You are here: Home / Archives for neon

Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.09]

by

As an entrepreneur, pricing is an important consideration in any evaluation, development, and customer testing. In How To Price A SaaS Product, we see different pricing strategies, cost-based pricing, competitor-based pricing, penetration pricing, value-based pricing, freemium pricing. None of these match what I am ultimately considering: consumption-based pricing. Pricing is critical to define the value proposition statement and determine the range of the total lifetime value (TLV). It can vary greatly for B2C, B2B, and B2B enterprise offerings. If we look at YCombinator https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6h-startup-pricing-101 a basic principle is determining the gap between price and cost. That is your margin and your incentive to sell, and you work with either cost-plus or value-based pricing. Starting with founder-led sales is difficult as you do not have the luxury of a dedicated and experienced head of sales to work on different models and guide a technical founder, even before you enter the minefield of enterprise sales with applicable bids, contract, and compliance complexities. I am drawn back to “Consumption-based pricing is a pricing model that charges customers based on their product or service usage. Consumption-based pricing calculates pricing based on usage volume rather than the number of users and is a popular pricing model for IT services, SaaS, and cloud computing and storage” Cite: Consumption-Based Pricing.

Moving a Billion Postgres Rows on a $100 Budget

I wrote recently about the 1 Billion Row Challenge (1BR). This week, I found this article on the same number with a different title. The objective was not performance; it was cost. PeerDB enables the efficient extraction of data from PostgreSQL into a data warehouse, such as Big Query, ClickHouse or Snowflake. It was interesting to see Arvo as a format used over, for example, Parquet. The product also offers different streaming modes, including log-based (CDC), cursor-based (timestamp or integer), and XMIN-based. I will need to do further research on this new term XMIN-Based.

Test queries against your production database (responsibly)

This post links off to a YouTube video of The Safest Way to Test Postgres Destructive Queries, which provides a basic introduction to branching of the Neon PostgreSQL DBaaS. While the title originally interested me, the example showing the mechanics is like many other product examples in which it is extremely simplistic and not a true representation of “production” size or workload. I see this as a similar concept to AWS RDS Aurora cloning. However, any example should modify the structure of a table, measure the impact of that structure against production queries (note plural), and provide additional metadata rather than just a response time. These are important considerations in my own evaluation of test coverage of data access and the gathering of configuration, data, and infrastructure when running experiments to determine a more optimal data access path or a new functionality requirement. More documentation can be found here on Neon Branching

About “Digital Tech Trek Digest”

Most days, I take some time early in the morning to scan my inbox newsletters, the news, LinkedIn, or other sources to read something new about professional and personal topics of interest. I turn what I read into actionable notes in a short, committed time window, summarizing what I learned, what I should learn and use, or what is of random interest. And thus my Digital Tech Trek.

Some of my regular sources include TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow. Also Scientific American Technology, Fareed’s Global Briefing, Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck, Last Week in AWS, Micro Newsletter to name a few.

Random Wisdom

This week, I was reminded via a very interesting statement that work-life balance and joy in what you do are critically important. You will not find on a tombstone the statement:

“I never worked enough hours.”

Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.02]

by

Indie Newsletter Tool Generates $15,000 a Month

There are so many different email newsletter sites you could wonder if there is market saturation. MailChimp, Mailgun, ConvertKit, Sendgrid (now part of Twilio it seems), Moosend and Mailersend come to mind.

It seems the space still has plenty of revenue-producing options including buttondown.email reportedly a side gig generating $15k per month. Source: BoringCashCow

When I asked a good friend and author of the Technical SEO Weekly his use of ConvertKit directed me to this Baremetrics Dashboard which is another product to look at sometime.

LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024

How do use an LLM? If you are still on the fence start getting into the habit of using it more frequently then start. I now use ChatGPT and Claude AI daily, and with a crowded market there are many other emerging technologies to also consider.

I use ChatGPT for coding and image generation with DALL.E. I use Claude more for reviewing large documents that seem to be ideal for producing a summary, or to generate a fictitious movie script from those documents.

I do not like Javascript nor do I wish to actually learn this language however I write it daily via ChatGPT. Javascript is the ever-changing technology of web development and it’s impossible to keep up with the next product, or version of a product you may know. ChatGPT helps me navigate this combined with asking for HTML and TailwindCSS.  However, it’s not perfect, you need to be an experienced engineer who has learned how to write code for many years to ask the right questions and to correct the LLM when it does not produce what you expect. Let’s look at CSS. Now there is flex and grid and it’s hard to keep up with changing features that browsers support. This is where ChatGPT has helped me. I have been using Tailwindcss but it still took an expert friend 30 minutes to help me debug a CSS formatting issue of a future OBS Twitch streaming project to correctly size the content all in a 1920×1080 box. I learned a lot of new features of Google Chrome Developer Tools Inspector I did not know and are probably just the start of expert debugging features.

Until a few months ago I never knew it’s now much easier to read JSON in Javascript.

async function fetchData() {
  try {
    const response = await fetch('data.json');
    const data = await response.json();
    console.log(data);
    return data
  } catch (error) {
    console.error('Error fetching data:', error);
  }
}

let data = await fetchData();

I’d like to remind users that  ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information.. Source:  TLDR

ParadeDB (GitHub Repo)

Every day there is another PostgreSQL product to review.  I am a current user of ElephantSQL which I didn’t know existed two months ago. Neon and Tembo are two more PostgreSQL serverless-related products on my product review list.  Now adding ParadeDB as well as reading Thoughts on PostgreSQL in 2024.

About ‘Digital Tech Trek Digest’

Most days I take some time early in the morning to scan my inbox newsletters, the news, LinkedIn, or other sources to read something new covering professional and personal topics of interest. Turning what I read into some actionable notes in a short committed time window is a summary of what I learned today, what I should learn and use, or what is of random interest. And thus my Digital Tech Trek.

Some of my regular sources include TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow to name a few.