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@tonyennis

Tony Ennis

@tonyennis

4,360 Tweets
2,743 Following
2,723 Followers

Building software teams & mobile apps Prev: Built a bank in Asia YC S21

Filtered by topic: Tech Philosophy & Takes ✕ Clear filter
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Sep 27 One of the things we're doing with all new joiners at @rlygoodsoftware now is having them go through @MobbinDesign and literally rebuild the products in there (with our stack/handbook of course), and with daily code review from me. This was built by 2 devs over 2-3 weeks. Note the details (loading states, animations etc) - it all feels reasonably smooth (with some polish to be added) but it's literally just partial page updates on the links and forms, a small set of ~20 or so reusable css classes, and a sprinkles library for minor frontend state. Posting because I keep hearing people saying modern web apps aren't possible to build without a "modern" stack like React (cough @shl) and it is demonstrably not true, *provided* you've done the work to find the right/bets abstractions (which admittedly is harder in non-react land). 3 1 0 440 849 .
Sep 27 @shl Got you - I do agree Rails needs more obvious ways to build really nice polished stuff, and turbo/hotwire/stimulus are not it IMO. On the other hand I still think for low/medium interactivity sites, HTML with something to handle partial page updates, and a sprinkles library for… 12 1 0 0 286 .
Sep 24 @FORSBERGtwo Hey Bjorn is this still available? Happy to pay for it 0 0 0 0 67 .
Sep 24 @RUTVIKCHANDLA @_jr @rails Still available? 0 0 0 0 43 .
Sep 19 Happened to see both of these in the last 48 hours. “My old ass” = great movie “Book of Mormon” (the broadway show) = not that good 0 0 0 178 133 .
Sep 10 @Shpigford Disagree slightly. Your db latency is multiplied by the number of queries on the page, so if you add features and have pages doing say 50 queries, which can easily happen if you don’t watch out for n+1s, it can get slow fast. Prob not Virginia to NY, but generally having app and… 3 0 0 0 291 .
Sep 10 @IMAC2 For the past decade the opposite has happened - It has been extremely common to see people using javascript to do things that are trivial to do with html/css and where using javascript makes the code and the product worse. I agree that using hacks or features that aren't… https://t.co/cibwOptGBs 3 0 0 0 303 .
Sep 08 @tabacitu @ste_bau I built this, for that: https://t.co/aSBC2Ao3k6 1 0 0 0 66 .
Sep 06 @Shpigford @synth_finance @Hetzner_Online @digitalocean @hatchboxio App server and db server in different locations gonna make that feel a bit slower than it needs to. Or are they same region? 2 0 0 0 192 .
Sep 05 I’ll say it because many in the Laravel ecosystem will feel too conflicted to say it (because Taylor has done so much and is an absolute machine). But this probably isn’t good news for the community/ecosystem - almost impossible to get the returns a series A investor will be expecting without juicing revenue and moving attention up market. Hope I’m wrong 2 0 1 421 356 .
Sep 05 What if I told you you could have... - UIs with reactivity and smooth loading states - That load in 1/10th of a second - That preserve scroll state - That preserve state when the page is reloaded Using only html, with plain links and a single attribute on your body tag. @rails with @htmx_org is the way. 7 0 1 337 327 .
Sep 04 I’m convinced Hetzner just blocks like every third person who signs up. Happened me a year ago, came back a few months ago and it worked. Weird 0 0 0 185 143 .
Sep 03 The main remaining large challenge I have working with clients: Almost no one wants to do the "grunt work" required in the product role - creating new tickets for features, bugs, improvements. Improving existing ones. Writing updates etc. Everyone wants to be a strategist 1 0 1 176 274 .
Sep 01 Dutch pragmatism is allowing a small group of 3 (us) to sit in your café for a few hours even though it's technically not open til 5, because they asked to and it's not doing any harm. Many such examples - love this culture. 2 0 0 287 224 .
Aug 31 Another week, another meeting with a founder who's convinced they need a "visionary" technical founding team member for their boxware startup. 1 0 0 211 142 .
Aug 29 @devhenryhale Hey! Did you get to build anything with it yet? 0 0 0 0 61 .
Aug 29 Opened cursor. First thing I tried: Spent 10 minutes trying to get it to understand what was happening and fix - no dice. Task was based on understanding that a markdown file was being converted to html, and writing a few lines of js to enhance it Will keep playing around 1 0 0 195 273 .
Aug 29 The idea that static typing is what makes the difference between solid software and buggy software baffles me. It prevents a very specific kind of bug, which happens (on our teams at least) quite rarely. What am I missing? 2 0 2 455 223 .
