Founder's blog

Your SaaS app is an attack target

I'm really pissed.

I just spent a week fighting some spam bots that were registering fake trial accounts in my app. Tens of thousands or trial signups.

Emotions aside, what’s wrong with the new MacBookPro

I like Apple. But I guess this is going to be the first time in 10 years I'm not buying a new MacBook Pro. Not because of the USB-C annoyance everyone's complaining about (after all, you have to lean into the future, quoting Jeff Bezos, and to be honest, Apple - is the only company that can actually force users into a new technology).

Resolving issues with Android and Comodo SSL on IIS server

This is a technical post for developers who have issues with Comodo SSL certificates on IIS webservers are sometimes showing "non-secure" warnings in mobile Chrome browser on Android devices (and sometimes on Macs), while everything works perfectly on desktop computers and iOS. We've had this issue in the past - some of the customers who use the hosted helpdesk app were complaining about similar issues

Target="_blank" - the most underestimated vulnerability ever

People using target='_blank' links usually have no idea about this curious fact:

Tricking idlers into becoming CS-badasses

Ages ago, when I was still studying computer science back in Russia, me and all the other "future engineers" in my class were wasting hours and hours playing "Quake I" deathmatch over the network in the computer lab (instead of actually doing the lab work).

Republishing on Medium: duplicate content, SEO and "rel=canonical"

Many bloggers and marketers recommend republishing your blog on Medium because it gets your content in front of new audiences and apparently that works really well.

Constraints are good

Every time our server experiences some hiccups - read-timeouts, CPU-overloads, out-of-memory overflows etc. - I'm tempted to throw more money into our Amazon account and forget about it. That's what most companies do anyway.

On Microconf

Microconf in only one month away. And I've already booked a nice tall Triumph Tiger 800 for a day-long ride from L.A. to Vegas (visiting every dirt-bike trail I can find along the way of course).

Tricks to speed up your AWS EC2 Windows server I/O

Say you have a pretty general Windows server, that runs Microsoft IIS (webserver), MS SQL (database engine) and probably some basic stuff, like SMTP, SSH etc. etc.

Here are some I/O performance hacks I came up with when trying to optimize our Amazon EC2 instances on Windows

SaaS startups - Beware of Spammers!

TL;DR if your SaaS app has some sort of email-sending functionality in it - beware of spammers who will register trial accounts massively and use it to send spam.