Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
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Technical co-founder of @usefathom , the simple, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics.
Canada / UK
Joined May 2008
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#นาฏราชครั้งที่15
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WIN AT NATARAJA AWARDS
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Moms
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テンハッピーローズ
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Marc
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#CSKvsRR
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#行列のできる相談所
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TIL: Stripe deploys changes to it's core API services 400 times per day 🤯
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Senior engineers/lead developers: How the hell do you context switch between reviewing multiple PRs, everything else that comes with your job and then also working on complex projects yourself?
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I turned off Docker 60 days ago and my Macbook Air is still at 100% battery.
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What's the most useful JavaScript package you've found? I'll go first.
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We run Laravel on infrastructure that can handle over 157 billion requests per month. Here’s my answer to the question: Does Laravel Scale?
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I didn’t know this kind of speed was possible in PHP. The author starts off with an execution time of 25 minutes to handle one billion rows and then shows us how he got it down to 27 seconds. Absolutely remarkable.
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Someone has been trying to destroy our small business for 3 weeks. Now we're fighting back.
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Everybody has a plan until they have 10 billion rows in their database.
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Love to see this. The default Laravel installation welcome page has ditched Google Fonts and moved to Bunny Fonts. This is great because it raises awareness that you don't have to send your website visitors browsing habits to an advertising company. Laravel is the GOAT.
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I’ll make this simple. I’ll soon be migrating & transforming billions of database rows without downtime using Laravel (old SingleStore cluster to the new unlimited storage clusters).
If 200+ people are interested, I will write the long article and share code. Otherwise, nope 😂
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We ditched MySQL and made our dashboard really fast. Here is how we did it.
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We have some huge news to share.
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I am doing something I may regret. We made a single credit card payment to AWS last month for our company (Fathom Analytics). If you can guess the exact amount of that payment, I will send the same amount to you. You have 24 hours. One clue: It's less than $20,000.
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We just migrated 17 billion database rows and here's every single detail about how we did it.
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Can we stop with the "Does Laravel scale?!" nonsense. You will run into database scaling issues 100x before you need to worry about your HTTP layer. And for those who still haven't got the message: Yes, Laravel scales.
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We re-built our entire application using Inertia.js and Vue.js.
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Ladies and gentlemen... Are you not entertained?!
I suppose I could take a few hours today and write about how I just reduced our AWS bill by ~$100,000 per year.
Does that tickle your fancy?
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Yesterday, one of our customers went really, really viral and I woke up to a queue backlog of over 1 million jobs.
If you're handling high scale (or plan to), this article will save you from running into the problems that we did 😃
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Our new infrastructure to collect pageviews & events:
- Infinitely scalable (millions of req/s)
- Multi-region
- Zero servers managed by us
I wasn't going to write about this, because I see it as a huge competitive edge, but I *will* write a blog post if enough of you want it.
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Should I drop my entire day and write about how we built our simple affiliate/referral system in three hours and release the code? 100 people by 11:30am and I’ll do it. We miss the goal and I never talk about it again 😇
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Warning: If you enable Google Pay as a payment method on Stripe, Google Analytics will be injected into your website when using Stripe.js. This is a huge oversight and puts businesses at risk, especially with data protection authorities pursuing companies that are using GA 🤦🏻♂️
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We’ve just hired our first full-time software engineer for Fathom 🥳
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We just reduced our AWS bill by $100,000 and can now invest in much more important areas of our business.
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We started rebuilding Fathom’s entire frontend two weeks ago, adopting a completely different tech stack, and we’re nearly done. As I always ask before spending hours writing, is there demand for a deep-dive article on our move?
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Today’s a big day for us. We officially deleted our MySQL database 🙈
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It took 11 seconds to remove an index from a table containing billions of rows. When I used MySQL, it would take 2+ hours to drop an index from a table containing a few million rows. The future is here 😇
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In my latest blog post, I share why we stopped using Laravel for our web application and moved to Next.js.
