darsoli

Although I read about the supply chain bottlenecks, I don't feel like it's impacted me yet. In fact it feels like there are more "Same Day" options than ever before (Amazon specific, but ditto for in-person shopping elsewhere). I live in NYC so not sure if that makes a difference or not.

Is there only one transform option, or could you offer several? That might be a good way of satisfying those who want a very fancy looking image to others who want specific functionality (magnify certain portions of a window, etc).

Help centers, along with "self-service knowledgebases", are just ways of making it harder to find the contact us page.

I agree that SEO has made it harder and harder to find good content on the internet.

I don't agree with Google being blamed for this. They're trying desperately to fix the problem. Maybe they're not as effective as you'd hope, but why would a "multipolar" search world be better? Wouldn't all search engines be plagued with people trying to game the system?

The product seems to hit a really important use case (I have created my own SaaS products in the past, and subs, authenticaation, and permissions are huge PITAs).

One suggestion - your homepage copy is very developer oriented and 'feature' oriented, whereas it could be less technical and more benefit-oriented.

I think changing the copy / adjusting the focus could go a long way. See Outseta.com (I have no affiliation to them) for an example of a company that seems to be doing something similar to you but with more benefit-oriented, business/revenue-focused copy.

Now if it can generate different styles of pies (detroit, chicago, NYC, neapolitan) instead of what looks like Pizza Hut fare (not an insult, just a fact), then Instagram pizzaporn account here we come!

This post seems to go into more detail on the technical architecture.

I've read a lot of these style posts, and oftentimes the results don't end up being that interesting - but I have to say this post is different. Nice job and good overview of all the different layers in the stack. I didn't realize there was a meaningful difference between Cloudflare Workers and Lambda, but now will have to check it out.

Agree with many points in this article. However, there are some enterprise software tools (Salesforce for example) that have terrible UIs for both casual and power users, and offer no performance upside despite longer term usage.

JIRA used to be this bad too, but over the years I've found their UI to improve bit by bit as they adopted more consumer UX standards around their interfaces + adding workflow rules. These improvements have seemed to work well for casual and power users alike.

Ah, to write a whole article about a known concept without giving it due service. Methinks "The butterfly effect" deserves a mention.

some of these cards are wild!

Ah, Varnish - I have heard so many great things. Not sure why I didn't use it this time around. I think I assumed Cloudfront would take care of it.

My biggest learning was that CDN != caching. While it can be used as such, it's not automatically set up that way out of the box.

For Cloudfront, I eventually got it working. The difficult part was figuring out how to get Wordpress to serve the site when it received the request from Cloudfront. By default, it turned into a weird redirect loop.

I eventually solved it by futzing with all the options.

Re why I didn't use Strapi/the others? Once I switched to node / markdown, I told myself I'd fit in a real CMS, but never got that far researching it. However, I like the options you mentioned. Thanks for sharing!

I think the main takeaway, caching, is important. But what's frustrating with Wordpress is that there are many plugins to do caching, and each caching plugin has a million options in it. How they handle images, dynamic content, cache headers, ETags, etc, are often buried deep in submenus.

On top of that, testing caching is challenging - replicating between local, staging, and prod is ultimately a very manual and error prone process, so there's no real way to figure out how to test and if what you're doing is the right thing. Since caching is not an immediate thing (it can take time for a CDN to pick up an asset, for example), it can be unclear if what you've done works, or if you need to wait five minutes and try again.

I wrote a blogpost a few months ago about this and other issues. (https://solitaired.com/why-we-switched-from-wordpress-to-nod...)

Maybe I'm doing it wrong? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I pity the user who ends up getting sucked into playing this game ...

(5 hours later) that user is me.

I don't understand the graphic on the left in the first example. Are they wearing a different type of mask that makes the infection rate higher?

Does this use one of the bigger search engines (Bing, Google) as an API, or is it fully custom rolled?

Nice work! Curious if AWS's Comprehend would help you extract organization names from the text: https://aws.amazon.com/comprehend/features/

For the mathematically disinclined (such as myself), the total savings are at least $229/mo .. not bad! Curious if you could use Cloudformation to provision these instances and setups? https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amaz...

The query language here looks eerily similar to what we use for our ORM in Node.js. It's called Sequelize (https://sequelize.org/) -- how does this project compare / what are the main differences?