Nice rebuttal though. He has a point. Either show your proof refuting the claim or stfu. I get so tired of armchair experts discounting everything because they just know it can't be true, that it would be nice if someone put people like this in their place once in a while.
As a person who gets asked to fix these kinds of projects once they hit a wall (performance/concurrency/etc) and then have to migrate them to a proper DB platform, just stop it! Put it on in a DB up front and save some poor developer their sanity.
Want a cheap database? A Postgres RDS micro instance costs $51 a year upfront or $0.018 per hour. Medium is $200 or $0.073, and that medium instance will probably be more than enough for a dozen projects.
You get the solidity and ease of use of PostgreSQL with all the admin details abstracted away by RDS, and you can be up and running in 10 minutes or less. Get AWS account, spin up DB, write to DB.
Should one of your projects take off and require more, it's a one click upgrade. Or you can pg_dump in seconds, and rebuild it on a separate instance and account and point your app at it. And you get backups and all kinds of nice things out of the box.
I seem to be in the minority in this thread, but I personally much prefer using UPDATE/INSERT/DELETE in the command line to modify data, than clicking on a cell and typing the modification.
He mentions that its explicitly for quick prototyping. I've started a few projects but stopped when setting up the infrastructure became too tedious. For the quick and dirty prototype, this seems perfect.
I understand, but every time I get handed one of these it's because someone who didn't know what they were doing was rapid prototyping something and woops they have 200 hundred users and it's crashing, it's corrupting data, etc...
At one job I'm like "people, just use Access, it's installed on your computer" and they look at me like I'm talking dark wizardry shit with their fingers itching on their pitchforks because they don't know if I'm going to eat their babies.
I'll admit right away that I haven't looked at the API OP posted so this is a little off the cuff, but .... this is exactly the way you want to do it. If you have a well defined API, you don't care what's on the other side of it. The migration of an app from this library to a proper DB is as well defined as the API.
Imagine if you had a Google Sheets adapter for ActiveRecord. You could start any project this way and it would be super easy to then migrate it to another supported DB.
But in all seriousness, using a spreadsheet for prototyping makes perfect sense. Why waste a ton of time setting up a database when you're still figuring out what you are doing, and a spreadsheet works just fine? Yes, there's some hassle when you have to migrate, but that's compared to the hassle of setup. The amount of time to get the first iteration launched is a LOT more valuable than time down the road.
No, it wouldn't, there's more than enough stuff like this that goes around that taking one slice off the stack isn't really going to change the stack. ;)
The thing is these solutions all sounds great on paper, but in practice for the common person? Not so much. For those people that know what their doing it really doesn't matter because they know what they are doing and update as they scale.
It's the 99% of the rest of the people who see "how easy that was" and suddenly they're over their head. And they are the same people who tell you that you can't change anything about the broken ass interface bolted onto the spreadsheet while you're fixing it.
"Can't you just fix it so it will stop crashing? Why do you want to change all of this? We don't have approvals to change this, the spreadsheet is what was approved by change control. Just make it work."
Well, she did prove one point though. She's not a customer for these things and doesn't have first hand understanding of that market. So she's got that going... :P
Apple makes a tech tool? Uh, no. They make fashion tech and have for over a decade now. Yes it's functional for techies but it's fashion plane and simple, and yes people will shell out for it. I know people that were already planning out the buy on the $10K model the day it was introduced before it even had a solid price because the price doesn't matter.
I enjoyed the article at first but she invalidated the positive experience with the pitch for her seminar at the end of the piece which just led me to discount the entire article as nothing but SEO bait for Google. Frankly it was irritating enough that I felt compelled to bitch about it in a comment...
Take this as an example of how not to do a sales pitch blog post in 2015.
seminar -> mailing list (aka newsletter, aka free)
SEO bait -> a thing I wrote on my blog with the words "Apple Watch" in it like a million other pieces, there is literally zero chance of SEO doing a damn thing which, if you work in SEO, you know
the barest whiff of commercial activity sending a person "bitching" to a comment box -> 6 years in business, I still don't understand this
I'm going to disagree. I do SEO work and this format is dying. Readers are put off by it as it lacks sincerity, it's also soon to get penalized in upcoming indexing activities.
If she was doing this right she would leave the pitch off the end of the article and provide a simple hint over to her services that exist on a non-sensationalized pitch page.
The change would add a level of sincerity to her article and leave it conveying the sense of authority she's trying to project while showing a level or respect to the reader by making them the target or the piece. Ultimately this piece is clearly targeted to bots, not people and that is why it is poorly executed. At the end of the page when I realized I had been successfully bated to read the article there was zero percent chance of me clicking any other page on that site.
Yep. There's even been some debate WRT to the Black Death agent being Yersinia pestis (formerly Pasteurella pestis), some think or thought an hemorrhagic virus was a more likely cause.
