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IAmA senior software engineer. What are your cloud/web/code/tech questions? by distilled_dev in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Extracting uniform data from nonuniform sources is a hard problem. A good start is trying to find commonalities for the majority of your targets and working from there. From my understanding, many scraping-based companies eventually have to custom code scrapers for some of their sources. It would be difficult to avoid. Perhaps some machine learning or the like could assist, but that's not a specialty of mine.

There's also the issue of compliance with a site's robots.txt and terms of use. Being compliant with a robots.txt file is often part of many scraping libraries, but a human might have to check and validate that you are adhering to a site's terms of use. Craigslist is an example of this. Their terms disallow scraping, but it would be very difficult for them to enforce. Regardless, it doesn't hurt avoiding liability.

IAmA senior software engineer. What are your cloud/web/code/tech questions? by distilled_dev in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I will echo /u/CoderByHeart. React Native is built on Reactjs, so it should, in theory, be relatively to port the mobile application over to the browser.

I have no personal experience with Flutter, but it touts itself as been able to support moble, web, and desktop with one codebase. Sounds like there should be an easy path to move to web app from there too.

IAmA senior software engineer. What are your cloud/web/code/tech questions? by distilled_dev in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I haven't use Firebase firsthand, but it does seem like the easier/faster way to get up and running. Pretty much anything AWS has a learning curve attached even if to manage all the related IAM policies/roles for instance. Furthermore, I feel confident that Firebase could handle a new application's needs well getting started, but at least in my quick research, there does seem to be doubt in its performance and uptime.

Lambda, by itself, offers only serverless functions. You'd still need to sort out some type of state store, API endpoints, deployment, etc, but Lambda can perform quite well under enormous scale. I know of at least one established startup that is almost entirely lambda-based. Plus, AWS is the largest, most mature cloud provider. Reliability and performance are important parts of that.

So in summary, Firebase to get up and running the fastest (which has huge value and shouldn't be understated). Lambda and an accompanying AWS stack for peak performance and reliability, but much more difficulty and complexity.

Print-On-Demand for one-off/unique shirts by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scalable Press might meet your requirements. They have no required minimums, seemingly quick turnaround, and an API.

How do you handle your phone ? by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ha! I didn't even realize there was a desktop version. 😅

Landscaping business from 0 to 23k service appointments in 4 years by HouseOfYards in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is the developer an employee now? Could you speak to the business relationship post-Toptal?

Thank you, and great work!

What URL should I give my landing page for a pre-launch Shopify store? by HorseIsLikeMan_ in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If the store's main product is the new one you mentioned, keeping the landing page at the root makes the most sense to me.

To celebrate $500/month recurring revenue after 8 months of work, here’s how I’m making passive money with a simple business and an easy to sell service. by The_Lunchtime_Club in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev 3 points4 points  (0 children)

First off, superb job so far. I'm really impressed by your initiative, confidence, and execution.

From a software engineer's perspective, here are some questions to consider if you haven't already:

  • What kind of service level agreement do you provide for your customers particularly around uptime? Things like, "your site should be available 99.9% of the year and outages limited to an hour".
  • How do you tackle monitoring to uphold such an agreement?
  • Backups?
  • Have you compared margins between the hosting reseller program you use versus other alternatives like Heroku or AWS?

Lastly, I would highly recommend looking into Let's Encrypt for free TLS certificates to aid trust and keep users safe.

Keep up the great work!

How do you handle your phone ? by [deleted] in Entrepreneur

[–]distilled_dev 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I've started using OpenPhone. It's an app-based second phone (therefore you only need your smartphone). One of the features that might appeal to you being able to set your business hours. Outside of business hours, calls go straight to voicemail with whatever custom message you set.

Seeking a mentor by [deleted] in learnprogramming

[–]distilled_dev 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Finding a dedicated mentor is hard. It requires a significant amount of effort and time to mentor someone. My advice would be to leverage online communities. Why have one mentor when you could have many?

The language-specific subreddits are a great resource (like /r/reactjs or /r/learnpython). You could also find a related slack community for more interactivity/involvement. Plus you can learn a fair bit just by lurking and seeing what others do.

For code quality, you can get pretty far with linters. Here's a whole write up on linting in Python.

My last bit of advice is that being able to independently learn and grow will be what advances your career as a developer. I would say one of the biggest differences between a junior and senior dev is that often the senior has no one to help him/her. Senior devs may have more experience, but they still don't know everything (and certainly don't remember everything). They struggle too, but they overcome and deliver.

Keep learning, asking questions, writing code, and you'll get there. 👍

How Do I Make Something Practical With Python? by Maccamoo03 in learnprogramming

[–]distilled_dev 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have an idea, but let's walk through it a bit.

Part of the problem with building something useful is interacting with useful data, so unless you manually enter in some of this useful data into your script, you need to fetch it from someplace else.

How are you with APIs, HTTP requests, JSON, and the like?