seth Godin

Don’t give up. Unless you’re in a cul-de-sac.

- Obviously Awesome, April Dunford

Your competitor is often not who you think it is.