areichert

Does anyone have a good comparison of using Gleam vs Elixir in 2024 (i.e. the pros and cons of each)? I've only used Elixir, but definitely curious to tinker with Gleam...

Very interesting, I’ll look into it!

Thanks for the kind words! And yes, I’d love to productionize this… next time I have a free weekend ;)

Author here!

Surprised to see this on the front page again (hello fellow pottery enthusiasts?), but figured this could be a good chance to address some of the comments from the recent discussion [0] since I missed it last time :P

The most common feedback seemed to be, "this is dumb, just use SQLite", which is definitely valid.

This was actually how I initially started building the app (using SQLite), and it worked pretty well. There were a couple reasons I abandoned this approach though: one, whenever I had to uninstall and reinstall the app, the data would get wiped; two, I still had to deal with migrations and other annoying boilerplate; and three, I wanted to be able to share my results with my friends in a read-only web view.

(That being said, I'm also curious to explore how tools like ElectricSQL [1], PowerSync [2], TinyBase [3], etc. play with SQlite to handle some of these issues. At a glance, it just seemed like these would require more time to setup compared to InstantDB [4].)

Another similar comment that popped up a few times was the idea that if I'm trying to model _relational_ data, it would be ridiculous to use anything other than a _relational_ database.

I think that's fair, but I also think it's fair to say a graph database is also "relational" in some sense, or at least "relationship-centric" [5] :)

Either way, I had a lot of fun with this. And I was definitely optimizing more for speed/scrappiness than for doing it The Right Way, so if anyone has any thoughts on how to build stuff faster, I'd love to hear it!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40860116

[1] https://electric-sql.com/

[2] https://www.powersync.com/

[3] https://tinybase.org/

[4] https://www.instantdb.com/

[5] https://aws.amazon.com/compare/the-difference-between-graph-...

I built something similar last year if you're interested! https://www.bktransit.com/

Shameless plug, but I just recently built my own little simple MTA app because I wanted to play around with Live Activities in Swift [0] to be able to display the next upcoming train on the lock screen of my phone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mta-tracker/id6477849271?platf...

(There are some annoying technical kinks with this that I'm still trying to iron out, but maybe someone will find it useful in the meantime!)

[0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Nice! I did something similar a while back, but just for substack :)

One example --

URL: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp-software-eng...

Sanitized output: https://substack-ai.vercel.app/u/pragmaticengineer/p/zirp-so...

Raw markdown: https://substack-ai.vercel.app/api/users/pragmaticengineer/p...

(Would be happy to open source it if anyone cares!)

Looks cool! At a glance seems kinda similar to Leap AI [0] which I've been following for a bit now -- I'm curious how you guys differentiate from competitors? Is it mainly the "no-code" aspect?

[0] https://www.tryleap.ai/

Yeah... DALLE is super annoying about this now. I had the same problem in my little "AI trailers" toy project [0], and it can usually be fixed by just checking for that specific "content policy" error when DALLE fails -> passing this into GPT: "Rewrite this prompt so that it passes the content policy: {prompt}" -> and then retrying with the updated prompt.

It's kinda dumb, but it's a quick fix that might help ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[0] https://aitrailers.xyz/

This might be a slightly more difficult question to answer, but instead of people listing the podcasts they like, I'd love to hear which podcast episodes in particular people would recommend?

Otherwise, as interesting as this thread is to read through, the amount of recommendations here is a bit overwhelming :P

I made a little transit app for my neighborhood: https://bktransit.com

It’s nothing special, but I like it a bit better than the official MTA app in NYC :)

Appreciate the kind words, and love what you guys are doing with Resend! I've been a happy user so far, excited to see what's next :)

fwiw you can use React Email pretty easily with anything by using their @react-email/render package [0] to render your email React components to HTML (this is effectively all Resend is doing in their Node library [1])

Just FYI since I happened to be looking into this recently as well :)

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@react-email/render

[1] https://github.com/resendlabs/resend-node/blob/90a7225c21db9...

Curious how much overlap there is with the book "Say Goodnight to Insomnia"? [0]

At a glance it seems quite similar, so I'd love to understand how the app is better than e.g. downloading a cheaper "wellness" app (with meditations, calming music, relaxation techniques, etc) + going through the exercises in the book [0]?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Say-Good-Night-Insomnia-Drug-Free/dp/...

Aren’t firebase functions practically free?