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200,000 background jobs per hour. Checking podcasts for new episodes. Transcribing the ones I found. Checking chart rankings. Sending webhooks. Adding new podcasts to scan. Emails.
I'm building a real platform here with . And it's just humming along! 🥰
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I'm excited to announce that my new video course, SingleStore for Laravel, is now live 🥳
I've charged into all of the MySQL headaches so that you don't have to, and I'll teach you how to use SingleStore at rapid speed and scale with Laravel.
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Woohoo! AWS refunded us ~$4,000 from the DDoS attack we got in November. Drinks on us 🥳
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Apple: "Up to 18 hours of battery life"
Docker: "Hold my beer"
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I'm so excited to announce that Serverless Laravel is now available. This course will teach you everything you need to know about Laravel Vapor and will save you a lot of time. I've had so much fun building this course and I hope you love it.
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Unbelievable few days for Fathom. We chose to innovate in response to EU law changes, and Google Analytics didn’t. They were declared illegal and now more people than ever are going privacy-first with their website analytics 🥳
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Local development with PHP is simple again 🥳
- Laravel Herd for local environment
- HELO for email testing
- DBngin for Redis & MySQL
- Tinkerwell for debugging
This is like the old days when we were all using MAMP & WAMP. A new generation of developers will benefit from this.
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Akamai
$18 billion mkt cap
9,800 employees
Cisco
$204 billion mkt cap
84,900 employees
Comcast
$173 billion mkt cap
186,000 employees
Dell
$56 billion mkt cap
133,000 employees
Disney
$165 billion mkt cap
191,250 employees
Fathom Analytics
A four person company in Canada 🇨🇦
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You're not shipping your side project because your scope is infinite. You've got a massive list of features, and you likely feel overwhelmed. The way forward is to reduce your spec and focus on completing one feature at a time. Repeat that 30x, and you'll be live in no time.
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To all the people scared of an unexpected AWS bill...
Setting up a budget takes 10 seconds. This will email you at 85% and 100% by default, and you can customize additional notification thresholds (e.g. 50%).
There's no reason not to use this feature.
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We've been under a layer 7 DDoS attack for the last 2 weeks. This attack was targeted at Fathom and was intended to cause financial damage or put us out or business.
Thread time 👇
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Updating the value of a column for 9.4 million rows. How long does it take?
MySQL: 3 minutes
SingleStore: 5.9 seconds
MySQL
- $730/month
- 250 GB Disk
- High Availability
- 4 vCPU
- 32 GB RAM
SingleStore
- $500/month
- 250 GB Disk
- High Availability
- 2 vCPU
- 16 GB RAM
🤩
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@alexfeinberg1
2017. So I was 23. Pill pushing doctor unable to fix issues my mum had. Gave her medication, documented side effects ensued and she died the next year. At age 29, I now know multiple different things we could’ve done that would’ve helped address her issues. I don’t trust doctors.
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The Laravel community is the best community I’ve ever been a part of. Everyone helps & encourages each other and no question is too much. If any of you ever have questions about scaling apps / Vapor, my DMs are always open :)
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To the developer who has sent us 900,000 dynamic event properties via our trackEvent() function, which hasn't been released yet and isn't documented anywhere on our site, I have just switched the value column from varchar(200) to TEXT to support those long values you're sending.
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If your first response is anger when you see someone else enjoying a specific technology or tool, you're the problem.
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A Formula 1 team is now a Fathom customer. Nothing to see here 🏎😎
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Don’t point your local environment at your production database. I’m not dunking on them, some people learn the hard way, but please don’t do it. Protect your database. Limit access.
On February 21st, Resend experienced an outage that affected all users due to a database migration that went wrong.
Here's a summary of what happened, how the incident was resolved, and the changes we're making moving forward.
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My tech beliefs:
Serverless.
AWS is incredible.
Laravel. One codebase.
Sustainable, not cheap.
