Category Archives: Design

cloud, Design, JavaScript, webdev

Building Resilient Microservices for Bootstrapped Apps 🏃🏼‍♀️🚵🏼

Out on the trail, your phone isn’t plugged into a wall. Every network ping drains battery. Every background process steals CPU cycles that could keep your GPS running for another hour.

In my previous post on the GPX Water Mapper, we explored visualizing water sources along your route. Now we’re going under the hood: designing a microservices architecture that respects the constraints of outdoor apps—where a dead battery isn’t just inconvenient, it’s potentially dangerous.

Imagine getting a real-time hydration alert as you approach mile 12 of your desert bike ride, calculated from your current pace, the temperature, and known water sources ahead.
All while using less battery than a typical podcast app.

What we’ll build:

  • A microservices approach that actually makes sense for small teams
    (spoiler: not everything needs to be a service – moreover, in many cases you should avoid it and run on a monolith)
  • Event-driven patterns that keep your app responsive without constant polling
  • Node.js implementations you can deploy on minimal infrastructure
  • Real-world trade-offs: when to split services and when a monolith wins
Continue reading →
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Design, webdev

Essential System Design Tips for Startups

You’re launching your first startup… Well, Congrats!

Whether it’s a SaaS invoicing tool, an e-commerce shop for handmade goods, or a new social app, you’ll quickly hit a truth: system design is your blueprint.

Done right, it makes your app boringly reliable. Done wrong, you’ll spend more time firefighting than building features.

This post is based on Sean Goedecke’s excellent piece on system design, reshaped with a founder’s lens: lean, practical, and ready for bootstrapped growth.

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Business, Design

UX/UI Designer Role At ESGgo

There is an increasing interest in how companies are managing their environmental, social, and governance (ESG). Since it’s a new topic, many companies struggle to cooperate with the changing demand around the ESG arena.

This is why we are building a new platform that will help companies leverage ESG and not struggle with it. Instead of manual data entry into spreadsheets or emails over long threads, our platform automates data collection and reporting across all the company departments. It will also have the ability to create reports, dashboards, and benchmark information that will help you identify gaps. On top of it, we will have an AI layer that will provide recommendations for setting goals and improving ESG standing against any reporting framework.

What is ESGgo?

ESGgo is the ESG-operating-platform for global enterprises.
A group of experienced business professionals and technology experts from Facebook, Google, and McKinsey and teams from the leading Israeli army technology units gathered together to impact the world positively.

We provide best-in-class tools to collect the hundreds of ESG data points across the organization, capture the data and simplify the work-streams.
Moreover, the ESGgo system enables departments to collaborate and analyze the ESG status. Later, the system automatically shares it with the different stakeholders: the management team, board of directors, and even external reports to shareholders.

One of the system’s unique capabilities is that competitive analysis tool: it allows companies to compare external rating agency scores and competitor benchmarks and suggest tactical and strategic actions that could help increase their ESG score.

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Chrome, Design

Design Better Forms

25%-metric-on-formsTL;DR

Make your forms as short as possible. The best form is no form. If you must have ‘few’ fields, make sure you optimized for Autofill with the right autocomplete attributes. As you can see in the image above, it’s moving the needle, for real.
Now, if you have another 4 minutes, here are few points to think while you are designing you next form. Continue reading →

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Chrome, Design, HTML5, mobile, webdev

Mobile Web For Mobile World


 chrome_front-androidHere are the slides from a talk I gave at Campus TLV to developers from the government. It’s clear that mobile is growing very fast and you must have a quality present on mobile devices. You wish your site (and apps) to be ‘mobile first’ and make sure they are using the best practices for mobile.
It’s important to remember that E-commerce occurs across apps and web, but consumers rely disproportionately on mobile web for commercial tasks. In these slides, we will see how to improve your sites or applications. Btw, if you wish to read this information in Hebrew, you can find it over at DevHeb.com Continue reading →

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Chrome, Design, life

3D Art, Mobile And A New Tutorial On Web Databases

Why mobile native apps must die

This is a very interesting talk by Scott Jenson. He speaking about the ‘anti phone’ and why  a phone that is based on a browser will be very useful (to say the least). From his talk description: “…Mobile apps are on a clear trajectory for failure. It’s just not possible to have an app for every device in my house, every product I own and every store I enter. Much like Yahoos original hierarchy gave way to Google’s search, applications have to give away to a “just in time” approach to applications. This talk will explain how applications must give way to a more universal approach to application distribution, one based on the mobile web and cloud services. The problem of course, is that the mobile web has both hands tied behind its back. Any mobile app today is locked away behind a browser ghetto: in effect, a sub OS inside a larger mobile OS. This isn’t just an arbitrary technology debate, a just-in-time approach to application functionality can unleash entirely new sets of application, ones which are impossible with native apps. This talk will layout how this problem can be fixed, and what changes need to take place, outside of just HTML5, for it to happen.”

Migrating your WebSQL DB to IndexedDB

Lastly for this post, as WebSQL is deprecated, I recommend web developers to stop using the technology in new projects, as, effectively, the spec will receive no new updates and browser vendors aren’t encouraged to support this technology. The replacement is IndexedDB. As a ‘NoSQL’ database, IndexedDB is very different from relational databases, and it give us lots of power. IndexedDB let us create an Object Store for a type of data and simply persist Javascript Objects to that store. Each Object Store can have a collection of Indexes that make it efficient to query and iterate across. In this tutorial I’ve showed how you can convert the current usage of WebSQL and start leverage IndexedDB.

And let’s finish with some art…

3D Art + Com

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Chrome, Design

Fog On The Ocean – In Your Chrome (Or ChromeBook)

A new Chrome theme that I’ve created to give you more from this ‘autumn feel’…

Thank to +Romain Guy for the great photo.

 

 

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Design, webdev

A List Of Great Free (Developers) Books

Let me start with MindView Inc – Bruce wrote, may be, the best books you can find on Java and C++ and they are free on the web.

Meta-List

Language Agnostic:

Android:

Bash

C/C++

Django

Git

HTML

Java

JavaScript

Linux

Maven

Mercurial

NoSQL

Objective-C

Perl

PHP

PostgreSQL

Python

Ruby

Scala

Subversion

SQL (Implementation agnostic)

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Design, webdev

Web Design in 2010 is not what you think

Very good, short (less then 5min) video from SXSW 2009. Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything. I sign on every word…

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