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rogem002

235 karma · joined June 3, 2012

Ruby on Rails Developer & Footloose.

Twitter: @MikeRogers0

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rogem002··on Ask HN: What is the most bloated website you use
I switched to Protonmail as my main email & have been very happy.

Every time I go back to check my old Gmail (I use it for signing up to products I know will spam me) I get very irritated at everything.

rogem002··on Saying Goodbye to Typo CI
I love the social software podcast! It feels like I'm listening to real people building products, plus following along with Colleen Schnettler build her product has been really inspirational :D
rogem002··on Saying Goodbye to Typo CI
I'm thinking Heroku. The experiences I've heard from developers writing for them has been super positive.
rogem002··on Saying Goodbye to Typo CI
> I wonder if this is consistent with what others have seen or if it's something unique to this project?

I've spoken to a few other GitHub app creators, it's a fairly common experience. I think GitHub Actions are kind of viewed as the preferred alternative by GitHub so that's what they're focusing on.

rogem002··on If Not SPAs, What?
You can use Turbolinks on any front end project (I use it on my static sites), it has a standalone JS library.
rogem002··on Ruby 3.0 Preview 1
https://gorails.com/ & https://www.driftingruby.com/ are both fantastic!
rogem002··on Why is America stuck with bad headlights?
High beam lights which turn off in sections to not blind other drivers.

They're pretty neat! You can drive on a highway, have high beams lighting up signs but not dazzling other drivers.

rogem002··on 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety – how to stop the cycle
I did the same. Now I’ve stopped using reddit as a news source, I feel a lot more upbeat. Plus my news cycle is a lot more localised now, which is a win!

I also unsubscribed from subreddits who started allowing false, but entertaining posts (like a image with a fake caption for karma). That was a good choice.

rogem002··on Netflix stops charging customers who never watch
I believe Visa has started working on requiring platforms "Provide customers with a digital or SMS cancellation method", though due to Covid it's been pushed back a year [1].

1. https://support.stripe.com/questions/2020-visa-trial-subscri...

rogem002··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
I removed my Chrome Extension from the store in February. It was averaging about £30 per a month in sales and the cost of keeping up-to-date with the changes in Chrome/the extension store seemed hardly worth it.

The thing which really pushed me over the edge was their new developer dashboard, it was a step in the right direction but what missing some key features which were present in the old dashboard. Googles solution? Make us use both dashboards for almost a year.

rogem002··on The Great CoffeeScript to Typescript Migration of 2017
I do Rails full time and most the CoffeeScript lives in the "legacy" side projects. Most projects I'm on have moved to vanilla JavaScript or ES6 via Webpack.

I don't think it's dead (it's still popping up), but I think it's time has passed.

rogem002··on Lessons Learnt Failing to Monetize My Ruby Gem
I think GitHub isn't trying to push the marketplace as hard as they were a year ago. I suspect the success of GitHub Actions makes the whole marketplace a bit of a risk they'd rather not waste time on.
rogem002··on Lessons Learnt Failing to Monetize My Ruby Gem
I've seen a few portals (Like Heroku Dataclips / Metabase) which offer this.

That said, I shoehorned it into my daily routine otherwise I'd just end up not checking it for a few weeks at a time.

rogem002··on Lessons Learnt Failing to Monetize My Ruby Gem
I regretted the name after launch. It seemed fun & playful at first, but soon its limitations became pretty apperent.

Next time I'm just going to use a "Does what it says on the tin" kind of approach to naming.

rogem002··on Lessons Learnt Failing to Monetize My Ruby Gem
If anyone is curious, the source code of the now shutdown app is available on GitHub ( https://github.com/PigCI/App ).
rogem002··on Ask HN: Do you ever contact people who have had a positive impact on you?
You're not the only one who does this. I have a small collection of thank you emails I've sent and received I use for motivation.

It's definitely not to common, but I think it's great to send positive vibes down the wires.

rogem002··on Stripe CLI
I can live with the full page refresh, but my biggest pain point is working with sub accounts on trello. They store the sub account in a cookie instead of in the URL, so if I want to share what I'm looking at with a colleague it's a faff.
rogem002··on The Future of PHP
Recently I was asked to help out with a PHP project for work, I made the switch to rails almost a decade ago & haven’t looked back since so I was excited to see how PHP felt.

I was fairly impressed with how easy it was to jump back to PHP, the documentation is full of examples, there is composer for package management and it has a strong community who meets up regularly.

rogem002··on Serverless: slower and more expensive
Once you factor in the learning time for AWS per a developer the cost is even higher.

