Trolls and bots are widespread across social media, and they influence us in ways we are not always aware of. Trolls can be relatively harmless, just trying to entertain themselves at others’ expense, but they can also be political actors sowing mistrust or discord. While some bots offer helpful information…

There’s a foundational question that every project starts with: accept the freedom to roll your own solutions along with the burdens that go with it, or take the chance to use sensible defaults that allow you to move quickly, but hide a multitude of decisions and set you on a prescriptive path. — Deciding whether or not to use an opinionated framework for your next project will have significant implications, both over the short term of getting the product to market on time and over the long haul. It can affect how easy your application will be to maintain and modify in order…

Many development teams skip having a staging environment for their applications. They submit a PR, potentially run tests in a CI system, merge to master, and then deploy to production. This is a risky pipeline because there is no true integration environment or integration testing being performed. …

Heroku Dataclips enable you to create SQL queries for your Heroku Postgres databases and share the results with your team, third-party tools, and with the world. The recent release of the new Dataclips introduces a number of new features, including a schema explorer, editor autocomplete, chart visualizations, and more options…

Not everyone who tries your product will purchase and stay engaged. If you offer a free version, you’ll often see a significant drop in engagement shortly after sign up. The question then becomes, “How do I improve the onboarding experience to increase engagement and revenue?” I’ll break this down into…

David Breger is the Tablet Mobile Product Lead at LinkedIn and a mentor at 500 Startups. Mobile now accounts for 43% of LinkedIn’s visits and will soon make up the majority. Previously, he created endorsements which is the fastest growing product in LinkedIn history. I reached out to David to…

At a recent Analytics Hackathon I was able to use R to double our prediction percentage for which customers converted to paid plans. An accurate prediction can generate lead scores so sales can focus their effort on promising opportunities or customers who are at risk. …