Aug 28 @FinlaysonConnor Had this exact question a few weeks ago and streak was the one that stood out, have been using it on and off since then and it’s quite good 0 0 0 0 156 .
Aug 27 If you're genuinely interested in being on the cutting edge and pushing the web forward - this is the kind of stuff you should be nerding out about and following - this is what gets us maintainable, usable, future proof web software. Not the latest react library that replaces it and is out of date in a few months 4 0 1 365 314 .
Aug 26 @atthatmatt Yeah, couple of reasons - "A crud app" is 3 syllables - people don't use terms in sentences that feel clunky. - "Crud" as a term means nothing to non-tech people, so every time you use it you have to follow it up with "CRUD means create, read, update, delete..." - People (I… 0 0 0 0 289 .
Aug 26 Thought about this more and I'm really liking "Boxware" - Easy to remember - Conveys practicality (like a box) - Discourages over complication ("You're building boxware, you don't need {X complex thing}") - Conveys storing stuff (like an actual box) - Most UIs are just boxes (form inputs) inside boxes (sections) 2 0 0 269 314 .
Aug 24 This is cool. HTML First is mentioned in W3C's own Web Sustainability Guidelines (although they mislabelled it "HTMX First" 🤣 https://t.co/PBtm0zRG0M https://t.co/6w55L7BSJS 4 0 0 419 174 .
Aug 24 Draft of a one-pager for how to build "Hypertext Rails" applications that are on par with the js ecosystem for experience & slickness, but without most of the complexity overhead. https://t.co/2GVX89YgbB 5 0 1 274 207 .
Aug 21 RT @MikeMcQuaid: I'm super proud to have spent the last year building @Workbrew_ with ex-GitHubbers @johndbritton and @mozzadrella (and som… 0 2 0 0 140 .
Aug 21 Knowing when to use @heroku and AWS, and when not to, can save you $45k/yr (Numbers from a recent @rlygoodsoftware client project) https://t.co/956HlQciqT 1 0 0 180 130 .
Aug 19 This week's issue: Been using @tellow_app to pay payroll tax for the last 6 months. Just found out the government has not received any of these payments - they're somehow lost in the system. Tellow have no way to get in touch with them & are ignoring support messages 🫠 0 0 0 122 274 .
Aug 18 I honestly think turbo will be replaced with something else in the future - just doesn't feel as magic as the rest of rails. I had the exact same experience and hear this regularly 0 0 0 250 180 .
Aug 18 The average AI founder seems to have thought very little about the implications of their beliefs. Good example here Them: “AIs will be sentient soon” Me: “Gotcha, so probably best not to commercialise them, cos that’d be like slavery right?” Them: “Oh no we’re building a huge moonshot company around giving one to everyone” 🤔 2 0 1 405 330 .
Aug 18 @finereli Love this. Happy to help paint the terrain 0 0 0 0 52 .
Aug 14 @RevolutApp I’m locked out of my account. I enter my Passcode and am told it’s wrong. When I try to reset I’m told I can’t use my current password 🤷‍♂️ https://t.co/RmXcie3sMH 2 0 0 0 175 .
Aug 14 @motherwell Our approach to determining value differs. This is like saying when GPRS data came along on cell phones "I'm happy to pay $1 for every mb of data I use to send email, because otherwise I'd have to fly to meet my clients which would cost thousands of dollars" - the value… 0 0 0 0 283 .
Aug 12 @gavinsblog Yeah, it may be the case that neither work. I’d agree that general digital literacy isn’t going to help much - I don’t even know how you’d create educational content given how quickly it changes and that we’re only starting now to get synthetic media. Also would think there’s not… 0 0 0 0 293 .
Aug 12 There *has* to be a better system than peridodically threatening business owners with the most drastic thing that could happen them (closing their bank account) in order to uphold protective regulations. How can the gov/payment cos not see how insane this is? https://t.co/DvFkUMWZau 0 0 1 223 284 .
Aug 09 Makes me sad when a js library doesn't have a vanilla javascript option 😢 https://t.co/sJyJ2ZOTWW 3 0 0 187 97 .
Aug 07 @bengbutler @wilhelmklopp @kolo_ai Congrats! Kolo looks very cool, would love to take a look at it if/when rails support drops. 0 0 0 0 127 .
Aug 06 I’ve always been the “Your engineers shouldn’t be hidden away from your stakeholders” guy, but having your ops team tag your engineers in slack multiple times a day and not go to a PM by default, is one of the best ways to get low output/attrition from otherwise great developers 5 0 0 219 279 .
