rorygibson's comments

Hey That's good feedback, thanks.

I'm definitely happy to talk to potential customers about alternate pricing models....

Basically the fee is a % field in the DB, if I wanted to reduce it, or zero it and work through invoicing or direct payments for individual customers, that's cool)l with me.

If it's of interest, drop me a line on [email protected] and we can work out a model that's better for your use case.

Great feedback, thank you!

We don't support subscriptions today - but we're actively working on it. Single-item payments is our MVP but subscriptions are next.

Documentation is .... um, "light" at the moment.

Right now, you should be able to use connect-src,img-src,script-src all "https://svr.trolley.link"

We also depend upon Stripe Checkout, so you should add the attributes for their stuff too ( https://stripe.com/docs/security )

Don't have a versioned release right now, which is a gap. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll sort it :-)

Maker here...

I designed this to be a simple Stripe-backend-as-a-service for people who want to take money fast without having to roll any backend code.

e.g. landing pages that take a deposit for your product (KickStarter style)

(I made this)

I mostly did this because I wanted to see just how minimal you can make a site that sells something these days.

If I make any actual $ from it I'll update in here :-)

I got tired of (only) working for other people as a consultant. Started a side project 14 months ago to create a small scale integration tool, and it turned into a full-on search indexing tool for digital product companies - https://getctx.io

(Basically you connect it with your Slack, Trello, Google Drive, email and GitHub and it indexes the content & lets you search via web or our Slackbot)

I've got multiple clients in trial and a couple of promising community installations for large tech bodies, hoping to get some decent revenue on the scoreboard soon :-)

I kind of agree with this, but I took a slightly different path and built my own 'enterprise search' tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io - so I'll always be thankful to Slack for giving me my idea :-)

I agree about Slack's search - it can be slow too.

(I actually had so much of a problem with this that I built my own enterprise search tool for my Slack, Trello and GDrive, and now I'm productizing it - https://getctx.io )

Hi Jacob, That should be fixed now - I've emailed you directly to discuss :-)

Founder / author here.

tl;dr - I spend too long trying to find that email I know I have around here somewhere. Or was it a Slack message?! Coulda been a Trello ticket... so I built something that helps.

CTX - https://getctx.io - is my side project, which I've recently launched.

It lets you sign up with a couple of clicks, invite your team members and index your;

  - Slack messages 
  - Trello tickets
  - GitHub (issues and markdown)
  - JIRA issues
  - Google Drive files
  - emails (that you send to your unique inbound address)
  - and more integrations in development.

The target market is people like me - working in smallish teams or mid-sized digital companies. The kind of places where you use a bunch of SaaS tools to store collaborate on things, but it's easy to lose track of what you've stored.

Right now it has a couple of plans for different sized teams, - and free trials.

It's been live for a couple weeks now and I have a small amount of traction, so I thought now was as good a time as any to talk in public and see what kind of feedback I get. Gulp.

Replacing other forms of communication is always a non-starter; every org builds up data legacy in the various tools they've tried out over the years.

(Shameless plug: that's why I built CTX - https://getctx.io - a SaaS cloud search tool that indexes your data in things like email, Slack, Trello, GitHub, JIRA and Google Drive)

The "organisational memory" point is one of the driving factors behind the tool / startup I'm building.

https://getctx.io

tl;dr - It's basically all the good bits of Enterprise Search, but set up to pull in the data from the cloud based SaaS tools we all use in 2018, and designed for digital / product teams.

The rationale is, I think that there is no sensible, central place for a company to store all the types of info they have. Slack doesn't do it all, Confluence, JIRA or Trello aren't enough, Google Drive is good for some things...

In my experience (and from many people I've surveyed and spoken to) most companies end up with loads of these tools, and it's a nightmare to find specific pieces of content when you have 5+ options for where it could be.

The answer isn't one tool to rule 'em all - it has to be an abstraction - make the data available but store it (master it) in the various locations.

So, my product indexes Trello, Slack, Google Drive, GitHub and email (and, in beta, JIRA). It'd be great to get some HN-style feedback :-)

tbh I haven't looked into PostgreSQL as a direct competitor to ES in the text search space, mostly because I have quite a lot of ES experience of things like aggregation for faceting, stemming and textual analysis, and I had a (perhaps incorrect) assumption that PostgresSQL was less capable in those more specialised areas.