It's hard looking that far back in time ... but we've got some amazing techniques now. We've found enough DNA in exhumed victims of not only the Black Death, but the 6th Century Plague of Justinian, 1,500 years ago (DNA is hardy stuff) to confirm they were distinct strains of Yersinia pestis.
From what animal reservoirs they jumped from, though, pretty much has to be speculative. But it is interesting they're smelling a new "rat" ^_^.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Plague jumped from one host to another and that became a semi-permanent reservoir. After the Plague came in during the Middle Ages it became a periodic event that only died out in the 1720s. Why it died out is still an open question.
I think you're presuming too much. As long as your code is documented and you're willing to release all potential IP claims as part of the sale I can imagine there would be someone interested in buying this straight out. You might even be able to sell them some kind of limited support/consultation agreement where you don't do code but can answer questions for a fixed period of time. It's not like you're doing some kind of business exit strategy. You're just selling off an asset from your portfolio.
If you look at the end of the article there is a short bio and his photo. He's a blond, white boy who's the spitting image of a young Mark Zuckerberg. To the "separated at birth" level of looking like him. Kinda freaky. :)
And just how did you come to that conclusion when he specifically said he doesn't care if someone like Snapchat keeps his photos forever?!? Will he care when his photos start showing up in advertisements? Will he care when a prospective employer with a data sharing agreement with Snapchat's future owner accesses his document/activity history and he can't get a job?
I'll hazard a guess that the prospective employer (if looking at other potentials in the same demographic) will need to turn a blind eye if they want to hire anyone at all. They'll all have something stupid on there. I'm curious to see what happens when my generation starts running for office.
Given that we've seemed to reach a stage where most US politicians seem to match the profile of what one would clinically call a sociopath, I'm going to hazard a guess that they will not really care.
They don't care, because they're operating under the assumption that it's true. According to his account, they're not putting their most private photos there—they assume that anything they post may be made public in the future.
I'm feeling like we read different articles. I never once got that concept that he was somehow protecting his privacy. He just stated that his perceptions were that some sites were more private than others. I get the feeling that his friends are still posting compromising content online, they just don't think they're be accountable for it.
While I will save that debate for another day, it is safe to say that when photos are “leaked” or when there’s controversy about security on the app, we honestly do not really care. We aren't sending pictures of our Social Security Cards here, we're sending selfies and photos with us having 5 chins.
And I'm still not seeing it. All he's done is equated privacy with things like social security numbers. He's also indicated that he's taking privacy statements from these companies at face value. Privacy is way more than that. Him and his friends just haven't been burned yet by mismanaging their online personas.
While it's an interesting article, I think he's being a bit hyperbolic in translating his local experience out to a generalization.
This isn't simply a 19 year olds experience. It is a white, suburban, middle-class, male attending a conservative university in a culturally regressive state. If nothing else, he's about as radically distant from an urban minority as you could get to the point where I'd imagine it is really impossible for him to have any perspective into other demographics and how they use these tools. I value his opinion, but it's important to take it into context.
Atleast he attempts to hedge his lack of experience in his opening statement.
I'm going to argue that. Many of these services are targeting a more diverse crowd. If they were only targeting this kids demographic, they would be limiting their growth potential out the door. Especially given that the growing base of users of these tools are international users.
Also, I'm going to argue just against my experience with urban teens living in more diverse communities which doesn't really align with this kids experience.
Agree in principle, disagree in execution. Pretty much any app maker (whatsapp aside) starts with a skewed market: people with smartphones. iOS makers even moreso. These people trend toward being white and middle/upper class. Now you need to narrow to who buys shit on their phones. Again that demographic skews younger. [1] [2]
So right away, if you want a successful smartphone app in the U.S. then you need to target, urban white men between 18-29 with at least some college and 75000+ a year in income.
I think as you say more people should target international etc... but people build toward the problems they have and the language they know. Whatsapp is killing it because they broke out of the mold. So yes, they should for many reasons, but if you just follow the money then who you target looks very homogenous.
What you say makes sense when you're selling a product. With most of these applications, their potential money making product though is the back-office data they collect on the users themselves which they then sell to brokers or data warehousing services, or provide to targeting advertisement firms. From that stand point you simply want the largest installed user base you can get.
A successful smart phone app based on these metrics is the one with the largest user base. You get that user base by providing a simple to use product that quickly addresses a need for the largest number of people, rich, poor, white, black, etc...
Now, if you're talking about targeted applications like certain types of gaming apps. Or apps that provide an extended retail experience? This is when you talk about focused demographics.
You get that user base by providing a simple to use product that quickly addresses a need for the largest number of people, rich, poor, white, black, etc...
Totally agree here.
A successful smart phone app based on these metrics is the one with the largest user base.
