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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
Date ↓ Tweet ❤️ 🔄 💬 👁 📝
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 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 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 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 .
Jan 30 @PierreDeWulf @rails https://t.co/7iabLPGSjm And Rails For Zombies is still the best way to quickly understand ActiveRecord https://t.co/dpLcoq4tNB 4 0 0 0 150 .
Jan 23 Have often day-dreamt about a competitive hackathon, where people compete to build a product in an hour or two. Problem is at current speed it'd still be pretty boring to spectate. Wonder if we could get to the point with AI where it's accelerated enough to become non-boring 6 1 1 467 277 .
Jan 20 @jmlacroix This particular app just didn't need websockets for the functionality - at the time the calculus was "Oh this will be make the product a tiny bit better and will be quick to do so zero cost". In hindsight there was a cost in maintenance and additionally complexity for deployment. 1 0 0 0 291 .
Jan 20 Watched a dubbed show on Netflix during the week after watching some heygen video on twitter, and the dubbed show felt so cheap/amateur knowing the tech now existed to just watch the same show with the actors real voices but in English 3 0 0 443 235 .
Jan 18 @ridd_design Yes, plus 10+ more combinations. Best term I’ve seen for this is @scottbelsky’s “Collapse the talent stack” 1 0 0 0 120 .
Jan 10 @bradgessler Might’ve misinterpreted you slightly. It is *technically* about js but in an extremely low-complexity, low framework, bite size kinda way 0 0 0 0 150 .
Jan 09 @Shpigford @readme Don’t try to be smart about it - have used rswag, swagger-rails, grape before but they create a large maintenance burden. Create a simple dynamic .yml.erv file that has the openapi spec of the api and can render enums and other minor data from the app when necessary. Put all the… 2 0 0 0 300 .
Jan 08 The "Hiring Pool" concern doesn't get enough airtime in my opinion. It's the number 1 thing that influenced https://t.co/EgIFQGIGpH If your app is 90% HTML/CSS/JS & you're prudent about adding new concepts to it, your hiring pool can be 100 - 1000x larger. 3 0 0 343 261 .
Jan 06 RT @joemasilotti: Here's the story of @AlexandruGlv and how they cloned RailsDevs for the YouTube community. Also, this screenshot is just… 0 2 0 0 140 .
Dec 23 To elaborate, there’s four areas where a company like stripe provides value 1. Simplifying interactions with legacy infrastructure 2. Preventing fraud 3. Doing the government’s job (AML, tax collection) 4. Providing great payments-related software (subscriptions, invoices etc) At the moment there’s huge value in #1 alone, but in a world where it costs a micro-cent to transfer 7 figures from one wallet to another, the idea of charging percentage-based fees for 2,3,4 wont cut the mustard. 0 0 1 212 493 .
Dec 22 @joshmanders @techsavvytravvy Nice! Category wise, none are jumping out. Which would you suggest? 0 0 0 0 97 .
Dec 22 @jacobrask @techsavvytravvy That’s genius! I do like the simplicity of copy-paste a one liner, but will add this also 1 0 0 0 117 .
Dec 22 @techsavvytravvy I haven’t actually shared this with anyone yet but why not: https://t.co/2yoYcloSPZ https://t.co/7PryR6XUCl 5 0 0 0 127 .
Dec 21 @csswizardry What are we missing here? You say it will likely be worse than 40% slower overall unbundled bs bundled. But his results seem pretty great no? Is the connection he’s testing on too fast? Or is your point that it’s bad to do things this way because even though it’s very fast, it’s… 2 0 0 0 293 .
Dec 20 @dcurtis We have them - @ContaboCom - @Hetzner_Online And a bunch of others. IME the problem is cultural. A cheaper AWS today would still be dismissed by almost everyone because the norm is to follow "best practices" over reasoning bottom up about what's actually required.… 24 2 0 0 275 .
Dec 19 My fave example of this is using an sdk/plugin/gem to interact with a few simple rest API endpoints 1 0 0 351 99 .