One thing I would like to understand is how the PostgreSQL search experience scales with data volume. My main cluster for CTX will potentially get (very) big and I don't know enough about PostgreSQL, multi-master and full-text search across large amounts of data.

I'll definitely do some digging though, thanks!

Hi devj, You're absolutely correct that an RDBMS would be an odd solution for a search index *

Anyway, on CTX I use PostgreSQL for storing things that deserve to be relational - job control, batching, users, accounts, billing, invitation codes...

All the indexed content is in an Elastic Search cluster (http://elastic.co if you're unfamiliar - it's a specialised search indexing data store built atop Apache Lucene)

* though actually PostgreSQL has a really good capability as a JSON store that means people do sometimes use it as a NoSQL solution

Yeah it works quite well. As usual, the biggest problems are with video and mics in meeting rooms with bad acoustics. Everything else is good.

#achievements works especially well because it gives a persistent, short-form log that people can read quickly when they come back from days off, for instance.

I've previously run with a #standup channel in Slack for distributed teams, where everyone makes sure there's an update in-channel at 0900 GMT of what they did in the preceding time they worked.

Plus an #achievements channel where you make a note of anything you did that was significant (I've also heard this called #whathappened)

I'm doing some consulting on the side (while starting https://getctx.io) and at this client we have a daily physical standup with a video call on Zoom, plus #achievements in Slack.

EDIT: oops, link updated. Thanks justinclift!

Performance, mainly.

Partitioning mean your data can be spread across more physical areas (or FS partitions, or whatever) at lower level, giving the database (and you) more control of performance by optimising what gets stored where at a lower level.

Official pg doc here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/ddl-partitioning.h... - the pertinent bits are as follows:

---

Partitioning can provide several benefits:

- Query performance can be improved dramatically in certain situations, particularly when most of the heavily accessed rows of the table are in a single partition or a small number of partitions. The partitioning substitutes for leading columns of indexes, reducing index size and making it more likely that the heavily-used parts of the indexes fit in memory.

- When queries or updates access a large percentage of a single partition, performance can be improved by taking advantage of sequential scan of that partition instead of using an index and random access reads scattered across the whole table.

- Bulk loads and deletes can be accomplished by adding or removing partitions, if that requirement is planned into the partitioning design. ALTER TABLE NO INHERIT and DROP TABLE are both far faster than a bulk operation. These commands also entirely avoid the VACUUM overhead caused by a bulk DELETE.

- Seldom-used data can be migrated to cheaper and slower storage media.

The benefits will normally be worthwhile only when a table would otherwise be very large. The exact point at which a table will benefit from partitioning depends on the application, although a rule of thumb is that the size of the table should exceed the physical memory of the database server.

As a long time user of MySQL, I've switched to PostgreSQL for my most recent startup precisely because the PostgreSQL team continue to innovate in a sensible way.

One of the core requirements is a stable, fast and reliable initial import of existing data from 3rd party services, and because of throttling concerns that led us to a batched, retryable solution - and a requirement for simple, fast job control.

We've built this around a parallelised solution using the FOR UPDATE/SKIP LOCKED feature from PostgreSQL 9.5 onwards.

It's not bleeding edge, but for us it was a great example of how the pg team pick up the useful features from e.g. Oracle, and incorporate them into the product in a solid way, without all the enterprisey marketing crap that Oracle make you swallow before you can understand the actual feature-set.

[the startup is a SaaS search tool that helps you index across Trello, email, GitHub, Slack, Drive - https://getctx.io if you're interested.]

Cold calling is not illegal in the UK, for either consumer or B2B. There are, however, restrictions. Here's a good summary.

http://www.inbrief.co.uk/consumer-law/cold-calling-and-the-l...

And here are the actual rules:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electroni...

More abstractly;

I'd be interested to know whether any of the respondents in this thread hold, or have held, genuine management responsibility in a reasonably sized company.

Sales tactics like cold calling work because in business, companies look for advantage or efficiency, and it's entirely reasonable that another company might sell you something that helps; many people are willing to listen to the occasional pitch if it has a chance of making their job easier.

I built CTX - https://getctx.io - to help me find stuff in all my cloud services.

Years of leading agency and consultancy projects for other people and never being able to remember whether stuff was in a Trello card, a Slack message, a Drive file, an email etc meant I was scratching my own itch.

It's now in private beta with a couple of companies here in the UK and I'm planning for a wider launch in a month or so (here's hoping)