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I don't talk about my side projects at work hours, even if someone asks. However, I built Pixmap for Android to learn Android dev. It makes a couple dollars a

by winrid 6y ago

I don't talk about my side projects at work hours, even if someone asks. However, I built Pixmap for Android to learn Android dev. It makes a couple dollars a month... :) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winricklabs.pixmap_client https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.winricklab... I built FastComments as a tool for myself, but it's starting to gather bigger and bigger customers. https://FastComments.com https://FastComments.com

ta17711771 6y ago
Dogfooding watch.ly as well. Very nice! Consider some sort of tag for that, by the way, even if small. I'm looking into one, and I had to dig into the source to find out which one you were using! ...and even then, I had to dig back in to find the URL, because your search ranking is nonexistent from my perspective. Your services are inspiring as hell, from a minimalism/productivity perspective!
- winrid 6y ago
  Thank you!! If you wanna try out watch.ly I can set you up. You can build the chat bot using a UI now. And yes - I didn't really market watch.ly yet even though I paid thousands for that domain. I switched to FastComments as a fun tool and then people started paying for it... :) I love to build fast software! It's so hard to get that to be a high priority in a day job at most companies (in my experience).
zatel 6y ago
FastComments is really cool looking and so simple (it reminds me of brutalist web design). Could you explain a little on how you do limiting of page loads? I've been trying to add this kind of functionality to my own projects but can't think of a way to track it without storing in a db which seems like a bottleneck process if every page load is a write
- baseballMan 6y ago
  I'm guessing they're using watch.ly. I've never heard of the service but it's on the header of the fastcomments blog. Watch.ly mentions a service that will "add realtime hit counters to my products."
  - winrid 6y ago
    Watch.ly is like mixpanel + instabot. I just haven't polished it enough to market it... FastComments doesn't depend on Watch.ly - it's just there for some UI stuff. Also, Watch.ly sends me a daily email saying what pages (or app screens on native apps) were visited most, for how long, etc, so we can see daily if all the sudden people stop spending time on an important page. It also gives me a realtime traffic graph. I can see people going from one page, to another, and where they drop off. Like four months of work there...
- winrid 6y ago
  Store an object representing the namespace (customer+month) and use whatever your DB's increment operator is to increment the count for that month. Keep a map, or use an LRU cache, to check the DB periodically to see who has gone past their limit. You can also fire off this write to the DB asynchronously since you don't care that much if it fails and you don't want to create back pressure in your application. For example an object like {tenant, month, year, count}. Then you can reuse this for reporting etc which is what I do. We also track other metrics per customer + month like commenter sign ups, votes, etc. Also - I'm open to new opportunities right now if anyone's interested in hiring me. :)
  - zatel 6y ago
    Thank you. this is very useful and will certainly work for my use case.

by winrid 6y ago

ta17711771 6y ago

Dogfooding watch.ly as well. Very nice! Consider some sort of tag for that, by the way, even if small. I'm looking into one, and I had to dig into the source to find out which one you were using! ...and even then, I had to dig back in to find the URL, because your search ranking is nonexistent from my perspective. Your services are inspiring as hell, from a minimalism/productivity perspective!

winrid 6y ago
Thank you!! If you wanna try out watch.ly I can set you up. You can build the chat bot using a UI now. And yes - I didn't really market watch.ly yet even though I paid thousands for that domain. I switched to FastComments as a fun tool and then people started paying for it... :) I love to build fast software! It's so hard to get that to be a high priority in a day job at most companies (in my experience).

zatel 6y ago

FastComments is really cool looking and so simple (it reminds me of brutalist web design). Could you explain a little on how you do limiting of page loads? I've been trying to add this kind of functionality to my own projects but can't think of a way to track it without storing in a db which seems like a bottleneck process if every page load is a write

baseballMan 6y ago
I'm guessing they're using watch.ly. I've never heard of the service but it's on the header of the fastcomments blog. Watch.ly mentions a service that will "add realtime hit counters to my products."
- winrid 6y ago
  Watch.ly is like mixpanel + instabot. I just haven't polished it enough to market it... FastComments doesn't depend on Watch.ly - it's just there for some UI stuff. Also, Watch.ly sends me a daily email saying what pages (or app screens on native apps) were visited most, for how long, etc, so we can see daily if all the sudden people stop spending time on an important page. It also gives me a realtime traffic graph. I can see people going from one page, to another, and where they drop off. Like four months of work there...
winrid 6y ago
Store an object representing the namespace (customer+month) and use whatever your DB's increment operator is to increment the count for that month. Keep a map, or use an LRU cache, to check the DB periodically to see who has gone past their limit. You can also fire off this write to the DB asynchronously since you don't care that much if it fails and you don't want to create back pressure in your application. For example an object like {tenant, month, year, count}. Then you can reuse this for reporting etc which is what I do. We also track other metrics per customer + month like commenter sign ups, votes, etc. Also - I'm open to new opportunities right now if anyone's interested in hiring me. :)
- zatel 6y ago
  Thank you. this is very useful and will certainly work for my use case.