Dec 19 Digging back into the @atlas_knowledge codebase in preparation for resurrecting it over christmas. https://t.co/dJZiAL3yYF 1 0 0 259 122 .
Dec 19 @antirez @csswizardry I'm not following sorry, we're agreeing right? 1 0 0 0 68 .
Dec 18 @nomadtechie @dhh Deference-to-experts is useful in domains where enforcing *one-true-way* of doing things is crucial for safety or other high stakes things. With the web, if you understand it, you can make trade-offs (yes, including UX vs DX). And the beauty of it is that it's not beyond… 7 0 0 0 290 .
Dec 18 @dhh @csswizardry https://t.co/86oysVCyOA 0 0 0 0 41 .
Dec 18 @csswizardry I had read it before and just re-read. My takeaways: - Compression favours larger files, so overall css/js shipped is higher without bundling. - Shipping multiple files also carries increased latency (dark vs light green in your graphic) But - The 22x cumulative latency number… 59 1 0 0 293 .
Dec 18 @csswizardry I follow you and respect you a lot. Can you explain why, in this specific case, this is a bad idea (vs as general advice)? 4 0 0 0 135 .
Dec 02 @kilianvalkhof Gotcha, I'd agree from an end-user-considerations-only perspective, but was written from a *substantially widen the pool of people who can work on web software codebases* perspective, so was more digging for nuance from that angle, if you had any 0 0 0 0 261 .
Dec 01 Not sure about a culture where the same kind of flashy marketing used to unveil consumer products is also used for products designed to kill other people. The industry/products are probably a necessary evil, but something feels off about public-targeted comms like this. 4 0 0 420 271 .
Nov 30 Still get goosebumps watching this, the build up and release of tension at 5:50 🤯 Do they make crowds like this any more? https://t.co/UZxTAxlgZz 0 0 1 249 149 .
Nov 30 Reverse UX: How can we design an experience that’s so bad it’s difficult to pull off? I nominate the open teabag that actively sucks water from inside the cup and dumps it all over the table 🤦‍♂️ https://t.co/h4NFrIPHzc 7 1 2 467 222 .
Nov 27 @nomadtechie @changelog @OpenAI @tldraw @laurencetratt @NewYorker @jerodsanto @JSPartyFM Hey Amal, sorry for delay. Would love to! 1 0 0 0 130 .
Nov 25 Meant to caveat this with *for remote product & engineering teams*. Encourages a constant hum of low-quality, low-bandwidth communication over short periods of high bandwidth comms followed by long periods of no interruptions to get deep work done. 0 0 0 255 252 .
Nov 22 Alleviating the culture (of polarization/tribalization) is probably the single thing we could do to make tech a force for good in the next few decades. Disheartening to see so many pitchforks coming out since this thing started (first Ilya, then Adam, then Helen). Always surprised how people can feel such visceral hatred/strong negative opinions towards people they don't know. 0 0 2 190 380 .
Nov 21 Usually I'd say don't sweat the tool, but something weird I've noticed: Tracking a software release as a list of bullets in a document (vs a kanban board with state columns) in my experience has a meaningful impact on the amount of software that gets shipped in a release. 2 0 1 381 273 .
Nov 20 RT @changelog: 🗞 New episode of Changelog News! 🫣 The @OpenAI unravelling 🎨 @tldraw's "make real" button 🥇 @tonyennis's case for HTML Firs… 0 4 0 0 140 .
Nov 20 @htmx_org If you're reading this and in agreement with my guy on LinkedIn, here's a quick example of how I would do this in our current html first stack. https://t.co/Sx6R4FHtnx 10 0 1 386 177 .
Nov 20 @railsui_ Looks nice! This stimulus? 1 0 0 0 36 .
Nov 19 @peakcooper Thanks for that very productive comment on my feed. Would you like to elaborate? 0 0 0 0 92 .
