Kamaldeep Singh

SVN is much simpler than git for the simple stuff (checking in files and updating them when everyone's online), and much more complex than git for the complicated stuff (branching and merging). Or put another way, git's learning curve is steep up front, and then increases moderately as you do weird things; SVN's learning curve is very shallow up front and then increases rapidly.

If you're storing large files, if you're not branching, if you're not storing source code, and if your team is happy with SVN and the workflow you have, I'd say you should stay on SVN.

If you're writing source code with a relatively modern development practice (developers doing local builds and tests, pre-commit code reviews, preferably automated testing, preferably some amount of open-source code), you should move to git for two reasons: first, this style of working inherently requires frequent branching and merging, and second, your ability to interact with outside projects is easier if you're all comfortable with git instead of snapshotting the outside project into SVN.

I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.

Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.

WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.

I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.

Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.

WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.

I still use slack, although I prefer discord. It can be intergrated with discord to work with clients who only want to use slack or even any other platform. API integrations are possible over at Discord.

The awful crappy dependency hell of a thing they call an API. Everything sucks. Slack is one of the worst messaging apps I have ever seen. It's incredibly slow and laggy.

Let me rant about everything I hate about slack. Even though I use it as an integration for another platform and will recommend it even though it's horrible as a whole. They are unstoppable towards companies who don't have people technically savvy enough to transition any other software.

It's so bad I am considering making my own mix of discord and slack.

Finding conversations you know you've had - but search is (Still) terrible, and if it was a direct message with a group of people, you have to remember exactly which group of people it was with

Search...absolutely awful. If they could figure out search, Slack would be unstoppable. it got better with ctrl f in conversations, but still isn't there

Badly arranged Chinese buffet of people, conversations, channels, files and links.. and search sucks too.. Break up the people into a separate window so I can have a buddy list ala Communicator or Skype. Give me some freaking organization and curation to the conversations - otherwise it's 1000 person cocktail party with everyone playing drinking games.

AGAIN! Search sucks. Spellcheck is still broken. Too many notifications.

Interface ist inconsistent between devices.

No way to forbid slack to touch my microphone settings (seriously, dont autoadjust my microphone level, it never works and i hate you so much for it)

Still no good screen sharing on linux.

The buggy red dot. Usually shift-esc will clear it (in itself a pain), but now even that hack won't help. The red dot number keep climbing even though I've read everything and used shift-esc.

I miss some features but I wish slack had a little more ability to organize, group channels, and navigate a little better.

user groups need work... If I search for a group, open it, I want to be able to not just see who is online from that group, but also a message button. I'm sick of searching that person, which closes user groups and if that person is actually AFK, I have to search for that group AGAIN and do it again... What a waste of time compared to other tools which are supporting this.

Date stamps needs to be more visible, or give us option in settings to make it more/less visible

Scrolling needs to be improved, I don't want random jumps there. Especially when time and date stamps are so tiny so it takes a while to get oriented again.

I used to really hate slack, but that's mostly because I have to use user groups a lot, most of the time I'm using slack it's to find someone who belongs to some group and message him... and that stuff is still pretty bad, even tho it was changed a bit...

oh and microphone settings... that hurts bad...

It's slow and laggy if you ever used a native program and got used to responsive user interfaces.

You can't remove someone from a call if they join by mistake

(or, to put it another way, if you start a channel call, you should be able to moderate it and remove those from it who are to meant to be there)

Video calls (using the "native" app on macOS) consume so much resources that the whole machine becomes unresponsive. A video call with the same number of people in a true native app is not a problem. So it's not the inherent bandwidth and processing power required. I mostly like Slack but for remote teams this is a problem.

You really want to know what I hate about SLACK...

The inability for the app to BLOCK DIRECT MESSAGING when outside work hours... I work for global company and I constantly get messaged after midnight by morons who think i am up at 3am

It has this Bullcrap Send Anyway function on messages which totally overrides my Do Not Disturb settings if said moron is blind of what time they are sending their damn message... I worked oncall before so the slightest him of my cell at night will wake me up...

Another annoyance on messaging... Idiots who message direct over chatting in the team channel for stuff that should be seen by the whole team working a ticket .... Or classic hey I opened a ticket not two minutes ago ' can someone look at this ticket pleaee' blah blah blah blah ... People who I don't know sending a random 'HI' and no other info about wtfh they are reaching out to me about ...

If SLACK wants to add a function to fix this I want control to block direct messages from anyone truly outside my direct team and line of management that is not a member of a group that can engage onCalls for issues ... I am so sick and tired of this I literally have to uninstall the app everyday to ensure no one bothers me after I am off work and then redownload it before the start of the next day... It's pathetic!

The people who choose discord over slack are only the consumers who dont need all the enterprise features that slack has. businesses are still sticking with slack. Or like us, those whom can program bots and integrate api's manually for a much better feature rich experience with discord.

Slack pricing is abysmal, it's honestly so stupid it's not even an option for most communities/dev teams

Bigger businesses I expect to use slack if they can't hire a developer to set up discord or even just hiring a contractor for a more productive platform to work off of.