Cloud, never on-premise.
Managed, never self-hosted.
We're doubling down on all of these as we plan for further expansion this year. So much to ship and we are off to an epic start 🥳
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It took 14 hours but we've just finished migrating nearly one billion database rows. This is a huge step for us and I'll be writing about it all very soon ☺️
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@TheJackForge
I’ve been thinking about learning it for the last 16 years but I’ll probably just spend another 16 years not learning it.
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I say this with zero judgement towards other peoples’ tech stack choices but I am so happy to have my business built on top of Laravel. The company behind it, Laravel LLC, is independent and profitable. It’s not a $300M bet by some venture capitalists, it’s already sustainable.
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I can't believe I'm writing this.
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January: We speak to five orthopedic surgeons and they all agree my wife needs surgery on her hip.
Yesterday: Meet a movement specialist in Amsterdam as our last hope. He identifies core body issues & has her RUNNING with a 45lb medicine ball. No pain.
Today: Surgery cancelled.
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ChatGPT feels impressive when I’m asking it questions about a topic I don’t know anything about.
But once I start asking questions about complex problems that I understand, it feels like I’m talking to someone who is just randomly Googling for answers to my questions.
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To celebrate GitHub using
@usefathom
, we're going to give away a Laravel course. RT to enter and we'll pick a winner on Sunday. The prize is any Laravel course under $300.
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It’s funny how we went from that chap on Reddit calling Laravel “dangerous” to the JavaScript community now discovering how amazing we have it over here in Laravel land. I’m here for it. Our company is built on top of Laravel and it’s an absolute dream to work with. Try it out 😇
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My biggest struggle as a software engineer is accepting that there’s no single “right” solution.
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I can’t get over how fast we’ve been growing in 2024. Google messed up big time and people absolutely hate GA4.
Our team is 4 full-time people and a few contractors. Small but mighty. And we’re here to take all of Google Analytics’ business. Come try us!
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When I perform massive system migrations, I always end up with a huge step-by-step migration plan, along with a full disaster recovery process. I usually delete this plan once the migration is complete.
Would anyone be interested in seeing a breakdown of how I plan migrations?
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We are building Team functionality into our existing Laravel application which currently has zero concept of teams or roles. It’s a headache. But we’re also making some epic architecture changes to simplify things. This is a blog post validation tweet. Should I write about this?
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It's been a long day but the Fathom API is now officially in early access. This is the first public API I've ever built, so it's a big milestone for me personally. And thanks to Paul, we have absolutely gorgeous documentation too.
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So... who hasn't moved to
@linear
yet? Best project management software I've ever used by a huge stretch.
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Whenever I get the impulse to try and solve something I don’t understand, like plumbing or electrics, I remind myself that some businesses use Wix to avoid paying for a website developer. And then I pick up the phone and call a professional.
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I used to hate getting cold emails, but now I love it. A random person emails us twice, trying to sell us something (like WP hosting for our static website), and I simply pitch Fathom to them. I even follow up if they go quiet. I call this "the reverse cold email sales pitch." 😎
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I am in shock. Cal Newport, the bestselling author of Deep Work (1.5 million copies sold), casually mentioned our company, Fathom Analytics, in his latest book, Slow Productivity. All because of an encounter with Paul's book a few years ago. I cannot believe our luck sometimes...
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We're about to launch our new website and my goal was to deploy it 100% serverless on AWS for maximum reliability.
- Static website
- Built in GitHub Actions
- Auto redirect www to non-www
- Remove trailing slash from URL
- Redirects defined in codebase
- Your cloud
Blog post?
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It’s the Sunday after Google Analytics imploded and our trials are 4x the usual amount for a Sunday. I’m currently sitting outside in the sun thinking about all the great stuff we’re about to release. I’d like to take a moment to thank Google for everything they’ve done for us 🥂
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We migrated nearly one billion database rows with zero downtime and improved query performance by 30%.
