Hey Makers! 👋

Kevin, our featured maker, created InvoicePlane and grew its users to thousands before feeling burned out and passing it to another maintainer after 4 years of work. He is now maintaining a bookmarking app that he created to scratch his own itch. 🏆

Bookmarks are very popular among users and are used slightly more than other navigation strategies, such as querying a search engine. Over 90% of users have a bookmark archive according to research from the University of Toronto.

As the Internet becomes the dominant global information resource, users will need bookmark management systems that scale-up to manage their growing archives. Systems should minimize the effort needed to organize bookmarks, ideally an automated sorting system.

Poor visualization hampers users with large archives, while limited information in the top level listing of bookmarks makes it difficult to find bookmarks. With skills in web and backend development, Kevin created LinkAce with a focus on user management and handling. ⭐️

What I’ve Been Reading 📖

⭐️ If you’re still using RSA encryption for your SSH keys, your keys may not be as secure as you think. Kevin explains that it may take only 10-20 minutes of your time to create a new super secure SSH key.

Hacker News was initially built by YC co-founder Paul Graham to scratch his own itch and the site quickly took off. However, he realized that growth has its downside and explained the quality of the site and its community of insiders has gradually been getting diluted.

Social apps have made creepers out of all of us. Do we really need an app that tracks when a Twitter bio is updated?

Starting with a solution (rather than a problem to solve) might sometimes work. But then you’re relying on luck. So try to find a real problem people have, and solve it.

It may feel unnecessary, but what if your device dies, account gets suspended or the company goes bust? How do you collect your online data and back it up?

Maker Focus 🏆

Featuring one or more makers per digest. Want to be featured as a maker? Fill in this form. ✍️

Kevin Woblick

Kevin is a professional web developer in Berlin, Germany. He is skilled in web and backend development (PHP, JS, Python), project management and community building. ⚡

He is currently learning about system architecture and first experience in building a SaaS. 📚

Product Focus 📦

⭐️ LinkAce

Your self-hosted bookmark archive. Free and open source.

LinkAce is a bookmark archive. It wasn’t built to manage the bookmarks of your browser but has its very own philosophy.

My browser bookmarks contain only websites I regularly use and access. LinkAce, in contrast, is meant to provide a long-term archive of links to websites, media files or anything else which has a valid URL.

Violentmonkey

Violentmonkey provides userscripts support for browsers. It works on browsers with WebExtensions support.

Violentmonkey is an alternative to Greasemonkey, which is a userscript manager made available as a Mozilla Firefox extension. However, Violentmonkey is built with web extension APIs, thus supports many browsers, including Chrome.

It enables users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to web page content after or before the page is loaded in the browser.

Limus

🎨 Make your screenshot/image more professional by rotating, adding shadow and more.

Remember those fancy rotated app screenshots that you saw? Well, I find it very inconvenient to do all those transformations on Photoshop or similar tools.

I created this tool to help you transform your screenshots/images faster and easier. You can use it online or clone the app and host it yourself.

Note: A comparable commercial Saas costs $5 per month.

Education 📚 & Resources 🧩

• The Mediocre Programmer – What is The Mediocre Programmer?: The Mediocre Programmer is a book about the journey of becoming a better programmer. But before we can become better programmers we have to pass through being mediocre programmers.
• Pattern Generator: Use this free tool to create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns.

An Interview with Kevin of LinkAce

Hey Kevin! Let’s start out with your background. 📝

Started as web developer in 2008 with some personal projects. Had some clients from family and friends.

Studied Business Informatics from 2015-2018 and became a professional web developer at the digital agency Taikonauten in Berlin, Germany after that.

Launched the InvoicePlane project while studying but burned out and searched for a new maintainer after 4 years of work. It was quite successful with thousands of users.

Had some smaller open source projects in the last years, mostly built them for fun or because I had problems that needed to be solved.

What is the purpose of your blog, and what resources do you use to get your ideas, if any? 🧩

I share interesting links to articles and tools, also write ownarticles, mostly tutorials on how to do specic stuff.

I have about 200 blogs, websites and follow many people on Twitter. I made a list: https://blog.kovah.de/en/2020/list-of-my-rss-feeds

What is an opinion you have that most people don’t agree with? ✒️

Great success (Bill Gates or Warren Buffet-level) is mostly luck, and not a high skill. The most successfull people on this earth were at the right place at the right time with a good idea.

Why was LinkAce started and is there a roadmap? 🎯

I created it to scratch my own itch. Needed a bookmarking app that fits my needs.

Now I plan to extend the app to be usable by businesses, so user management and handling are important. There are some other features that are interesting, but nothing is strictly planned.

What is the most challenging problem that’s been solved in LinkAce, so far? 🚧

There were no big problems with it, but figuring out a way to archive links was hard. Found an easy solution with backups handled by the Internet Archive.

What is one product that you can’t live without that you think others should know about? 💡

Most important ones are 1Password (password manager)and TickTick (to-do list).

If I gave you $1 million to invest in one thing right now, where would you put it? 🚀

Hard to answer, because I would prevent investing into one single thing at all costs. Diversification is key.

But if it were one thing, I would like to hire additional developers for LinkAce and extend the softwareto become more usable by businesses. Building a SaaS around it could actually work.

Thank you Kevin.

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