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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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Aug 06 My issue with payments companies (including @stripe) is this exactly. The thinking seems to be “we wired together a dysfunctional system, therefore we deserve a percentage of all transactions” even though today there are systems to transfer value much much cheaper, and one of the things preventing their adoption is the preservation of the old system by the payments companies who built an empire around them. 2 1 0 553 412 .
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 22 Announcement: Today we're launching Really Good Software - the first software agency built for the future, that acknowledges.... 1) Individual developers augmented with AI will increasingly surpass the capabilities of entire teams, and... 2) In the new world, the dominant Software Agency pricing model (charging for bums on seats and hours worked) will need a significant rethink. Our answer is an incredibly-priced monthly subscription that gives you all of the ingredients needed to ship great software. Go check it out 👇 https://t.co/7lWI7JnXSt 20 1 4 2.9k 553 .
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 16 I work fairly long hours and haven't had a proper holiday in years, but I can decide to go to the cinema with the family at 3pm on a Tuesday or hit the road on a whim, and it's an amazing feeling coming from 10+ years of startup life. Being a business owner is tough for the first few years but if you stick it out the freedom is unmatched. 6 0 0 746 341 .
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 I generally try to be nice online, but I *despise* these kinds of “You’re not smart enough to sit with us *real* engineers” tweets 16 0 2 928 130 .
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 30 "Integration Settings" by @louisdainguyen Finished Result: https://t.co/1TpMONHQ2j #RGSQuickbuild https://t.co/iuipvdsXQu 4 1 0 1k 124 .
Jun 30 Mini Announcement For the past 2 years we've been building a software agency called Tonic. In the next week, we're going to be launching our Productised Offering - Really Good Software. The ultimate goal with Really Good Software is to become the obvious answer when someone asks "Do you know of any good freelancers or agencies?". To unlock that we'll have public, transparent pricing, and (soon) a lot of public content - both on the work we're doing, and on our approach. I've been obsessed with the idea of Building Good Software Affordably since I began building teams over a decade ago. Silicon Valley engineering culture has convinced us that quality is unavoidably expensive, and I would like to show people that with the right approach, it's really not. 24 2 1 2.1k 765 .
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 .
Jun 06 There are Hypertexters and Javascripters. Both talk a lot about why their way is objectively better, but in reality neither chose their approach for its merits. It was always about personal taste. Hypertexters prefer writing html, Javascripters prefer writing javascript. 4 0 2 1.2k 274 .
May 30 I think @t3dotgg is mostly bad faith, but there is a pretty important point here. The html-over-js-brigade (of which I'm a part) should have better responses and resources to point to when jankiness is raised. In my experience It's 100% possible to make server-rendered apps that *feel* as good/fast as SPAs. But it does require much more intentionality than is involved if you take a declarative js library off the shelf. 1 0 1 913 423 .
May 29 A few weeks ago @RevolutApp started bouncing every payment to our Filipino team, who we’d been paying for months, and blamed it on “an issue on the other side” with no other explanation and no recourse. How can there be so little accountability for something so important 🤯 1 0 2 700 273 .
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 07 Just found out that yc is back to in-person since '22, and now I feel bad for the lukewarm advice I gave to people on whether they should apply (I was in the remote batch and was quite disappointed). If I said this to you you can safely ignore - I'm guessing an in-person yc would https://t.co/uj7WTjQtWo 6 0 1 681 298 .
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 24 It's interesting how people can interpret the same thing so differently. My experiences - personal, family, friends - is that it's basically impossible to get half-decent, reasonably affordable therapy - not the thing I'd be calling for *more* regulation on. Personally don't think the AI chat tool is appealing. If it were the case that the alternatives were abundant and affordable then *maybe* would say this kind of thing is harmful. Otherwise this seems like a good example of "It's the worst thing we have, apart from every alternative" 0 0 2 923 546 .
Apr 23 Glad I didn’t see these types of tweets when I was thinking of applying to yc. The one day of prep for runway for 9 months when I was pre revenue at a very generous valuation was one of the highest leverage things I ever did. Most people’s early stage ideas are worthless. 2 0 0 540 272 .
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 Writing something this polished in this amount of time/code is *so* satisfying. No build step, and full control of the markup. 🤩 https://t.co/qdzgDKWMGf 5 0 1 613 152 .
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 The optimum amount of conflict in friend/family relationships is not zero - it's being able to get a little cranky at each other and have it not boil over. Seen so many examples now where people have zero conflict for years then something happens and they never talk again 8 0 2 833 272 .
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 25 Is there a ruby/rails version of https://t.co/OUtr9ZEFPP? Love the interactivity & gamification, think it could be incredible for getting juniors up to speed. 1 0 1 797 162 .
Mar 19 @ahmed_sulajman Any plans to do a html output version? Or react only for now? 0 0 0 0 77 .
Mar 19 This is a fascinating exploration of an alternative way to “write code” 3 0 1 678 71 .
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 16 Who else is making music (or anything) that gets this kind of reaction, not just from die hard fans it seems, but the *average* fan Feels like the pinnacle of creativity https://t.co/5CB3sktSS6 2 0 2 597 194 .
