Some exciting news to share today! October 1st will be my first day at Microsoft Windows Azure. This is going to be my first full-time job. I am joining the same team which I had an internship last year. My position is software development engineer in test and my team produces end-to-end automated testing systems for Azure cloud services. I’ll be moving to Redmond, WA (where Microsoft headquarters is located) in Seattle area. Read More →

iPhone 5 is announced today with a bigger 4-inch screen resolution today. It corresponds to 1136 x 640 px. Compared to old 960 x 640 px resolution, the new screen is 176 px wider. Apple announced that old applications in the App Store will still run at their original (old) size and will be centered on the screen. That means there will be 88 px empty (black) spaces at the end and at the bottom. Read More →

Many people in startups these days trying to be “the next” Instagram, Pinterest, Path, Foursquare or whatever. The main point many people (including me) miss is that making products for masses is not for three-kids-with-zero-money job. You literally need strong connections with online press and a team to gain a traction and growth –and of course several millions of dollars. Think about Foursquare, before it came out, people did not need to publish their locations. Read More →

Here’s how I keep my inbox 0 unread everyday. Unsubscribe from all newsletters. They are probably just information load for you. If you are not a serious Groupon user, just opt-out. You’ll check that out when you seriously need information. Unsubscribe from email notifications. You use Facebook, Twitter or Github, Quora every day. You are already going to see who followed you on Twitter or mentioned you on Facebook when you log in. Read More →

As Jason Fried (CEO, 37signals) puts it down: It seems like in a lot of companies we are reaching “peak people”. There’s a shortage of talent out there, and if there’s a shortage of resources, you want to conserve those resources. Although there are quite a number of programmers, designers, product guys are around (and many others are at the other end of the world, working from their homes, like 37signals does) there is a shortage of talented people. Read More →

I’ve been reading Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps book by Josh Clark for a while. Not because I am trying to be a designer, I just want to see principles behind user interface design and user experience. First book is written in 2010, since then iPhone is not changed but the UI examples given in the book are a little bit poor compared to today’s quite fancy apps. That’s when I realized how humankind made a huge progress in app UI designs. Read More →

(Hacker News is an awesome website where so many hackers and startup guys around the world show-off their work or share useful content on the interwebs. You should visit everyday.) The Code I arrange this bash script to run every 5 minutes with cronjob: <code lang="sh" class="sh"> curl http://news.ycombinator.com | grep -o 'id=[0-9]\+' | sed 's/id=//' >> frontpage sort frontpage | uniq > frontpage.tmp && mv frontpage.tmp frontpage curl http://news.ycombinator.com/newest | grep -o 'id=[0-9]\+' | sed 's/id=//' >> newest sort newest | uniq > newest. Read More →

Yesterday Microsoft launched a new product under Azure services: Azure Mobile. It is a cloud backend for mobile apps. This is a huge leap forward in Microsoft developer tools and cloud+mobile iteration in the company. Maybe someday, it will be language-independent and have SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows Phone. It is just like Parse.com. So things are getting crazy at backend-as-a-service (BaaS) market.

But is it always viable to use a BaaS for your app or startup? What are pros ad cons?

Well, that depends on the scale you’re aiming for.

If you are aiming to be a mobile startup that is going to be around in the market for a few months or at most one and a half years, then BaaS is a good option. The main reason is, you don’t want to buy a Linux VPS, write backend code (in Ruby, Python, Java whatever), don’t want do choose a DB (mysql, pgsql, mongo etc) and don’t want to configure a permanent domain and URLs for your communication endpoints.

These are considerably messy tasks. Most of the backend-as-a-service providers promote several points on their homepages:

• Ease of use
• Rapid prototyping
• Off-the-shelf mobile SDKs
• Data security

If you would evaluate these features in terms of your needs, you’ll see that they are aimed mostly for small-scale apps. No serious apps rely on BaaS providers and probably they won’t in the near future. Even the security and privacy of services like EC2 (and therefore Dropbox) are questionable these days, so you wouldn’t expect large-scale apps to rely on some middleware service. If you are doing serious mobile development, then you won’t need BaaS mobile SDK and don’t need rapid prototyping etc. Read More →