Founder's blog

Finding first customers and increasing sales - Indiehackers followup

I have received dozens of emails after my recent IndieHackers interview and this is just awesome. Nothing I like more than chatting with fellow entrepreneurs.

Fastest way to generate URLs in an ASP.NET MVC app

Almost any "optimize ASP.NET for best speed" tutorial out there suggests optimizing the URL-generation process in some way. You know, getting rid of those Url.Action("Action", "Controller") calls that are expression-tree based, replacing them with RouteUrl, or implementing some route-resolution caching etc etc..

Speed up your cloud-based SQL Server by 200% for free

For those of you who run SQL Server on cloud VMs (AWS or Azure), here's an awesome performance hack I have recently discovered. It's called "buffer pool extensions" and it's been introduced in SQL Server 2014 and later ("standard" edition or higher).

Facebook is terrifying

Remember that last time you posted a picture on Facebook and it automatically offered to tag other people on the photo? Nothing unusual. You've tagged these people before, right? You've trained the machine learning face-recognition algorithm. And now Facebook can spot where they are on your picture.

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.