I don't fucking believe it! Who the fuck navigates on right click!? Invision, you fucking piece of shit! Can't you do one fucking thing right?

We don't have a designer yet in the team so we had to learn Adobe XD on the side to prototype our ideas. After months of getting the hang of it thinking this semi-free tool will work for us to save some money, Adobe decides to change their pricing plans starting in April 2020 and it will no longer be free. It feels like Adobe trapped us to get used to their platform and then secretly slap us with a price tag halfway. We can't blame them since we're all trying to put food on the table here. We started exploring Figma today and oh boy was it a gift from the gods! The features are so much better. They make our workflow faster!

Yesterday I had a conversation with a mobile app development company to make a clone of the current contacts app. 3 points from 10 mins conversations;

1. They offered me for a working prototype in just 35% of actual app development cost. They'll take 15 days to work on that. ( Me: "Do you mean the prototype that I created in 40 mins using invision and sent you its video recording?" after a little argument they agreed that they meant the same.)

2. They said they will have to embed the complete search engine in the app. (Really!! we never name searching in DB as "search engine")

3. They said they'll take approx 15 days in UI and UX. (Me: "will you change the designs I shared?" They: "It is our internal process, we can't give much detail on that")

Designing with "real" data

In Interaction Design Uni i've got this assignment to design a prototype for an "Ebay for used books". A requirement is that we have use "real" Data and not lorem ipsum for our design prototype tools. Which is a fair point but....

It's about 50 book categories (crime, history, romance) we have to cover, and for every category the prof wants at least 2 Books.

I've don't have the time to type in the (meta)data for 100 books at 30 JSON properties by hand. What would be your advice?

Do you maybe know a easy to use online bookshop API? (remember I'm a tech savy designer not a dev)

Or do you know someone in a low income country who does data entry? Or any experience with hiring someone on fiverr?

Thank you for your help. :)

What do you use for your side-projects regarding Anti-DDoS protection?

I have a community with 1-2k daily users hosted in Siteground. Currently, I am not experiencing any DDoS issues (mainly L4) but I used to when I was using another service provider. The trade-off is that the machine and the service I'm paying here is way more expensive.

I don't care about managing the server, but I was looking for a cheaper option to get my project with.

The stack is LAMP and it is an Invision Power Board forum.

What do you recommend? Which service(s) do you use for your projects and how do you prevent DDoS on your side?