Category: Side Project - Page 5
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How to Unshorten Short Urls
Several months ago I created a site called LinkUnshorten with the goal to guard people against short links from sites like goo.gl, bit.ly, tinyurl etc. Url shorteners are great but they do have the risk of...
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Side Project Tech Stack
I want to start this post by saying this is my preference on the frameworks and technologies that I use for most of my apps. Depending on your experience and goals you should experiment to see what works for you. For...
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Weather.io
I’ve been working on a new site called Weather.io. Besides being on an awesome io domain name thanks to park.io , it’s a simple site that displays a weather-related background image and the current weather...
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Headless Chrome on Heroku
I’ve been experimenting with headless chrome for a Link Unshortener tool I’ve built to take screenshots of websites. I’ve been using BrowserShot which is great. It’s a php wrapper around Puppeteer which makes it...
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Stress Test with Loader.io
Ever wonder how many requests your $5 a month Digital Ocean server can handle? Using Loader.io’s free load testing tool can help you do just that! It’s a good idea to know what your server can handle so you can be...
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Round Robin DNS
In a previous post, I’ve covered how I used Digital Ocean’s load balancer to handle the increasing number of request my Weather Extension receives. For weeks everything was going great but about a month ago I started...
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DigitalOcean Load Balancers
Performance and reliability are two key factors that contribute to a user being happy when using a website/app. They tend to not be forgiving when a website fails to load especially when it comes to browser...
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How to Market Browser Extensions
For the past year and a half I’ve been testing different ways to market my Weather Extension. Currently Weather has over 125,000 users. Here are some of the strategies that have worked well for me: Share the...
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Ways to Improve Laravel Performance
Over the past few months my Weather Extension has grown to over 118,000+ users and averages 14 req/sec. Weather uses Laravel primarily as an api and VueJs to render the html. Speed is very important. Currently...
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Zero Downtime Laravel Forge Deploys
So you’re a Laravel developer and of course you are using Forge to manage your servers. You enjoy how simple Forge makes it to deploy your applications but you may notice a few seconds of downtime when your app is...
