Posts

I have just created a Chrome extension that replaces Cmd‑F when you need to search for many terms at once. Think “ERROR”/“WARNING” or “JavaScript”/“Machine Learning”/“AI”. It is fast. Really fast. Faster than any similar extension I know. CSS Custom Highlights = no injected wrappers, no jank. (Curious about alternatives? See one and another.) Keyboard‑friendly. Open Ctrl+Shift+F, Next Ctrl+Shift+H, Prev Ctrl+Shift+K (rebindable). Finds hard‑to‑spot matches when asked. Hidden items show up in the list (e.g., a term inside a collapsed section); one click reveals and glows. Hidden is off by default. Try it now: Install from Chrome Web Store: Highlighter — Better than Cmd‑F A bit more details on the welcome site: highlighterextension.com ...

If interested email me at artem.marchenko[at]gmail.com Send your phone number if you’d like to discuss something by voice or in chat. I used to to fly a paraglider. A great sport (which I started with the awesome Tamkik club in Tampere), but time goes. Family and moving between cities and workplaces - over the last 7 years or so I haven’t done a single flight, so it’s time to admit it and sell stuff to somebody who needs it more. ...

Starting a SaaS or micro-SaaS business can be challenging, especially when it comes to creating a landing page. As I recently discovered when building AI Feedback Pro, creating a landing page to validate customer interest can be a costly venture. However, I found a solution that cost just $19/year plus the cost of the domain, without sacrificing the essential features. In this post, I’d like to share my experience and provide you with a list of components and services that will help you build an effective landing page on a budget. Whether you’re just starting out or looking for cost-saving measures, this guide is for you. Just the list Where the price isn’t mentioned - it is free on the landing page scale Landing page service: Carrd on Pro Standard plan for $19/year, can be used for 10 sites Runner-up: EarlyBird.im for $8/month Theme: Carrd’s own template #95 free for Pro Plan users Runners-up: template #106 also free and SaaSy template for $29 Mailing list to subscribe interested people: EmailOctopus Cookieless Analytics: PanelBear for your first users, GoatCounter not too loose the track if landing page is suddenly successful Runners-up: Clicky and Couner.dev Surveys: Tally.so Illustrations: Undraw + some PlaygroundAI modifications when you want to have something similar, but a little different Runners-up: just google for “undraw alternatives” - there are lots of illustration services free for commercial use Logo: Namecheap LogoMaker Runners-up: LogoAI for inspiration if you are fine with recreating it in SVG, BrandCrowd for $8 or TailorBrands for 8€ Email service: Gandi, but you’ll need to buy domain from them in order to get it for free Support chat: Crisp chat Bonus: Your service name: ChatGPT as a discussion partner Now to the details. ...

How to choose the appropriate level of statistical significance for an AB-test Nowadays a lot of product managers have to confirm most of their decisions with AB-tests. Yet, it is far not always clear how to choose the parameters for the test. A particularly difficult parameter to tune is often the level of statistical significance. If we choose too high level - tests will fail even though improvements do exist. If we choose too low level - we’ll be getting lots of “confirmations” of false improvements. When we make decisions based on AB-tests, once in a while we’ll be making mistakes. We can limit the losses caused by such mistakes by choosing the appropriate level of statistical significance. Signup with the phone number Imagine that you are a product manager in a company running a typical web service. You are working on the ways for increasing the amount of signups. You examine the signup process steps and notice that many visitors stop when they need to enter their email address. So you decide to try asking for a phone number instead. Using phone number for identifying the users is not exactly a widely used practice yet and comes with the need to pay for a text message for activation. However, nowadays people aren’t that much into email anymore and do everything on the phone - so possibly phone number-based signups have the potential for bringing in more users. VS ...

Got GORM 6.1 (Grails 3.3+ or Micronaut), MongoDB 3.2 and strange “Prematurely reached end of stream” errors? - Check if these happen when trying to save BigDecimal fields and disable it in grails.mongodb.decimalType: false ...

This post is a slightly updated version of the one published earlier. It was created by Peter Stevens who have later written a whole e-book on Agile Contracts As a customer or supplier of software services at the beginning of a Software Development Project, you know that there is too much at stake to work with just a verbal agreement. A contract is really just a set of written playing rules. The right rules increase the chance of success for both parties. The wrong rules make cooperation difficult and hinder progress. What are the available playing rules and what is the best approach for a agile project? ...

This post is a slightly updated version of the one published earlier Measurement is fundamental to any engineering discipline and the planning of a software creation work is no different. Whenever you plan to make or renew a piece of software the most important metric as the workload size. Measure of size is important because knowing the amount of work to do and the team skills (i.e. velocity) you can easily derive the work costs and duration. Agile software development methods do strive against the overplanning and overdetalization. However, being agile doesn’t mean having no clue on when the work is going to be completed. Vise versa most if not all of the agile methods continuously provide team the current “best guess” on the remaining workload and possibly even options to cut some corners. ...

This post is a slightly updated version of the one published earlier Product backlog always lists items adding value for the customer. It includes functional requirements and non-functional requirements. It can also include items required by the team, but only the ones that will eventually bring value to the customer, e.g. taking into use a continuous integration server in order to guarantee the continuous end product quality. Product backlog cannot include concrete low level tasks and requests for building the intermediate artifacts. For example, it cannot include request for producing the design document unless customer has to ship it further for some purpose. Product backlog utilizes the simplest and the most effective way for prioritizing requests - a simple list. Such a method does not allow for having 100 absolute max priority features and forces the product owner to actually make decisions about the feature priorities. The higher the items are located on the product backlog, the more detailed they are. Items for the closest couple of months are usually quite detailed, while items that will be worked on in some 6-12 month can be defined very broadly and imprecisely. When there are several interdependent teams in the company or department, typically they all have a single product backlog and pull their work from it. Product backlog does not typically include the detailed requirement information. Usually the final requirement details are figured out with the help of the customer, when the requirement is being implemented. Ease of use, clear and transparent purpose is what makes the product backlog so useful for seeing into the project status. ...

Want to try handling your Scrum product backlog in just Excel? Here is a template with lots of comments and a video on how to use it. SimpleProductBacklog.xls ...

Got a single page app deployed to an Amazon S3 bucket or Netlify and want to see how popular it is without polluting browsers with the tracking cookies? Just add a Cloudflare CDN layer on top. ...