Aug 05 @mubashariqbal If the stats can come from simple Sql queries then @metabase is awesome - super quick to set things up and get familiar with 1 0 0 0 139 .
Jul 31 @rtayag Agree! ActiveRecord + the gem ecosystem is 90%+ of the value of Rails in my opinion 1 0 0 0 91 .
Jul 30 My biggest pet peeve now that most other productivity problems have been solved - Most day-to-day computer work happens across about 2 dozen SaaS apps - Have to constantly re-log-in to most of them - 2fa flows etc. - Many are slow. - Often you need to be logged in to 2 accounts at once. Result: Just getting basic tasks done each day can feel like a slog Strikes me that having custom frontends at the OS level could alleviate this somewhat - let the providers expose the API and let the OS handle the UI, which would like be some form of tables with filters and actions. Wouldn't work with creative tools but would handle most crudware. 0 0 1 244 643 .
Jul 29 @johnrushx Ah I see what you mean. I think that would also apply in Europe though - large variance but places like Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Germany anyone at that level is making a lot more than €36k a year 2 0 0 0 207 .
Jul 25 It’s wild that people still haven’t properly caught on to what cloudflare workers can do - these kinds of things are a few dozen lines of code that chatGPT can one-shot output from a text prompt. 0 0 1 339 195 .
Jul 25 Separately, just signed in to Zapier for the first time in a while - their new UI is top notch - the whole thing feels super smooth & easy to understand 1 0 0 138 156 .
Jul 25 Is there really no good alternative to https://t.co/GjWmj3F7Tx? Pricing is insane, seems like an opportunity for someone to build a better, cheaper competitor 0 0 1 167 159 .
Jul 25 @rlygoodsoftware Hotwire (https://t.co/JXc3HKUXwt) walked so we could run https://t.co/f4vpVJNQpn 0 0 0 125 97 .
Jul 25 3 years of work in one graphic. This is how we build apps at @rlygoodsoftware https://t.co/EwLPyokC4l 4 0 1 281 101 .
Jul 23 @1Marc But you’re still writing html inside JavaScript 😕. Personally prefer js in my html attributes like https://t.co/lr6EztfwdZ 4 0 0 0 129 .
Jul 23 @austen we agree - one of our devs is also a @bloomtech grad https://t.co/aHzZJJ77nG 0 0 0 238 84 .
Jul 19 @joshmanders @stripe You wrong about this - they’re very good at responding publicly but if you don’t go semi viral on social you’ll get the same “there’s nothing we can do” customer service - I know easily 10 people who have had that happen. If you’re “inside the happy path”, which I’m guessing you… 0 0 0 0 301 .
Jul 18 Want to really get behind Web Components, but the way they handle CSS - with no way to easily inherit the CSS of the containing page - feels like a massive constraint 😔 2 0 0 267 168 .
Jul 17 @emerywells Whats the example of existing saas where this would apply most strongly to? 1 0 0 0 87 .
Jul 17 Worst parts of using @heroku : - Sporadic, but time consuming manual upgrades when you run a lot of apps (upgrading DB, stack, plugins). - Overpriced "Add Ons" which cause cost to balloon - Finding the right specs that cover throughput during high-traffic periods without spending too much on a monthly basis. We've recently found a nice middle ground - using RDS for database, upstash for redis, and letting heroku run the web app & workers - now we can scale compute very easily and one-click resize the database when it starts to struggle. 0 0 0 240 544 .
Jul 15 Back in Manila this week. There's something about the culture and people here that just puts a smile on your face. Unflappable, infectious positivity. Very lucky to work with 🇵🇭 people every day. 2 0 0 166 197 .
Jul 15 @neondatabase any idea when you'll be supporting eu-west-1 as a region? 0 0 0 0 71 .
Jul 14 @rsnous @htmlenergy Hey Omar! Have you come across https://t.co/EgIFQGJeff by any chance? We have very similar ideas 😁 3 0 0 0 118 .
Jul 11 .@webflow is great but editing long rich text is so bad - arguably the buggiest feature I've used in any product 0 0 1 177 112 .
Jul 10 @panphora No idea if it's the angle you're thinking, but my immediate reaction from the demo video was that the perfect audience for this is students (literally elementary school upwards). View Source editing is something I've seen a lot of kids do and immediately be enamoured by & have… 0 0 0 0 292 .
Jun 30 If you're curious how far away from this we are, I ran the experiment. Answer: About 90 minutes of additional coding to go from Claude Output to high fidelity, production ready frontend for a Saas screen. https://t.co/CwI2YB1ACY 0 0 0 479 230 .
