Founder's blog

How I learned to stop worrying and wrote my own memory-cache

Here I am, writing about performance optimization again. I'm a performance junkie. Constantly monitoring and investigating bottlenecks for our SaaS helpdesk webapp is my favorite thing ever. And I'm proud to say that with thousands of clients, even some really big ones, our app's backend process rarely goes higher than 5-6% CPU. Even during the peak load times which happen around 2-3pm UTC - the time when "Americas are waking up while Europe is still very active".

How to Hide Tethering from Your Mobile Operator

TLDR:

1. Use a secure VPN to prevent DPI
2. On your laptop, change packet TTL to 65 (iOS default 64 plus one).

Improving C# Performance with Span<T>

Whenever I have some free time on my hands I love making our helpdesk app faster. The newest C# and .NET Core releases come with so many performance oriented features that I've been waiting to play with, specifically the new datatype called Span<T>.

SQL is the most long lasting skill in tech

In January 2020, right before COVID hit, a question has popped up at the HackerNews front page:

"Which technology is worth learning in 2020?"

Cross-Post: Migrating a 1TB database from Win to Linux with no downtime

For those of you who don't follow our company blog, we've just published another "tech porn" story on migrating a huge database from Linux to Windows with no downtime. Check it out.

Speeding up a huge multi-tenant SaaS database

Here's a little story of how we sped up our SaaS backend with a one-liner magic silver bullet

Reasons NOT to upgrade ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core (but you will have to anyway)

I know, I know, .NET Core is the future of .NET, and "cross-platform blah-blah", and "high-performance and scalable blah-blah", and also "microservices!!! containers!!!" etc. Even more - I understand that's it's inevitable. But still. Consider this an angry post on what's wrong with upgrading from ASP.NET Framework to ASP.NET Core:

System.Drawing vs SkiaSharp benchmark

This is a ridiculously short post for .NET devs looking to compare System.Drawing with SkiaSharp (the fastest open-source alternative).

What selling to Enterprises REALLY looks like

BIGTECH: Hello, we would like to buy an on-premise version of your software.

ME: Oh! Cool, here is the payment link

Generating product ideas - mixing vertical and horizontal

Generating product ideas via meshing or "multiplying" two existing products into one - is a popular creativity exercise. They even teach this at Stanford, at the product innovation course. But as with all techniques - it's tricky.