Nov 19 @jen4web Hey Jen. Original author here. Couple points: - Not intended to be a hot new philosophy - I've noticed a resurgence in these ideas & put this out there to surface the people with whom it resonates. It's done that quite well. - The approach I'm advocating is slightly different to… 2 0 0 0 294 .
Nov 18 @peakcooper Launching a version of tailwind that has just the most commonly needed classes (e.g no square bracket classes) that's precompiled and served from a CDN, and is still quite lightweight. Are you following me because of https://t.co/EgIFQGIGpH? It's related to that 1 0 0 0 275 .
Nov 18 @jamesholwell With Figma I'm referring to what happens on the canvas - the complexity involved in performantly placing and manipulating shapes/objects is very different from "add this class when a user clicks this input and let CSS do the nice transitions" 0 0 0 0 256 .
Nov 18 @jamesholwell I agree it's kind of crass and makes this kind of software seem low-craft, but I haven't found a term that's easy to remember and also captures the difference between interfaces-on-databases and other software. Any other ideas? 0 0 0 0 241 .
Nov 16 Just realised it wasn’t obvious from the original recording, but that’s our own version of the Airbnb search bar, written with our library - the whole thing will probably take about 800 lines of HTML, and is - Fully complete (interaction and styling included) - Incredibly readable - Copy-paste-able - Requires zero build steps 2 0 0 232 328 .
Nov 15 RT @EamonnCottrell: @tonyennis Reading html-first the other day helped calm the feeling of being forever behind with the tools that are inc… 0 2 0 0 140 .
Nov 15 RT @LoremIpsam: This is gold. As a designer who also codes, I’d have been a much more productive collaborator on web apps whenever we switc… 0 1 0 0 140 .
Nov 14 RT @stephenlb: When we're dealing with popular web frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue, we sometimes forget to ask whether we really ne… 0 1 0 0 140 .
Nov 13 @heyandras @linuxnetdata 3 0 0 0 24 .
Nov 12 @hbroek13 This is awesome @hbroek13! I recollect seeing it on https://t.co/IsCvJ4SoWo but I don't think I dove into the docs enough, just looking at it now and there's a lot of overlap in our thinking - I would probably use this if we weren't building our own. Will add a directory to the… 0 0 0 0 289 .
Nov 12 One of the first ideas HTML First: Principles for building simple, maintainable web software https://t.co/L9LM9FUKvs 44 10 0 0 118 .
Nov 09 @thepatwalls Any thoughts on why “web apps as a productised service” doesn’t seem to work? Examples of web dev I’ve found are all websites (Webflow, Wordpress etc) 0 0 0 0 163 .
Oct 31 @Sirupsen This is awesome. Out of interest, why not vscode’s remote ssh plugin? 0 0 0 0 79 .
Oct 30 @mijustin @dvassallo Second Daniel here - I’ve gone through the process in Ireland, Netherlands, and the US - basically the same bureaucratic/process overhead for a simple software business (and I hate bureaucracy). I think stripe atlas convinced EU founders who haven’t used it, that US has zero… 1 0 0 0 297 .
Oct 21 We built an AI photo tool last year as an experiment - could definitely get some good results but more than 50% of the friends and family we tried came out bad. Would have felt pretty bad selling it to the masses in that state. Assumed the new gen would be more reliable, but doesn't seem so 🤷‍♂️ 0 0 0 274 296 .
Oct 12 Hey @cramforce at what number of imported files does this get to “does not work”, which I’m assuming you’re using as a proxy for “makes apps noticeably slower than those that use bundling”? 0 0 0 424 189 .
Sep 28 @searchbrat Kind of. But most codebases don’t support copy-paste-ability, which can only be solved if the Ai agents have a feedback loop, which is the next step here and the actual breakthrough point at which excitement/fear will be warranted 1 0 0 0 242 .
Sep 28 @heyandras This is very cool. Even cooler still - a package that spins up Postgres and pgadmin on a server - I did this myself manually and it’s awesome, I now have unlimited pg databases for €6/month. I think more would if it were easier 1 0 0 0 238 .
