ibudiallo

This should not be a problem anymore. My pull request has just been merged.

There is a sample credential file to be renamed to credentials.json, this file is now in gitignore.

I got excited and almost learned Spanish, Japanese, German, then I realized I was simply addicted [1]. The good part is that at least it gave me the confidence to speak to people in different languages thinking I made sense, even though I didn't. The confidence to make mistake is how you end up learning anyway.

[1]:https://idiallo.com/blog/no-spanish-with-duo

There is another thing Neistat likes to portray in his video that I think makes him even more popular: The illusion of amateur.

His videos seems like they can be shot by anyone. But try skateboarding in the middle of a busy New York street with cars going in both directions while holding a heavy tripod camera on one hand, a remote on the other, and talking to the camera and saying hi to fans on the street, and finishing that narrative you started two miles ago all at the same time.

I meant the latest books that came out last month, Lab Rats.

We talked a lot about how many founders that somewhat found success, try to be Gavins or Russ Hannemans. But the show doesn't portray these people as the visionaries they think they are. In fact it makes fun of them.

A few months ago I wrote a certain story here and to my surprise I received a call from Dan Lyons, one of the writers of the show. We had long discussions about silicon valley and his new book coming out (I'm featured in it). A few weeks ago he was in LA and we had another long discussion about the show.

Silicon Valley is the show most startup founders will refuse to watch. My startup was featured on TechCrunch Disrupt, we were on stage talking about how we will change the world with our product. Then things didn't particularly go as planed.

I discovered the show and started watching it shortly after. It was painful to see that they portrayed our exact journey as it happened. Only the show poked fun of the mistakes we were making. I watched it not only as a comedy, but also as a documentary that would predict our fate. It was eye-opening!

My favorite part (and most humiliating) was when we pitched our startup to a non-silicon valley investor and she simply replied: "OK, cut the crap. Which website are you scraping?"

All my co-founders were offended by the show. I must admit, its painful to watch someone else make fun of the things you put your heart to. But from time to time, someone has to make fun of you or you start to take yourself too seriously.

If you are trying to make it in silicon valley, please watch the show. At best, it will help you make your startup more grounded.

I can already imagine the inspiration videos on instatwitube that will be published quoting this.

"You don't even need a computer to get started. Jack Dorsey, CEO of two multi-billion companies, doesn't even own a computer, yet he is successful."

I really want to move away from Google Analytics. But I have not found a viable alternative so far. I had settled for Piwik (Now Matomo) but I had to disable it when the server it was hosted on crashed when I received a burst of traffic.

GA gives me some good insights but I can live without it if I have an alternative that can safely handle large traffic on a budget.

I don't work at YouTube, but it is highly unlikely that they have a Brexit department or a divisiveness department. What they have is machine learning.

The goal of their Algorithm is to maximize for watch time. Any behavior that leads to longer watch time will be promoted.

If a user watches 2 videos, leaves the platform for a while then comes back later to watch a third, the system will have learned what video to suggest to another person who watched only the first two. If the system can't determine what to show next, it will choose the video that has a record of increasing watch time.

I have been working on .Net c# this past 2 years, coming from PHP. The hardest thing for me was to remember to close my database connections. Of course when you don't close one connection, your app doesn't break, it simply consumes more memory. After a few hundred requests, your database fail and you have no clue what went wrong. (close your connections!)

In PHP, when your page is done processing, the process is killed and all the connections, file handles, or resources it had open will be closed.

The more I work with .Net, the more I get to appreciate the things in PHP I had taken for granted.

I wrote about this a year ago: https://idiallo.com/blog/php-fast-debug-time

hmmmm, you and I need to have a little talk...

Edit: Since I am getting downvoted, I will just add context -> https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me

I was on the other end of a similar system.

This is a nice write up. My only concern is that these days we think that the alternative to free is $40 to hundreds of dollars a months for something decent.

In the days of shared hosting, you could drop $3 to $5 to host your small website and expect your website to decently perform. But with your DO/Linode, you can expect excellent performance for the same price.

Only last month my two $5 droplets handled 5 million web requests from a viral post.

Thanks! I will be on the look out for google changes to update accordingly.

I once read a comment here on HN about SEO, and someone was suggesting to start by buying a domain name that is your first and last name. I thought it was cool, but didn't see how it could improve SEO. But I bought it anyway[1].

I had nothing to put on it for a while, so I started just working on my own design skills replicating Google.com. It just a fun thing I do for absolutely no benefits to others. Great way of learning.

Anyway, I check my other projects analytics and it shows that a large number of user sign ups come from that random for fun project.

So yes, please keep building websites like these. Build your own terrible website and don't worry if they don't seem immediately useful.