Jun 28 There is a third option here. If you combine React Native Stacker and React Native Webview, you can build your app with no turbo, just 100% normal links and forms, and have it feel as smooth as the amazon shopping app (which is also hybrid). 0 0 1 366 241 .
Jun 20 @htmx_org someone tweeted a really well written article a week or so ago about the benefits of using attributes over for example web components, I think in response to something you tweeted. Happen to know where that is? I can't find it anywhere 7 0 0 0 245 .
Jun 06 Not to dunk but to provide an alternative perspective. Every single Neo bank is horrendous when you want to do anything slightly atypical, including @RevolutApp. As an example of something atypical - sending payments from an EU country to contractors in the Philippines. 0 0 1 441 270 .
May 27 We need more of these kinds of founders - authentic, thoughtful, genuinely mission driven. 6 0 1 479 90 .
May 16 I get annoyed when people imply technology can *only* get better. The fact that no individual or business can have any degree of trust that they can send & receive payments without service interruption, in 2024, is a great example. These companies are too big to provide support, and yet everyone relies on them. 2 0 0 494 312 .
May 16 @arcinternet why is mute disabled on whatsapp? How do I get it back? https://t.co/307AmRkbY2 0 0 0 0 92 .
May 10 @joeldrapper What youre describing in your response here (using the same markup for a button as opposed to a component) is not the same as what he’s describing (copying and pasting the exact same content - a footer, across every page it appears) 0 0 0 0 245 .
May 07 @joeldrapper Oh I know, believe me! Just think there’s a lot of misconceptions about heroku so thought it was worth mentioning https://t.co/2Syx337SFk 0 0 0 0 152 .
May 07 @joeldrapper Not sure when you last used heroku but unless you need a bunch of services it’s actually pretty reasonable. I manage 12 orgs on there and on average it’s about $200/month for apps with traffic. (I’m also very pro VPS but of the PaaSes heroku is IMO still best and not as pricy as… 4 0 0 0 293 .
May 04 @volkandkaya Will try that, What about for as the page scrolls and sections come into view? Same approach? https://t.co/lbMlvqnLwM 1 0 0 0 132 .
May 04 @volkandkaya is there a way in Versoly to trigger classes on scroll intersect, or to otherwise achieve the same text appear animation you see on e.g. https://t.co/POVsgaVVv7 ? 1 0 0 0 175 .
Apr 30 @willobri The wright-brothers-level innovation is the LLMs, not the hardware. I get where you're coming from with go-easy-on-the-builders but the bad-faith arguments reduce your credibility 1 0 0 0 190 .
Apr 26 Banking System is so f**ked. Trying to pay several contractors that we've been paying for months. Now @RevolutApp is just insta-failing them - no actionable response on Live Chat, no way to get support. So fucking frustrating. https://t.co/iMZzD1L8LM 2 0 1 481 250 .
Apr 25 Rails people looking at these tweets Wish people would stop making over generalised claims for their pet theories. There are many ways to build an app, each with benefits and trade offs. https://t.co/FZEb04fcFT 0 0 0 70 212 .
Apr 24 @steveruizok How would a pizza get ordered without eventually having to hit an API/Browser, even if through a CLI? 0 0 0 0 114 .
Apr 24 Still think for the "AI virtual assistant" to hit a value threshold where it becomes widespread the API orchestration model is too limited - there are so many things that APIs only still can't do. https://t.co/KMUqMjuPUs 1 0 0 147 221 .
Apr 24 I'd go a step further and say that a cloud based remote-controlled browser is *the thing* in the short term that unlocks the real "AI VA" use case - there simply won't be sufficient API coverage to do everything you can in a browser. But Rabbit's marketing was based on a "Large Action Model" which if this turns out to be true, was dishonest. 1 0 2 438 343 .
Apr 22 https://t.co/xVuxpjiSR0 1 0 1 344 23 .
Apr 20 https://t.co/rEPUifGYYz 1 0 0 190 23 .
Apr 19 @getsentry your product is awesome but first-run experience is bad. Just wasted half an hour trying to get Slack set up - first issue: Upgraded the plan but the app still didn't seem to be aware of the upgrade. Second issue: Getting this cryptic message when trying to set it up,… https://t.co/70NbPM7wUM 1 0 0 0 304 .
Apr 18 @ToKTeacher I think you have the psychology wrong on this. Most people who have these interests do so not out of excitement, but because they want to understand and accept the reality *despite* how it makes them feel. I happen to think, as you do, that they’ve reached the wrong… 0 0 0 0 281 .
