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colinramsay

1,758 karma · joined August 2, 2011

http://colinramsay.co.uk/
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colinramsay··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)
Location: Cornwall UK

Remote: Yes

Relocate: No

Technologies: Backend, Frontend, DevOps, most recently full stack React

CV: on request

Email: colinramsay at gmail.com

https://colinramsay.co.uk/

I’ve most recently been tech director for a software agency and I'm now looking for something new. I enjoy problem solving and have experience across lots of different technologies and domains.

colinramsay··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025)
Location: Cornwall UK Remote: Yes Relocate: No Technologies: Backend, Frontend, DevOps, most recently full stack React CV: on request Email: colinramsay at gmail.com

https://colinramsay.co.uk/

I’ve most recently been tech director for a software agency and have worked with loads of different technologies. I enjoy problem solving!

I’m looking for a flexible role but I don’t have a specific position in mind. I’d love to have a conversation if you’re looking for a capable developer and communicator!

colinramsay··on Ask HN: How's Your Cloudflare Experience?
I wasn't aware they had a Discord, so that's in addition to "real" support and community support forums? Seems like a crazy way to approach things.
colinramsay··on Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative
Amazing. Good luck with the project, I’ll be giving it a test run soon!
colinramsay··on Launch HN: Stack Auth (YC S24) – An Open-Source Auth0/Clerk Alternative
I think Clerk looks great but it starts to get quite expensive if MFA is a requirement. Do you have 2FA/MFA in your roadmap?
colinramsay··on Show HN: Pages CMS – A CMS for GitHub
Amazing, thank you.
colinramsay··on Show HN: Pages CMS – A CMS for GitHub
EDIT:

I didn't have a `media` entry in my pages.yml, which meant the rich text editor wasn't loading (JS error was being thrown). When I added that entry, it started working! Brilliant work!

I'm using Jekyll, with yaml frontmatter, and it's not clear how to specify the body. The documentation says that a rich text field could be set up with a "name" option (and gives "body") as an example but my Markdown files don't specify a name for the body.. it's just... there:

https://github.com/colinramsay/colinramsay.github.io/blob/ma...

I'm probably missing something but happy to open an issue if not.

colinramsay··on Remix Vite Is Now Stable
I think (hope) they learned a lesson from this, as Remix is very good at not introducing breaking changes:

https://remix.run/docs/en/main/start/future-flags

colinramsay··on Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems
I'm less interested in immutable systems and more in pre-configured systems. NixOS with Home Manager is the one that stands out here, but the configuration is just awful. I want to be able to have my full config in source control and know that is the state of my current system, with anything else being wiped on reboot. Anything that's changed before reboot should be highlighted.

In my (limited) experience with something like Silverblue, the base system can be configured but when you start adding applications (like say, Firefox), it is lacking when it comes to configuring that because you're using Flatpak and I don't know of a way to tell it to both install all Flatpaks I want along with all of the configuration.

I guess there's some way of installing Flatpaks en masse and then dotfiles can take care of the rest?

https://universal-blue.org/tinker/mindset/#resist-the-urge-t...

colinramsay··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)
Go Tripod | Full stack dev | Remote

Please respond with rate and time zone! No agencies or recruiters please.

We’re looking for a freelancer who could expand to a full role to work primarily with TypeScript, React (Remix) and Tailwind. Must be able to work with a PR-based development mode, independently, and within budget. Backend and frontend experience is a must.

We’re a small UK agency building up a base of Remix projects and need someone to support new projects and support existing ones.

hello@gotripod.com

colinramsay··on Remix web framework aquired by Shopify
Yes. The use of loaders and actions blurs the lines between client and server. It's really productive. There are a few gaps that need filling, one that comes to mind is internationalisation [1]

I am very surprised that NextJS has left it so long to consider mutations - they're apparently coming up with an RFC on that but it seems to be somewhat behind closed doors.

[1] https://github.com/remix-run/remix/discussions/2877

colinramsay··on Remix web framework aquired by Shopify
I'm not sure how to feel about this, but my main wish for Remix is a public roadmap and full development in the open. There is overlap but also healthy competition between it and NextJS, and I'm really interested to see where Remix goes next.
colinramsay··on Ask HN: What are the best tools for web scraping in 2022?
For a particular type of scraping, we wrote SSScraper on top of Colly and it works really well:

https://github.com/gotripod/ssscraper/

colinramsay··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)
https://gotripod.com/ | Location: Remote

Looking for TypeScript/Remix developers who have the ability to self-direct. Dev workflow will be through GitHub pull requests so we expect strong communication, documentation and testing chops.

6 month contract with a view to permanent.