Man, I feel like you hit the nail on the head here... this is definitely the best way I could think to articulate why `unless` throws me off so much.

Weirdly, Ruby was one of the first languages I learned early in my career, and at the time I had no problem with `unless`. But after years of experience with other languages, I similarly feel that `if` statements now trigger the fast pattern matching circuits in my brain, while `unless` makes me do a double-take and basically translate it into `if not`

At first I thought I was just becoming dumber with age, but I like your explanation better :P

Oh dang, just last week I started working on my own version of this [0]. Quite fun to hack on! Been thinking about what could be done to really differentiate.

Anyways, it's amazing that this is free! Very clean, very well done... bravo :)

[0] https://www.booper.dev/

Oof, basically everything I've built, I've been too lazy to market...

- Mental Health tracking app [1] for tracking my daily activities against my anxiety/depression/well-being

- Web3 Contract Explorer [2] for making it easier to inspect and run methods on Ethereum contracts

- GlobalEntry appointment notifications [3] for making it easier to book last-minute interview appointments

[1] https://mental-h.vercel.app/

[2] https://web3-contract-explorer.vercel.app/

[3] https://www.appointmentfinder.xyz/

I know the founders of InstantDB [1] are using some of these ideas for inspiration :)

[1]: https://www.instantdb.com/

I've struggled with sleep for as long as I can remember, but my issue isn't falling asleep -- it's staying asleep throughout the night. I usually sleep ok from 12am-5am, but after that, I wake up and fall back asleep every ~30 mins or so til I get up around 8.

Does anyone else have this issue? Curious if there are any good solutions...

A few years ago, I was dealing with some issues around anxiety, so I made a little app for myself to track my daily activities against my mental health (in the form of 3 assessments [0] measuring depression, anxiety, and well-being)

I spent about 9 months logging, and found these to be the top 5 activities that improved my overall happiness:

- 1. Strenuous exercise (e.g. going hard at the gym, playing a sport, taking a dance class, etc.) was a clear winner. (Going for a walk or doing light bodyweight exercises at home helped a bit, but not nearly as much.)

- 2. Creative activities (e.g. writing, playing music, programming), particularly when I could get into a "flow" state.

- 3. Reading long-form content (for at least 20 mins).

- 4. Meditating (for at least 5 mins).

- 5. Spending time with close friends (as opposed to e.g. going to parties with acquaintances).

A lot of these things are fairly obvious (and may also vary a bit by personality type) but being able to see concrete, quantifiable results made it much easier to adopt habits that made me happier in the long run!

[0] https://github.com/reichert621/health/blob/master/server/db/...

Building an integration with Microsoft Teams has been infuriating, especially after working with the Slack and Discord APIs (which were so much easier to manage)... I'm curious what other potential high-value integrations have been difficult for others.

re: Stripe, it feels like what was more important was that they understood that what they were working on truly _was_ a problem -- I don't think the point of the article is to say that you need to completely understand every nuance of the problem you're solving before you can move fast, but that there's a base level of understanding you need to have in order to be effective (which is probably less common in founders/startups than most people think) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As a programmer-turned-founder, this is something I have to remind myself all the time... it's often very hard to resist the urge to just keep coding and launching and throwing things at the wall until something sticks, because that's what I'm "good at" and it creates an illusion of productivity and "moving fast".

It seems like some people are commenting that the advice in the article is common sense, but I think when your mindset is to move fast, it can be easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand a problem when you're really just married to an idea but too scared to go out and discover whether it's actually solving something real or not.

Oh man, really excited about this. I'm curious how far Stripe wants to go down the path of KYC-related products... it feels like a huge market with a lot of pain points where having Stripe-quality APIs would be amazing.

In case anyone was curious what I used for the diagrams in this article, it was an awesome open source [0] tool called Excalidraw! [1]

[0] https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

[1] https://excalidraw.com/

OP here -- I know what you mean. "Ashamed" is probably too strong a word. I think the feeling I was trying to convey was just that I'm not exactly an authority on Elixir, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, and nitpick away :)

Nope! I'll check it out :) does your team use it?

Yup! We talked about it a bit here: https://serokell.io/blog/elixir-in-production-papercups

It's on our roadmap!

One downside of Discord is that we use threads in Slack to manage conversations, and I don't think Discord has great support for threading. But I know some solutions have worked around this by spinning up a new channel for every new conversation... still need to figure out the ideal UX.