Apr 17 @destraynor I feel you guys are leaning into this trope in a way that comes off as needlessly us-vs-them. It can be true that building is hard and should be lauded, and people get bad reviews for missing the mark. Labeling people with reasonable critique “haters” doesn’t feel very intercom-y 12 0 0 0 292 .
Apr 15 @joeldrapper Ouch! Personally find raw html with a little bit of erb to be the clearest, most maintainable way to do it. Although I'd agree when it comes to Rails frontend stuff e.g. <%= turbo_frame_tag %> Also agree that I'm in a minority and you're probably right that many prefer react 2 0 0 0 295 .
Apr 14 @Mqsley Yes! This sounds genuinely great. 0 0 0 0 41 .
Apr 13 @joshmanders Took me 10 years to realize this, then a few weeks to learn the basics. I've now spent more time manually migrating no-longer-supported heroku databases in the past 6 months (which is meant to be "managed") than I have maintaining servers. I'm paying €6/month for a server with… 0 0 0 0 291 .
Apr 11 @KenjiCapital Nice! Assuming by your answer there's no website/online venue that just lists different kinds of properties that you can browse through? E.g. what @faborio just launched with https://t.co/cOlzonmtCw ? 2 0 0 0 215 .
Apr 11 @KenjiCapital Where would I find more examples of these kinds of things? 1 0 0 0 72 .
Apr 10 @artillain Yeah I considered building something custom also but decided not to, as I'd then take on the burden of maintaining/explaining vs just pointing the team to https://t.co/8tQiLs4pMS If I was going to go a more custom way I like Chris Ferdinandi's HUG CSS https://t.co/cbkldHUsCH 1 0 0 0 287 .
Apr 10 @jakobgreenfeld I feel I have more experience than most with this - we worked with an agency to build a more targeted offer for outbound. We also closed 2 pretty large deals from cold outbound (ironically our own, before we worked with the agency). "Only works if you find the very small… 0 0 0 0 290 .
Apr 10 What has happened the @transferwise mobile app? Insanely bad, just won't stay logged in, which is terrible UX when you need it to confirm payments. 0 0 0 216 147 .
Apr 08 There are developers who like to write code and developers who like to ship features. Often some overlap. But not the same thing - and the former often present as the latter to the non-technical people hiring them. 2 0 1 466 214 .
Apr 08 @MindaugasLT @digitalocean @ContaboCom - although the incredibly retro UI might put you off. What are you using it for? 1 0 0 0 119 .
Apr 05 Don’t understand this logic. If they’re not using the product, why would you want to charge them? If they are using the product, block the features til they pay same as all SaaS? 3 0 0 487 178 .
Mar 27 @darraghcurran In that example the answer was completely wrong, it lead to an article about getting a pin from your POS system - nothing to do with admin API keys. Ideally it would just give me the answer, which turned out to be “this is not possible”, which I found on page 2 of google search… 1 0 0 0 294 .
Mar 27 @dr For sheer cost, cheapest is @ContaboCom followed by @Hetzner_Online If you'll want to do more than one, spend half an hour and self install pgAdmin on one of their €6/month instances = unlimited free databases https://t.co/LZqY9hkJGU 3 0 0 0 240 .
Mar 19 @ahmed_sulajman Any plans to do a html output version? Or react only for now? 0 0 0 0 77 .
Mar 16 @vadimdemedes Hey Vadim! Checking this out now, very cool! Is there any way to use it without npm? My codemirror is setup with vanilla html/js. Thanks! 0 0 0 0 152 .
Mar 16 @dpaola2 @dewskix Sure. Requires a chrome extension from here: https://t.co/lXliOv6hx3 Then a vscode extension from here https://t.co/BbwM4YQA07 And then adding this 👇 to your development.rb file config.action_view.annotate_rendered_view_with_filenames = true Which is documented here:… 0 0 0 0 293 .
Mar 16 @dewskix the open Rails Partial extension is awesome, thanks for building it! 1 0 0 0 77 .
Mar 08 @Kombaico your tool is getting *really* good. If you had - First class VScode integration like codeparrot - Support for Static Tailwind (basically "don't use square bracket classes") It would reach the threshold for me/my team - would be transformational. Any chance of either of… 2 0 0 0 281 .
Mar 06 Noticed this. I (currently) really don't like it - I follow people in the web dev space - I want to see their ideas when they post, and I'm guessing those who follow me want to see mine. Currently if I don't find an "angle" that appeals to a broader base, that doesn't happen 🤷‍♂️ 1 0 0 335 280 .
Mar 05 @jaycee001 Because they’re all built on the banking system, which is largely duct taped together 0 0 0 0 96 .
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