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@NapierHolland
Where abouts in UK? The challenge in the UK is getting a space that encourages you to be outside but is close to things. Or knowing that you need to get walking. This was the weather we had for 3 months. Every day we got outside into the sun. UK normal life doesn’t support this.
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Hi, I'm a developer, and I'm mad that you're not using the same framework as me.
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Who needs drugs when you can merge a single pull request with 75,000+ lines changed? What a ride.
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@kdlafrance
Brave did this a few months ago and it messed with my flow big time.
1) Go to chrome://flags
2) Disable download bubble flags
3) The bottom download bar will come back
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I couldn't wait till Monday. Here's how we built our referral program.
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New year, new website 🥳
My cofounder, Paul, did an incredible job on this.
The tech stack we're using:
- Jigsaw by Tighten
- Skunk CSS
- Torchlight syntax highlighting
- Algolia DocSearch
- Fathom Analytics
- Bootstrap JS
- Alpine JS
- CloudFront & S3
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The calm before the storm. Or the storm before the calm. Either way, Serverless Laravel launches tomorrow and I’m so excited. I’ve packed all of my Vapor knowledge into a series of video lectures and demos. It’s taken months & we are nearly there 🎉
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I love being a software engineer. And my favourite thing is when I have a seemingly impossible problem. No solutions are available, and you don't know where to begin. Nobody has done this specific thing before. You spend hours trying to solve it, and then suddenly, you crack it.
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TIL: Upserts made it to the core. Very excited because this lays the groundwork for a refactor in Cache::putMany(). We'll need less queries for each pageview or event we process 🥳
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I might get in trouble for this one, but I've started mixing up how I deal with cold emails. In addition to the reverse cold email sale, I am also introducing cold emailers to other cold emailers for maximum carnage.
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I disabled GitHub Copilot and I’ve been way more productive. I don’t believe that Copilot has the capability to intuitively handle some of the architectural challenges I have on my plate, and I could code it all myself in the time it would take to give Copilot the full context.
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✅ You have a Laravel app
✅ You need to monitor your scheduled tasks
✅ Fast install is required
Why is nobody talking about ?
Let's get more awareness about this incredible product. I'll buy a year Pro subscription to a random person who RTs this tweet.
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I’m sat outside, with pen and paper, and I’ve just finalized the new database schema that’s going to make Fathom the fastest and most flexible analytics provider in the world. Sometimes you’ve got to smash and rebuild the foundation before you can deliver the big vision.
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I've spent the last two months paying down technical debt that we've accumulated since we first built Fathom. One of the worst parts of our codebase was how we did analytics, and we had this complex base class with very little flexibility and poor readability.
Before & after 🥰
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My Laravel tip of the day. If you're running slow tests that need to hit a third party API, you can break them out of your Features directory and put them in a dedicated test suite (e.g. External). Then you can run "phpunit --testsuite Feature", and your External tests won't run.
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January: Google Analytics ruled illegal in the EU
February: Google fonts ruled illegal in the EU
March: Google announces that they're killing Universal Analytics and deleting all of your historical data
2022 is the year that
@usefathom
takes over the world 🚀
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Good morning and new product announcement: this week we’re starting to roll out Fathom Verified - a subscription that lets you get a blue badge on your dashboard. Fathom verified starts at $14.99 / month. We’ll be rolling it out in North Korea this week and more countries soon.
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TLDR: The reason that Twitter has moved so slowly for years is because they have gigantic amounts of technical debt and never paid it down. We paid ours down earlier this year, and we spent months doing it. Now we’re moving with ease. And we make way more profit than Twitter 😂
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Thinking about my next blog post. I want to do something along the lines of "10 mistakes I made as a CTO" or similar. I've made lots of mistakes (technical and non-technical) and run into some quite unique problems at scale, which I think could help people. Should I write this?
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We've now imported billions of pageviews from Google Analytics. Here's how we built our data importer using Laravel.
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