Sep 27 The reason many hosting/cloud bills are *way* higher (often 10x+) what they could be: The Prevailing Wisdom -The only acceptable cloud platforms to use for reliability are the big ones (AWS/GCP/Azure) - We *must* have every service (including non prod) on it's own server (best… 0 0 0 0 279 .
Sep 22 @_swanson You're 100% correct though - rest APIs are great for triggering actions - once you get into systems that have the same data models and need to be synced, they're the wrong abstraction. I've seen a few interesting models pop up - sequin's approach to use SQL as the interface for… 0 0 0 0 289 .
Sep 10 RT @keithwhor: Thesis: Ruby on Rails generates economic surplus by enabling people to build working internet businesses from scratch. This… 0 7 0 0 140 .
Sep 07 One thing missing from the typescript debate that keeps surprising me - any obfuscation layer on top of first class web languages (html,css,js) has a large effect on reducing the number of people who can work on existing codebases - open source or not. The tradeoff here is adding one more constraint to your list of hiring requirements, or spending large amounts of time training new devs on *tooling* (that could be better spent training them on how to build the software), and generally excluding entire categories of people (new grads, boot camp grads) from the hiring pool, even though the product being produced is fundamentally simple crudware. 2 0 0 435 651 .
Sep 07 @t3dotgg Yeah, we ain’t gonna see eye to eye on this - I disagree with both of those statements but 🤷‍♂️. I just know a lot of new career devs follow people like you and think they have to learn a massive amount of stuff (npm, typescript, react) as the price of entry, which I hate. And the… 9 0 0 0 291 .
Sep 05 RT @_swanson: Building a b2b SaaS product is 95% HTML forms and background jobs so get really fucking good at those 0 52 0 0 115 .
Aug 28 Observation from being on a few sales calls this week with people trying to sell me/my clients their product: The average tech sales person is not very good. 5 0 0 302 157 .
Aug 27 @Mqsley Nah it very much looks like a camper - blinds, solar panels etc. I leave the back blinds closed so people can’t see any valuables but didn’t deter them. First time they didn’t take anything, second time they got in and took a suitcase which I retrieved from the police. Think I… 0 0 0 0 286 .
Aug 21 @GergelyOrosz Replit and codeanywhere 2 0 0 0 37 .
Aug 17 @volkandkaya Want to use simple examples to explain the idea, but it's just javascript so you can use whatever you want 1 0 0 0 119 .
Aug 14 Stating the obvious here, but the best part about @htmx meme-img it’s way into recognition is that on the surface it looks like a discussion about whether to use {new shiny library} - in this case htmx, but in reality it’s a way to discuss the fact that oftentimes an html-first approach to your-latest-project might be better than a js-first-approach, which for whatever reason was not a fashionable position to advocate. 2 0 0 376 422 .
Aug 14 @csakon I wish more people were aware of this. Would make our positioning as a “Software agency that doesn’t suck” a bit more resonant. I suppose at that point it’s also difficult to convince them you’re different. https://t.co/T9jDuIJlh8 1 0 0 0 238 .
Jul 31 @antoniogm @ctjlewis Another way to look at it: our lack of ability to co-ordinate lead to a race-to-the-bottom and ultimately with (thousands of instances of) objectively world ending technology. Not saying we should expect to be able to co ordinate better today, but this doesn’t seem like a strong… 2 0 0 0 301 .
Jul 29 @htmx_org Next weekend is the plan. Appreciate that! 0 0 0 0 52 .
Jul 26 @peteromallet Calling something quite a lot of people believe is necessary to prevent the end of civilization "propaganda" (whether misguided or not), feels uncharitable no? 0 0 0 0 173 .
Jul 18 @htmx_org Started writing a blog post recently (@htmx_org features heavily). Fired up to finish it after seeing this tweet 🔥. Playing with "Novice friendliness as a core design principle" but feedback/suggestions welcome. Here are the first few paragraphs https://t.co/ESTtAjidz5 18 1 0 0 279 .
