Thoughts on Tech Stacks for Bootstrapped Startups

So you're starting a bootstrapped web-based business and you're deciding on the tech stack. After running a software startup with zero funding for 13 years, here's what I have to say about this.

CSS: always use transparent colors for your shadows

I see a lot of websites and apps using "box-shadow" like this box-shadow: 0px 0px 20px 5px #ddd. Which literally means "lets have a #ddd-colored shadow, with zero offset, 5 pixels wide and 20 pixels blurred".

Which is perfectly fine, for the most part.

The REAL reasons to be concerned about AI

Everyone's being paranoid about AI these days. And the less people are familiar with the subject, the more concerned they are. Even some of my tech friends, even - believe it or not - software engineers, the ones have a very vague idea of how AI/ML works, are expressing their concerns.

ASP.NET MVC: Allowing Html for Particular Action Parameters

Sometimes you need to allow users to post HTML to the server. And, by default, this is the error you're going to get:

A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client

Cool Regex performance hacks I bumped into

CPU usage stats after patching for Meltdown

The following chart shows the impact on CPU usage after applying the Meltdown patch.

Finding first customers and increasing sales - Indiehackers followup

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

Almost every "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.