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 .
Feb 28 @SanchezDav90 @rails @dhh This tweet made me re-visit the docs site - it's much clearer now than the last time I checked, but the time-to-aha is still super long. I personally understand the ideas because I spent a few weeks with it, but if I was directing a new joiner to read about it - I'd almost be… 1 0 0 0 303 .
Feb 28 @zeddotdev I noticed you have "Work with code on any machine" on your homepage. Do you have something like VScode remote ssh or is this purely about the collaboration features? https://t.co/EZKHF2JX2w 0 0 0 0 201 .
Feb 28 @SanchezDav90 @rails @dhh 👇 https://t.co/A8abXqf9NG 0 0 0 0 52 .
Feb 27 @johnlpollard @Intrepidd @rails @dhh Sorry just realized it wasn't mentioned in this part of the replies but my personal go-to for this is htmx. We only use 5 of the attributes the library gives, which are just more succinct ways to do an async fetch, so there's very little learning curve. 0 0 0 0 290 .
Feb 27 @johnlpollard @Intrepidd @rails @dhh That’s such a good point - to be honest there’s not. I should probably write one 😬 but might take a while to get around to 0 0 0 0 159 .
Feb 27 @Intrepidd @rails @dhh Would argue it's higher than 5%, but still that's kind of my point. If the thing you're using it for is remote partial replacement, there are much better options out there that are both conceptually simpler and better documented than Turbo 0 0 0 0 262 .
Feb 26 This is why I don’t recommend using Hotwire or Turbo with @rails unless you really need real-time, web socket enabled features. People (including @dhh) talk a lot about how awesome it is, but the reality is that the supporting material just isn’t there - and the people who made it don’t seem to care too much about documentation etc. so getting it in use on a team has much more friction than say, just using @htmx_org. 8 0 4 4.7k 420 .
Feb 22 @dabit3 I’m not a beginner. Your tweet said “you can now build mobile apps with html”, but the video didn’t show html, so I was clarifying whether you could build the apps with actual html, vs html in react as you’ve demoed 3 0 0 0 223 .
Feb 22 @dabit3 I don't see html in either the example video or the repo, looks like jsx. What am I missing? 2 0 0 0 100 .
Feb 20 @_swanson Yes! Rails routes are a great example of obfuscation for very little benefit - one of the first lines on our readme files is “strictly one route per line” 1 0 0 0 164 .
Feb 19 This is very cool. Using a checked in sqlite db and the sqlite viewer extension with @code to get a super clear explanation of the data before and after a commit. https://t.co/7dDd9Bb2I2 3 0 0 437 187 .
Feb 18 I really hate to say it, but tailwind is a prime example of this. 90%+ of apps need a simple, constrained set of SPCs to prevent cascade collisions on teams of more than one. This stuff is very cool, but totally unnecessary for most applications. https://t.co/Aj92K9Wwt4 1 0 1 356 272 .
Feb 10 cc @htmx_org this was inspired by one of your tweets - goal would be to let anyone create a "Cookbook" and build their own collection provided it's based on HTML 1 0 0 217 161 .
Feb 10 Working on something along the lines of "Shadcn for HTML". Is this a dumb name? https://t.co/19Nm9gKT7T 11 2 7 1.5k 103 .
Feb 10 A disproportionate amount of frontend interactivity (more than we'd like to admit) is based on the simple idea of toggling classes when a user clicks on something. https://t.co/528btThJu7 8 0 1 430 187 .
Feb 04 @rails https://t.co/HWJxpgVYz6 0 0 0 255 30 .
Feb 02 Another bad faith argument from @cramforce that there's no way to keep a chat app serving ~500 users moderately reliable for less than $90k/year because you have to have a person on call to fix it if it goes down. The main reason Slack needs people on-call is that they serve the same product to 30 million users. They've had 8 outages in the last 12 months - that's *super* impressive at that scale, but even so, much less reliable than the 6 apps I've been hosting on Cloudron for the last 18 months with zero downtime. For the "Clearly he's never done this in real life" crowd - Updates: Handled 100% by Cloudron - all apps are auto updated with new releases. - Dodgy Deploys: We had one for Gitlab - there was an answer on the forum which required rolling back a version - took me 15 minutes & about 2 hours downtime (still less than Slack in the last year). And I wasn't "on call". - Backups: Set up in 15 minutes and about 20 clicks with Snapshooter - Resource Issues: Cloudron tells us when resources are getting low (there's 6 apps on a single VM). It's one click to resize the server with our host. - Storage Issues: It's €14/month for 300GB of storage with our host - even at 500 users your chat database is not growing beyond that for *years*, and when it does, again it's one click to resize. What am I missing here? *Why* would you need someone on call for this? 3 0 0 621 1.4k .
Feb 01 @Shpigford @maybe @rails Just sent a DM 0 0 0 0 39 .
Jan 31 Same thing happened to me - bizarre onboarding process with no transparency or way to dispute. No idea why my account was flagged. Just use @ContaboCom 1 0 1 363 151 .
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