Very small teams (2-5) are the professionals I see switching to Discord and can switch to slack with premade discord bots to easily transition slack and discord api intergrations to message cross platform. Or just switch when you need the enterprise features and not feeling like vetting programmers to work with discord. It really isn't a big switch, just do it. You won't regret it.

Discord has an amazing freemium model. Their devs are great and they push out amazing updates regularly. Due to this Discord is getting adopted by communities everywhere.

My dev team is still on slack for various reasons (threads, better integrations (monitoring/software dev), expiring guests built in, auditing, SLA, variety of in-house integrations).

I was skeptical at first but the amount of stuff (voice, search, video/screen sharing) they've added in such a short amount of time won me over. I think if they target the business market more they can stomp out Slack. The only problem is that Slack is becoming an industry standard for IT so integrations for it are everywhere. The slack compatible webhook discord provides helps with this a bit (even though it's a bit broken).

Honestly I hope they don't target the business market. Not specifically anyway. Discord is made by gamers for gamers. Everyone else is welcome but they shouldn't be trying to please other demographics specifically.

I honestly see no need for slack really. The only reason why its better than discord somewhat is because of all the integration; mailchimp, github etc. All can be accomplished using a bot it's just a pain. Also I do think Discord should have some sort of "paid" tier for discord hopefully better than Slack's model because their current method of generating revenue isn't going to be sustainable for the long run. Important thing to note is that their focus has and will always be on gamers/streamers so developers are not a priority with all their features, it just so happens that our needs align on some level.

As developers ourselves, we've made bots and are able to do everything from making phone calls or texts to doing follow up lead emails, collaborating for graphic design and video editing. All of it is possible through api integrations with discord.

So far for me, it uses hell a lot less memory.

Really simple to use cdn for wordpress that's built with siteground. Temporarily using them until I'm down with my art piece of a website that's still being coded from scratch. Maybe it'll be done in a week, maybe a year. Whenever I get to change hosts I'll probably switch to something I like better. Thinking of going with kinsta and looking at my cdn options after the switch.

Been using discord since I was gaming back in 2017, never stopped using it. I love it, my employees love it, our clients love it. There's some people used to slack so we integrate slack into discord with zapier.

Best decision ever made. Unlimited calls, screen sharing, groups, privacy options, api intergrations with zapier. So much is possible for so little as $0.

Go with Hotjar or Clicktale, they're the best in the business. You've got to keep in mind that heatmaps will always be a sample of a population. Unless you're paying a massive premium they aren't tracking literally every click on a page.

Heatmaps are pretty useless on their own, but paired with digital analytics, user research, etc they can provide some serious value.

For example, let's say you've got a massive visitor drop-off on your shipping details page and you're trying to figure out why. Heatmaps are a great way to contextualize the problem. You'd be able to see A.) Which form fields are being clicked least often B.) where people stop scrolling on a page (if your program has scroll tracking) C.) If users are clicking off the page to go do other things.

You can do a lot with that information like:

Run an AB Test that reduces the amount of form fields to the screen depth most visitors reach

Remove the form fields that are filled in the least (removing major barriers)

Check your analytics to figure out how often visitors who click certain links from the shipping page go on to buy. If you find a particular link leads to less conversions on average, test removing it from the page completely.

These are just a few example of heat maps. I like integrating them with my AB Testing program and looking at the different ways users interact with content depending on changes in page layouts. You can gain some real insight here.

For instance, let's say I wanted to test whether a navigation with 10 options would convert more users than one with 5. So I run a test and the 5 options wins. Great. But what if it turns out that even though it lost, a very large number of people were clicking a certain part of the navigation in option 10 not included in option 5. Heatmaps would let me see that. Then I could run another test where I included the highly clicked menu button and one where I exclude it.

Good heatmapping programs also come with scroll tracking and use recording sessions as well. All very useful tools in analyzing how people interact with your website.

Temporarily working with a wordpress site using elementor pro theme builder, mainly for the speed to just get it up and running. (We code from scratch or use a builder for clients as requested).

Coding a site on the side which won't be live on our new hosting server until I feel like it's absolutely mind boggling gorgeous! Haha.

Like all frameworks, it has its pro's and con's. You would be mad to write a serious game or a heavy app with this. But we have built simple games using this. Performance is probably much better can you expect.

The biggest problem we see is one constantly needs to figure out workarounds for annoying platform specific bugs. One that is driving us nuts now is playing sound on Android. And this is connected to the fact that the time saved on making a single codebase is usually wasted on trying to figure out these workarounds.

The biggest pro is - yes, you can build an app in Javascript and it will work on Android and iOS. If you only know JS, then you can expand on your offerings. There are a bunch libraries that make life easy - ionic for example for UI stuff.

For the right app (small; simple) then its a good option. But be prepared to swear a lot :)

Been doing Cordova + Polymer. Works well and looks like a native app. Still think you need to have a decent knowledge of your target platforms for fixing issues like FB integration.

Kinda self explanatory unless you have 0 knowledge of software or web development. But basically, the barebones minimum you need to know as a coder.

What do you guys think? Why is this even an option, feels like everyone would be having this selected. lol.