I sent the same page three requests this morning with no cookies attached, the way a monitor or a link checker would. Three responses, three different session ids, three different CSRF tokens, each one set to live for a day. The same response also says it must not be stored by any cache.
The pages either side of it, same site, same server, same deploy, hand out nothing at all and are served with five minutes of freshness and a day of stale while revalidate. The difference is not the page and not the traffic. It is which middleware group the route was declared in, which in my source is a word at the end of one line.
Then I went looking for what reads those two cookies on that page. Nothing does. The page carries no form and never prints the token into the markup, so neither cookie has a consumer until the visitor goes somewhere else. I watched the session store locally while sending five of those requests and it did not gain a single file. The id is minted, sent, and never asked for again.
Here is the check, and it is about two minutes. Take the pages you point ads or links at. Request each one without cookies. Look at exactly two response headers: whether anything is being set, and what the caching header says. If the first is present, that page is out of every shared cache in front of you no matter what the second one claims, and the clients collecting those identities are your uptime monitor, your link checker, every social preview fetcher and every crawler, none of which will ever send one back.
Picking a flexible setup feels like overengineering when you're just starting out so we just threw everything into one flat database table to move fast.
It seemed like the right call at the time because we shipped our MVP in two weeks. But six months later when we needed to add relational data and user permissions, refactoring that massive table took an entire month of halted development. Sometimes moving too fast in week one creates a massive anchor in month six.
Did you stick with a simple database structure early on, or did you prep for scale from day one?
One week ago, I noticed in one Facebook group (nich : Graphic design) this discussion post: TL;DR: Due to AI advancement, he receives 70% less work as a graphic designer freelancer.
[The text was translated from the Czech language to English.]
I started sharing what I was building because I liked the idea of it. Accountability, feedback, community. All the reasons people give.
What I did not expect was the way it changes the way you think. Every decision starts to include an imaginary audience. You find yourself choosing the version of your work that will make the best post instead of the one that is best for the product.
Building everything your loudest users ask for is a classic trap. We went down that exact same path early on and ended up with a bloated app that confused everyone else. Power users want niche workflows that might not fit your actual target audience at all.
We started telling users "no" or pointing them to workarounds, and our retention actually went up because the app stayed simple.
Do you separate feedback from paying enterprise clients versus regular users, or treat all requests equally?
As an entrepreneur who started my journey at 15, I never thought that there was another path, but sometimes I hear the opinion from people who launched their startup that "being a founder is terrible." What is your opinion?
