A Techie Solving a Non-Techie Problem So you are a techie like me, and you build a web application that solves a problem for non-techies. Not a product for developers, not a product for a hi-tech or an IT company. The Auction Events Platform I am building a platform for auction events. It can be used by creators, like artists…

Extreme Conditions How do you work, program, and be productive with intermittent Internet and electricity? This is my challenge in Ukraine now. But it is a situation that is increasingly occurring in peaceful countries in face of climate change and other emergencies. In a location with intermittent Internet and power, you discover…

How do you approach the development of a new web application? If you are a solopreneur or SMB, you are not aiming for a big scale. You cannot afford well-known but costly development environments. It is a challenge that I encountered repeatedly as a freelance consultant. …

The Appeal of Randomness Constructing web and mobile applications with an element of randomness is known to attract users. People like to be surprised. Such randomness is used in the hot BeReal mobile app, where users are asked at a random time during the day to take a picture and share it with their…

The Trouble in Twitter The current leadership and ownership changes in Twitter have caused many users to go to Mastodon. Business-wise Twitter lost lots of significant advertisers. The Rise of Mastodon Lots of users, close to half a million, have joined Mastodon in the last two weeks. …

You are building a hybrid events platform, such as the Auction Events Platform for Creators I am making. Users will be on and off the website during the event. How do you achieve continuity of the experience for your users? Define Meaningful Moments Choose moments when there is some phase change, such as…

BeReal is the hot new name in social networks. So hot that Instagram and TikTok are trying to emulate it. How does BeReal work? The way BeReal works is it prompts users to take one unedited photo a day at a random time, which changes daily. …

As I am building an auction events platform for artists, I aim to help artists make money. So the question of how artists make money, in general, is front and center for this platform. While the big names in art, and I mean living artists, not the past masters, have…

You want to build a creator economy platform. It could be a newsletters platform, like Revue or Substack, a podcasting platform like Anchor or Transistor, or a crowd-funding platform, like Patreon or Buy Me Coffee. How do you design such a platform? There are many moving parts and infinite possibilities…