Don’t Choose a SaaS Helpdesk! Really? Mar 17, 2013

This is a guest post by Dean Mitchell about the objections people raise against on-demand help desk apps. And since we're a saas help desk vendor we figured it fits our blog just perfectly.

It’s obvious to everyone but a crazy hermit living in a cave eating dried frogs and drinking unsavoury and unmentionable liquids that a helpdesk solution of some kind is an unquestionable necessity for the smooth running of your business. You may already have one that causes you to tear your hair out and scream creative and colourful profanities due to its convoluted and counter-intuitive nature. Bin it now! Life is way too short for that crap!

Hit the Tail: Marketing Hacks from Jitbit Dec 11, 2012

Over the last couple of years we came up with a number of great marketing "hacks" here at Jitbit Software, that include:

1. "Marketing Mondays"

Every Monday the whole team works on nothing but marketing. Nobody writes any code, no one touches the servers. No hacking, no debugging, no database tuning... Just marketing. Brainstorming on new ideas, staring at Google Analytics numbers, reviewing conversion rates, running A/B tests, working on website design etc. I ~~stole~~ borrowed the idea from Mike Taber who was kind enough to share it when we met last year.

Have fun!

This is my favorite time management principle. Even though it's hardly about saving time per se, but still... Don't be afraid to have fun! It's OK to have fun. Don't feel guilty for having it. Having fun is not losing time. So go ahead, grab your snowboard and go to the mountains for a week. Have a dinner with your wife. Take your kids to the waterpark. Try skydiving. Have a motorcycle trip across a couple of states (I did this two months ago on a rented bike, and it was amazing). Play a video game. Heck, write some code, if that's fun to you!

Have fun. It's fine. Don't put it off for the "better days" - there's no such thing as "better days" when all the work is done and the goals are achieved. By that time your body might not be capable of having fun anymore. You're getting old, remember? Human intelligence peaks at age 26 and keeps declining afterwards. We all get dumber over time. So go out and have fun right now before it's too late.

"The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work."

is my favorite quote by Paul Graham.

Now, the actual hacks:

Google Search is only 18% Search Sep 3, 2012

I was recently testing some of the keywords and positions for our hosted help-desk app and it suddenly occurred to me that 80% of the page were not actually the search results. Check this out:

My brain got used to filtering the ads out, so it never popped into my head before... We are used to this picture. I actually had to get up from my laptop, grab a coffee and then glance back at my monitor from across the room to notice this.

ADs vs Results: area size

Now, we're all technical people so let's do the math

Another post for ASP.NET/C# developers reading this blog. If you think these posts do not belong here, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.

Everyone knows Visual Studio 2010 can be slow. Even on my laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and Intel Core i7 it gets sluggish. Especially when editing Razor MVC views - every keystroke takes 1-3 seconds to register.

Below are a few tips on how to make it a bit faster:

IT Designation Definitions Jun 9, 2012

Continuing the "IT-humor" series of posts (previous: What If Drivers Were Hired Like Programmers) here goes:

Definitions of Designations

Project Manager is a Person who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in One month.

Microconf vs. Business of Software May 29, 2012

Being a long time fan of the Business of Software conference, I finally decided to try something else and went to MicroConf - a conference for self-funded startups run by Mike Taber and Rob Walling.

Once there was a search engine Apr 2, 2012

This is a sad story of an Internet giant. Started by two guys in a garage it eventually grew to control over 80% of the Internet search market and practically owned the whole Internet.

It was innovative and agile. The stock market loved it - at times the company stock doubled in price within just a month. It was one of the very few surviving companies after the dot-com bubble burst.

Automating Amazon S3 backups on a Windows Server Mar 18, 2012

Our helpdesk app (the hosted version) is being used in about 170 companies. Users have uploaded almost 150k (150,000) files. We have logged about half a million tickets. From about 100k users.

Obviously, we need to backup all this data. And obviously, a consumer product like Dropbox or SugarSync is not an option. We needed something fast, reliable & scalable. We needed cloud storage. So we chose Amazon S3 and I decided to write this simple step-by-step guide for anyone interested in automating S3 backups on a Windows server:

Wait, don't add that feature Mar 14, 2012

Just had an argument with my partner. He was going to add a new logging feature to our help desk app. Another feature. Another button in the admin panel. Another setting. Another report to read.

This reminded me of Jamie Zawinski's law. The one that says every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.

Why Developers Hate Antiviruses Jan 25, 2012

I hate antivirus software. I really do. Like almost every desktop software developer.

And the reasons are:

[Infographics] The Ultimate Career Advice Dec 16, 2011

I'm SO happy to be in the middle.

And don't forget to check the 24 Steps To Success.

Rethinking the Cloud Nov 28, 2011

For months I've been thinking that a "cloud-server" is just an overpriced version of a VPS.

Don't get me wrong, I get the platform - as a software engineer. As a business owner - I even get all the benefits - elasticity, reliability, scalability, flexibility and all the other "bilities". On the other hand...

See, a regular VPS also runs "virtually" - just like the cloud. It's isolated from the host-machine failures - just like the cloud. The latest VPS-software (say, vSphere) can even do load-balancing, shadowing and real-time switching between physical hosts in case of a hardware failure - just like the cloud.

So, what's the difference then?

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