[1]: http://www.ibrahimdiallo.com

Recently I was wondering how they created that click animation in material design. So i made my own and you can check the code here https://github.com/ibudiallo/buttons

Note that it works without js, but js allows to position the button press effect right under the mouse.

I used to work very hard to produce low quality content and post it on hn twitter and whatnot. It was depressing to see very little traffic.

So i reduced the number of post, stopped posting on HN. Suddenly i have more traffic then ever. Though google is mostly responsible for it.

What i started doing more often is link to people i find interesting in my articles, that's the new blog roll replacement, and somehow it has pushed those to link back to me.

Ps: don't give up because no one likes your content, the majority will not like it anyway.

https://idiallo.com

3 years ago, timewarner was doing the same thing[1]. They throttled YouTube and then makes the page that explains it disappears from THEIR internet. It doesn't matter what they say about their position, they are in the business of making more money and Net Neutrality means not more money.

[1]:http://idiallo.com/blog/timewarner-you-suck

Thanks for reading. Actually since then there has been greater traction. The low traffic however wasn't just us. Live video showed a very low number of viewers (never more then 100).

Also we are adding verticals as the we see the demand increase. We started with fitness, dental, office and now we are seeing more and more people asking for generic spaces. So this is our next goal, renting any sort of space possible.

Oops, I forgot to include the link to cloudflare:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-its-like-to-launch-at-techc...

Earlier this year, we were in the Alley and also participated in Battlefield. I would say it's worth it because it gives exposure to your start up.

However, techcrunch is not all it is said to be. It is much of a self congratulatory Enterprise. A lot of people that came to our booth were other start ups trying to find new customers. The amount of web traffic we received was dismal, compared to that famous cloudflare article.

In the end any advertising is better then no advertising. plus it helps you come up with a one liner that describe what your startup is and does.

If you want to read the whole experience: https://idiallo.com/blog/renly-techrunch-disrupt-ny-2017

We went from startup school, to participating in techcrunch battlefield NY 2017.[1]

We were clueless to what to expect or how all this works, but through the guidance and many one on ones with our instructor we were able to manage it.

The course prepared us for meeting with investors, helped us with how to deal with the first rounds of investments (first money can be overwhelming) and how to do the non scalable things early on. It was definitely a useful course.

Also, being on a video call every week, listening to 20+ plus other people's business can be very valuable. Problems that seemed unique to us and unsolvable were solved with a quick chat with someone who already went through it.

Any way, i'll write a post about it eventually. In the meanwhile here is our presentation for Renly: https://www.startupschool.org/presentations/435

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/16/renly-launches-studio-book...

I feel that sometimes bad is synonymous to "hard to use". A lot of software is hard to use with a bunch of unfriendly settings. But the more time I spend trying to figure out, the better I get.

One example is Git. I used to use SVN with a GUI and it was a breeze. When work required me to use git, I hated it. But after a while of using it, I stopped doing the 'how do I do svn feature X with git' now I understand it, and even recommend it to people.

I'm mostly familiar with git on the command line and when work required me to use it on a gui with visual studio, I first started by complaining about how complicated it makes it. But after a while, I got used to it.

Approaching a new software is always hard and frustrating in the beginning. But the more time you spend on it, the more you will tolerate or appreciate it's short comings and complexity.

Not that long ago, I had an experience with this[1]. I'm currently running a test with my old phone to confirm that it is listening to me. I have an old android phone, with the microphone disabled (tape on the input)

Every once in a while, I will have the tape removed and say a few keywords, then disable it. My hope is to see if I will receive any advertising in with these niche keywords. It's only been a week so far, but I will update the post if there is anything.

(Note I have create a new google account just for it.)

[1]: http://idiallo.com/blog/be-mindful-with-ad-targeting (disclaimer: my blog)

It's not that it is hard to build stuff from scratch, it's just that it is easier to use a tool to do it.

I worked on a project where we had to remove jQuery from the page, and it was a nightmare for all the developers that had never written vanilla JavaScript.

These days, I don't use jQuery or bootstrap, or lazy loading libraries because I can just add the functionality I need by myself.

Oh wow. You can watch a 360 video of a ride around a city from a bike: http://dubai360.com/#!s=1334-dubai-grand-parade-2013&l=en

All these questions test my google skills, not necessarily my front end skills.

I was stuck in many even though I write JavaScript everyday.

Thanks, and I'm glad you found it interesting.

In my case, I did two things:

1. Add memcached 2. Serve static files via nginx

It allowed me to handle 2.9 million requests

I documented it here: http://idiallo.com/blog/handling-1-million-web-request

for some reason it fails on chrome for me, but works fine on firefox.

On chrome i get the "Aww Snap" page

Maybe wordpress is to blame, but the poor man can still handle HN traffic. Did it recently [1]. Disclaimer: it's my blog.

[1]: http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/11/handling-1-million-web-reque...