Jul 17 The EU: Let's make sure the banks can interoperate and consumers can use their data in useful ways Also The EU (according to @GoCardless/@nordigen): Let's ask consumers to go through a clumsy multi-step re-authentication flow (including 2 factor auth) every *three months* in order to use tools built to leverage this 🤦‍♂️ 2 0 0 395 325 .
Jul 15 @caddyserver not sure if you know, but you broke a large amount (I'm guessing) of SEO traffic that helps people use caddy by taking down https://t.co/I8MV893UZ2 - tons of google results now lead to dead pages 0 0 0 0 208 .
Jul 13 @LeaVerou Mind explaining what you mean by “Medium or larger web app” and “tightly coupled mess of a codebase”? It’s *very* possible to build a very fast, somewhat reactive, mid size web app today that’s extremely maintainable and extensible without a frontend framework, but maybe we have… 2 0 0 0 290 .
Jul 10 @maccaw @homsiT Nicely received by Tristan, not a great look for you guys imo. The inspired by/ ripped off line can be blurry, but if those screenshots are representative you definitely stepped over it - feels incongruent with reflect brand (great design). Just my 2c 2 0 0 0 267 .
Jul 10 @jamescodez @stackblitz @LangChainAI @supabase @OpenAI @vercel @swyx @shadcn I built this for rails a while back but found the response times to be too unpredictable/slow (avg 30 seconds +). Has that changed? Congrats btw! Looks great! 1 0 0 0 236 .
Jul 04 @ArcMembership Ah! That makes sense, will try. Thanks! 0 0 0 0 54 .
Jul 04 @ArcMembership I use it specifically to silence messaging app tabs, which are an unwanted distraction when I’m trying to focus. So that change broke it for me 😞. Are you saying it’s not possible to prevent a tab from making noise indefinitely? 0 0 0 0 243 .
Jul 04 @arcinternet what happened to "Mute Tab" on the latest release? Was it removed? 0 0 0 0 79 .
Jun 29 @dhh I can’t remember if you said designers are in the actual codebase or working with static files? If the former, how do you handle environment setup etc considering they’re less technical? In either case you should consider a live-staging-VM with VScode’s remote server, adds… 3 0 0 0 279 .
Jun 27 @elliotdickison @htmx_org On the largest team you've been part of... What was the total monthly spend on engineering headcount? Would you consider the ROI on that spend good, considering the output? Was hiring and onboarding devs considered a huge headache or solved problem? Was reorganising teams to… 0 0 0 0 303 .
Jun 27 @scottcorgan @remix_run You're not wrong on that argument. You then reach the next argument - do the benefits of this approach justify the additional complexity of needing to (reasonably) deeply understand js as the primary language (vs plain html), the npm/npx ecosystem etc. https://t.co/aKxM3RUuID 2 0 0 0 300 .
Jun 27 @elliotdickison @htmx_org I have a tweet for that 👇 Imagine on-boarding someone with ~3 months of total learning experience - how much time do they spend learning the tools vs the much simpler task of creating some html. https://t.co/2DcoghgytY 0 0 0 0 246 .
Jun 20 Another infuriating example of how to make your customers resent you - charge a 120% premium to skip the 30 - 60 mins wait at the luggage belt (i.e. to let people have a small carry on). Seems like a new thing this year? Culprit here is @vueling https://t.co/NF17sT6758 0 0 0 201 270 .
Jun 16 @JoshWComeau Yes! @iwantmyname are excellent - No fluff, super quick & easy to use, great support. 3 0 0 0 102 .
Jun 09 Realising that "Planning & Execution" is in many cases better language than "Product and Engineering" to describe the two streams within technology teams and orgs, and better reflects what actually happens. 4 1 0 304 210 .
May 26 @dpaola2 @Replit @bitdotioinc No docs needed - you sign in and create a database, and they give you a host, username, password for your db which you paste into database.yml. It’s postgres so don’t need to forego using pg no 1 0 0 0 223 .
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