Get in touch: https://gotripod.com/contact/

colinramsay··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2022)

  Location: UK

  Remote: Yes

  Willing to relocate: No

  Technologies: TypeScript/React/Ruby/Rails

  Résumé/CV: https://stackoverflow.com/cv/colinramsay

  Email: info@colinramsay.co.uk

Interested in new contract work, my recent interest has been in Remix/NextJS but I've got extensive experience across a range of industries and skillsets.
colinramsay··on Heroku Is Down
I really like it, but I'm only using it for fairly low traffic apps. I've heard it gets expensive quickly.
colinramsay··on The Curse of NixOS
I'm going to look into this, thank you.
colinramsay··on The Curse of NixOS
I agree. That doesn't negate the fact that it took me a while to understand what the issue was, see if I could get around it, work out how to disable the font downloading in Flutter, etc, etc. I may have been trying to force a round peg into a square hole but NixOS didn't do much to help me see the shape of the pegs and holes in the first place.
colinramsay··on The Curse of NixOS
> I'm going to keep using it, since I can't stand anything else after having a taste of NixOS

This is how I feel about NixOS. I like what it gives me but I don't really like much else about it. Unless something _just works_, you're looking at hours of debugging which will most likely lead to failure. Off the top of my head there are a couple of things I've hit a dead end on recently:

- Packaging a Flutter desktop app because its build process downloads fonts from a URL and so makes the whole thing impure

- Getting Blender's GPU support working, I think the same problem is causing Webcamoid to crash on launch

Previously I used Arch, which I loved, but it was all to easy to completely shaft my setup and not be able to roll back.

colinramsay··on Getting started with our beta platform
I'm currently working on a small Slack app and the experience has been fairly horrendous. The documentation is all over the place. I'm not sure if adding yet another chunk of stuff to it is such a good idea - where does this leave Bolt?

https://slack.dev/bolt-js/

colinramsay··on Using Flutter to build a native-looking desktop app for macOS and Windows
I've been doing some work with Flutter on Linux and I've been really impressed. I like Dart as a language, the VSCode support is superb, and Flutter seems well thought out. The two UI packages mentioned in this post look great too.
colinramsay··on Ask HN: Why aren't there other biographies of Steve Jobs?
From Puffin's Extraordinary Lives:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Extraordinary-Life-Steve-Jobs-Lives...

colinramsay··on The State of Web Scraping in 2021
Not yet but my plan was to just have a static HTML site which the tests could run against.
colinramsay··on The State of Web Scraping in 2021
If you're familiar with Go, there's Colly too [1]. I liked its simplicity and approach and even wrote a little wrapper around it to run it via Docker and a config file:

https://gotripod.com/insights/super-simple-site-crawling-and...

[1] http://go-colly.org/

colinramsay··on One Thing Well – A weblog about simple, useful software
This looks great, and obviously the website does one thing well too. One of the entries is for Bunch [1] which is something I spent years hoping to stumble upon only to do so now when I've moved to Linux. Oh well.

[1] https://brettterpstra.com/bunch/

colinramsay··on Static Typing for Ruby: Adopting Sorbet at Scale
I'm not sure about Sorbet. Shopify are definitely talking the talk but the issues list on GitHub is getting pretty large and the much-trumpeted VSCode plugin has disappeared. My first foray was cut short by a bug (https://github.com/sorbet/sorbet/issues/3603). With the up and coming typing support in Ruby 3 there's competition, which is good, but given the current state of play I'm going to wait for things to settle before trying to adopt again.
colinramsay··on How Ruby on Rails Could Be Much Better (2008)
> see upcoming ViewComponent for example

What does this refer to?

colinramsay··on Show HN: Automatically Rename HEY's 'Imbox' to 'Inbox'
We discussed this at work. It's smug in a way that I can't articulate. Our first thought was that it was a typo, then we found the actual part of their website that tells us "no, it's not a typo". Thanks for that guys, I appreciate you changing my expectation to meet your contrived brand of UX design.

edit: typo :D

colinramsay··on An always-available, online-capable Raspberry Pi in your pocket
You may be interested in http://www.berrylan.org/ - I only found it today so haven't tested it but it does seem to be an interesting solution to the wifi problem you have stated.
colinramsay··on [dead]
Theresa May had a deal agreed with the EU, and one that was softer than this. The DUP hasn't agreed to it, and there's no indication it can get through Parliament. If it does, it could have a confirmatory referendum attached.

Not only that, but there's so little time until Parliament's potential vote on this on Saturday that there will be very little scrutiny on what it contains.

The mooted deal is also contrary to Boris Johnson's previous statements on border restrictions AND I believe it still has to be ratified by the EU before 31st October which means a short extension is still likely.

This shit-show still has a long way to go.

Not to mention that even if the deal does go through, that's not Brexit "done". There are years of negotiations that need to happen to get the UK back on the same footing as we were pre-Brexit.

Here's the text of the deal:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_19_...

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