At the start of 2018, I made the bold (or stupid) move to quit my job and try my hand at building a startup.

Before making this somewhat reckless move, I did my best to minimise risk. I cut my expenses as much as possible and did a lot of market research, including interviewing my target market before I even wrote a single line of code.

As a full stack developer, I knew I had the skills to build the product, so that wasn’t an issue. As they say build it and they will come. As I am sure you are aware, it is not that simple. …

I have used quite a few logging frameworks in the past such as Log4Net and Splunk. However, most of them aren’t particularly useful for tracking down errors and seeing how your service is performing. I started using Seq with Serilog when I was working at my last company and it is amazing what a difference it can make having useful searchable logs.

What is Seq?

Seq puts all your logs into a quick searchable system that allows you to easily track down bugs. This is what the Datalust team say about Seq.

Seq creates the visibility you need to quickly identify and diagnose problems in complex applications and microservices. Empower your team to build better software by centralizing, searching, and alerting on structured application logs. …

I have been a big WordPress user for many years and I still have many websites running on WordPress. In fact, WordPress powers 30% of the web. However, for this website, I wanted to try something different.

How I Got Started With Static Site Generators

My first foray into static sites actually started with WordPress. To speed up your WordPress site there are a number of plugins you can download. One of them is called W3 Total Cache, which works by minifying your JavaScript and CSS and then converting posts and pages into static HTML so they can be cached.

This sped up my website significantly giving me an A rating in Pingdom. However, I still had to log on to my WordPress installation to write blog posts. My hosting provider at the time was cheap but it was also slow which meant writing blog posts was painful. (Note, I now use SiteGround for my WordPress sites and they are now a lot faster.) …

Sweaty-palmed you shake the hand of the developer who is going to be grilling you today. You nervously make small talk and then sit down on the opposite side of the table to your opponent. Most interviews start this way, however, a software developer interview can generally go one of two ways.

You have the nice interviewer who asks you about your experience, gets you to talk through the technologies you have used and explain your roles on the projects you have worked on.

Then there is the interviewer who tries to trip you up, who will crack out the algorithm questions and get you to code an application on the big screen in front of 3 other developers while they all watch. …

When I started my first startup GrowRecruit I went with the recommended setup. However, I soon found that what is recommended is actually quite costly for a bootstrapped startup.

If your product is still at the MVP stage (Minimum Viable Product) and you haven’t got customers yet, you want to avoid spending large amounts on AWS hosting.

My initial setup consisted of the following:

• VPC with Public and Private Subnet and NAT Gateway
• 2 t2.small instances RDS database cluster (one read, one write),
• 2 t2.micro instances, one for WordPress the other for my API
• 2 S3 buckets
• Route 53

This is a fairly small setup for bootstrapped SaaS, I would have liked to go with a smaller RDS instance, however, t2.small was the smallest available that offered encryption. …

As an entrepreneur, I am always trying to find cost-effective ways to promote my business. I am no marketing expert, at least not yet, so a lot of it is just trial and error at this point. For my first attempt at paid advertising, I chose to boost a Facebook post to see what would happen.

Now if you follow other bloggers you may have heard of Melyssa Griffin she is an internet marketer and blogger who makes over $100,000 a month! …

I am a big fan of .Net Core at the moment. Mostly because I can do development natively on my Mac and the fact I can run them in Docker containers (did I mention I love Docker?).

With .Net Core you can build any app you can currently build in vanilla .Net, such as console apps, Web APIs, MVC apps. As you know, console apps generally come in 2 flavours, run all the time and run on a schedule. Typically the scheduled console apps are just hooked up to Windows Task Scheduler and forgotten about (until they break).

Given .Net Core is supposed to be cross-platform, what is the cross-platform equivalent for Windows Task Scheduler? I had a look at building in a timer loop or using a framework such as FluentScheduler but this just felt like adding bulk to an otherwise small console application. …

People think that Google is some mysterious organisation with a mythical algorithm that searches the web and gives you the answers you need. The reality is Google’s algorithm isn’t that difficult to decode. At least the intentions of it aren’t. I will be going into detail in a future post how Google ranks websites, for now I am going to focus on one aspect, page speed.

Google’s sole objective is to find the website that best answers your query. Google tracks which results you click on, how long you spent on the site and whether you find the site so interesting that you stick around. …