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Date archive for: September 2011

The Benefits Of Spammers Abusing Your Service

Published by Tom on 29/09/2011

If there is a way to make money online by abusing a service, you can guarantee spammers will give it a try. They have so little regard for the service, the spammers will club it to death without a second thought, all to increase their chances of making a fast buck.

Somewhat ironically, spammers do have their benefits: at some point you will be forced to harden your systems, both against spammers and against Things That Can Go Wrong. Let me tell you how this worked out for one of my apps, TweetingMachine.

Continue reading The Benefits Of Spammers Abusing Your Service

Hiring a designer is a premature optimization

Published by Tom on 07/09/2011

UPDATE: When I wrote this post, I was writing about design in the sense of pretty little boxes – and NOT how the user interface comes together and so on. I’m now aware that the terms “design” and “designer” cover an awful lot of ground :-)

Design is one of the biggest challenges for pure programmers who want to build web apps. When bootstrapping your startup, I’ve read that some people seem to be very keen to hire a designer. I can’t think of a bigger mistake. Continue reading Hiring a designer is a premature optimization