At my previous company we had project with an AWS deploy process that only two developers could confidently use. Teaching a new developer & keeping them up to date was a big time sink.

For comparison we had a Rails app setup on heroku that on day one junior devs were happily deploying to (plus we had Review apps for each PR!)

rogem002··on On logic in a Rails app, revisited 6 years later
I'm currently building a Rails app with a event driven development (EDD) approach. This post makes me tingle.

After building apps with easily way to much logic in controllers, EDD feels like a much cleaner approach for long term scale. But finding the right EDD approach that feels like "the rails way" has sparked a lot of debate within our team, especially around the "does this actually help" argument.

I'm petty curious about others experiences :)

rogem002··on SEO for Web Engineers
> A complex web page might call the server 150 times as it loads to completion.

That irked me a little. I'm assuming this includes fonts & images (not a bunch of ajax requests), but it still seems high.

rogem002··on Blue Apron lays off more workers
My food delivery service (Ocado) at some point added a "Here is a recipe, want to add the ingredients to your shop" button. For me that totally halted my desire to use services like Blue Apron.
rogem002··on Ask HN: What has been your most rewarding job or project and why?
I wrote a small chrome extension to reload assets as they change.

In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t have many users, but it’s always nice to hear from someone when it makes their day a bit easier.

rogem002··on Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates
3-4 people a day. My extensions are development tools so I’d imagine people get their companies to pay for it.
rogem002··on Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates
I switched my chrome extension to a paid model (one off payments). Most the offers from these shady people, work out as approximately 1 year worth of sales.
rogem002··on Show HN: TrackChanges – Share what you've changed
Thank you!
rogem002··on Show HN: TrackChanges – Share what you've changed
I had a client make the changes they wanted to the site in chrome dev tools, then just send me screenshots. After ranting to a few friends, they had the same experience. So I built this Chrome Extension :D

I'm looking forward to hearing what you think of it!

rogem002··on A year after monetising my Chrome Extension
This is a follow up to the article I wrote last year ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925467 ). Overall, I had a drop in active weekly users but averaged £210 a month in sales.
rogem002··on Ask HN: What's your working day like?
Profession: Software Engineer (Remote, currently in Nunavut, Canada)

[06:00] Woken up by cats poking my face, I roll out of bed & feed them a little bit of food then head back to bed.

[08:00] Alarm goes off, I get up, grab a quick shower & take the dog out for a quick morning walk.

[08:40] Feed dog & cats their breakfast. Make a coffee with Irish Creamer (It makes the coffee taste like it has booze in it).

[08:50] Start my first block of uninterrupted coding time at home. I'm a few hours ahead of my colleagues, so this time is my most productive. I listen to an audiobook or podcast to avoid talking to myself.

[11:00] Make another coffee & prep for morning standup call.

[11:10] Sit down on my sofa & start the call.

[11:40] Coffee #3, tell myself I should plan out my afternoon, then promptly start dicking around on social news sites.

[12:00] Make lunch, then take the dog for 1h of exercise. Dog decides its ball should be split in two.

[13:20] Head to the shops to grab food for the next few days & a new ball for the dog.

[14:00] Saw I had a unread message from my Mum. I give her a call to remind her I'm still alive.

[14:30] Finally back to coding. Spend way to long debating about a 4th coffee.

[18:00] Start a load of washing & take the dog out again.

[18:40] Feed animals (saving a little bit of cat food for later), then cook dinner.

[20:00] Remember about washing, then figure out plans to go out for dinner tomorrow with some locals I've met.

[21:00] Decide I should burn some evening oil on getting to a better place for work tomorrow. End up thinking more about side projects & catching up on TV.

[22:30] Sun still hasn't set outside. I take the dog out again for a quick pre-bedtime walk.

[23:00] Feed cats the last of their dinner in a hope they'll let me sleep in a bit more tomorrow.

[23:15] Catchup on news in bed, then sleep.

rogem002··on Ask HN: What are your app monetisation strategies?
I've been attempting to monetise my Google Chrome Extension for the last few months ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12925467 ). I felt I could never inject ads to my extension as I never had a sensible place to put them.

Instead I've been experimenting a lot with one off & subscription approaches, here are two things I noticed:

1. When I had a subscription model, most users would sign up & almost instantly cancel their subscription (though very few ever requested a refund).

2. Adjusting the one off price didn't change the monthly revenue. For example when I changed the price from $7.99 to $10, the sales decreased a little but at the end of the month I ended up earning about the same.

(Shameless plug: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/livepage/pilnojpmd... )

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