When your app relies on making API calls to external resources, you should expect that there will be network issues from time to time and you should prepare for them.

While these will be rare relative to the number of requests you're making, handling them early on could really save you a lot of headache in the future as your app usage grows. Many of these things can be easily handled with a simple retry …

Our third Shopify app, EZ Importer, was actually published on the Shopify App Store a couple of months ago but we decided to stay in beta for a bit to make sure the app is stable and our early users are happy with it. We're finally at a point now that we're ready to get out of beta and have added a bunch of features since the initial release as well.

If you're already …

I've been using Google's Project Fi service for about 4 months now and it's one of those services that I wish I'd known earlier.

I first heard about this service when I was living in Bogota, Colombia earlier this year from another traveler. Currently, to sign up to the Project Fi service, you need to have a U.S. address. So when I visited family back in the U.S., I immediately signed up for the service. …

I've finally decided to perform major version upgrades of the main components of this blog: the operating system (Ubuntu), the programming language (Python), and the web framework (Django). Doing these upgrades to the latest LTS (long-term support) versions will future-proof the stack for at least the next 3 years.

One of the main reasons you'd want to do this is to get the latest security updates. It's hard to keep up with security as vulnerabilities …

We've recently passed 100 paying customers for one of our Shopify apps, EZ Exporter.

Shopify apps are technically SaaS products. We maintain the app and the servers it runs on and provide it as a service to Shopify store owners. You can set different types of pricing: from one-time fees, usage-based, or recurring monthly subscriptions.

EZ Exporter is our first paid app which got published on the Shopify store last December. It took about …