This is where we diverge. An app is only as successful as what it can make money from. Having a billion people use something and they don't generate revenue from it is worthless in the long run - bloated investments not withstanding.
A reliable proven to be profitable user base is what consistently makes money - the facebooks etc... are extreme outliers that got lucky with monetization after growing the userbase are not really cases to be emulated.
I'm not sure of what the divergence you're indicating is. I agree that an app with no monitization is worthless for sure. A bloated app user base where you aren't monetizing your users is a money sink.
Granted there are other cases of revenue models that we may not even be aware of that are in play. For instance Twitter initially was making money off SMS bulk transactions. They would buy SMS network blocks in volume and sale broadcasting blocks to marketers at a markup which was lower than outbound texting rates. There was good money in the margins here for a time. They don't like to talk about it publicly but they still admit that the service was built around a focus on SMS... https://blog.twitter.com/2010/introducing-fast-follow-and-ot...
This is why for a while they also tried like hell to push people to take Tweets over SMS instead of having pulling them from the web via a web browser or other web based client. Smartphones unexpectedly gimped this business model for them.
>Which is the demographic that all of the services in question care about (except whatsapp) - which kind of proves the point.
Hahaha, no way that is true man.
Also, bcRIPster, I believe your comments provide a valuable POV, that thing about the demographics, it hadn't ocurred to me. Thanks for posting and don't take the witch-hunt personal, remember that karma is given for people that spend all their time here, they don't reflect the holder's knowledge or politeness. Most of the downvotes here are just another way of saying "I don't like what you say but I'm uncapable of coming with an intelligent response on to why I don't agree with your opinion, hence I'll just downvote you (and absolutely everything else you post afterwards)".
Thank-you... beyond that I just learned from another user that even though I've been using this site for years I have never seen a down vote option, so I always suspected it was a mod activity. Now that I know it's just other users doing it I don't feel so bad. Thanks for the kind words :)
Ok mods, I'm concerned that I have made some valid criticisms on this article as have others in their comments, yet mine is being down modded into negatives.
I'm left feeling this is immature and punitive for a joke I made on a prior news posting where I complained about the down modding.
Would someone like to explain just how my criticism is so much more severe as to warrant attack over the other criticisms?
> attending a conservative university in a culturally regressive state
I didn't downvote you, but I feel like I could have without any guilt. Have you been to Austin? Or any urban center in Texas? They are probably more conservative than Berkeley, but they're definitely blue areas. Especially Austin. I mean, Houston's mayor is a lesbian! See if you can pick out Dallas, Austin, and Houston on this map:
And substance aside, terms like "culturally regressive" are unnecessary and inflammatory. And your post has an overall dismissive attitude of someone who is just expressing himself. He makes it extremely clear that it's just his opinion.
So maybe there is a downvote brigade, but I'm not in it. And they're redundant if you ask me.
I imagine Texas is a lot like Oregon. Super Blue in the cities, and super Red when you drive out. But really it's hard to characterize an entire state, especially the 2nd most populated one in the U.S.
I don't know. Every Texan I've ever known likes to name drop Austin to defend their state to the point where it's like saying they've got a black friend so they can't be racists. Or, they let a gay guy hug them so they're not homophobic.
At some point it starts to make you cross-eyed :P
I'm sorry, I'm know I'm poking this subject with a stick. I hope everyone understands the satire and frustration of my statement.
No. Honestly I haven't been to Austin and I have heard good things about it but I did spend a few years living in the DFW Metroplex area (Arlington and then later in Plano). I have on the other hand have had bad personal experiences with UT graduates being rather full of themselves clueless about the real world. As well as white middle-class 19 year olds thinking they're social media experts because they posted a blog post.
Texas in general has always left a bad taste in my mind and their political and religious exports don't do much to change my opinion.
I always love how Austin get's thrown out as some amazing counter to excuse the rest of the state.
>As well as white middle-class 19 year olds thinking they're social media experts because they posted a blog post.
From the article:
>That being said, I'm not an expert at this by a long shot and I'm sure there will be data that disproves some of the points I make, but this is just what I've noticed.
All that proves is that his Journalism instructor told him to be sure to include boilerplate CYA to deflect criticism of his article. If he really felt this way he wouldn't be so declarative of his opinions.
I think that the downvotes have nothing to do with the joke you mention. Your comment doesn't add any value to the discussion, we are aware of the things you highlight.
Good! Good! Then I wholly expect to see every comment that is stating an obvious concept to now be down modded off of this site. That's really healthy for discussion.
You understand that users are the ones downvoting you, as a relatively inactive user you don't have a downvote button but many of us do and don't like complaints (about downvotes) or broad generalizations ("culturally regressive") that don't add to the discussion.
I was with you until you started attacking an entire ethnicity.
