Turned this on mainly to have background noise that wasn’t football so Kira wouldn’t get riled up by the dogs next door, but turns out it’s just a great documentary youtu.be/yjpYzFtxf…
Y’all, I can’t believe this is finally happening.
Little CRM’s initial alpha is finally live!
Little CRM’s early alpha is almost ready! The plan!:
- Get this alpha ready to ship
- Write a blog post explaining what’s in the early alpha currently, and how it works
That way folks can see what the ethos is, and talk about signing up! So far the reaction has been excitement
The form for adding someone important to your account is coming along! I've been trying hard to add realistic, fun placeholder values. Hopefully it'll guide to less transactional convos. I want people to actually think about the people most important to their endeavors, and view them as people first & foremost, not a resource to extract
Look at this astounding header illustration that Wren made!! I’m floored, it’s perfect
One of the thing I’ve prioritized with Practical Computer is making sure things look great. It’s important, because we have these displays that can truly show off beautiful work. That polish & care pushes you to make better stuff.
That’s why I work with Wren, who consistently knocks it out of the park! Truly some of the best investments my business has made.
More proof of CableReady’s resilience
Mrujs and CableReady are so great together. After using Turbo 7 on both serious and hobby projects since it was released, I’m more and more finding out that it creates a lot more problems than it solves for me. Especially frames, which encourages bad controllers (imo), but drive too.
I haven’t used streams much, but from what I can gather I can recreate the features I want more elegantly with CableReady. I haven’t tried Turbo 8, but I don’t see the point as long as this combo exists. Mrujs has all I want, and the CableCar 🚡 integration is chef’s kiss.”
I saw this and dropped my networking stack guide, obviously.
It’s funny, I’d researched if CableReady and mrujs would make a good stack for my project, and I’d just started when your post happened to came along the same day, as if by divine providence. I took the fact that someone who, unlike me, seems to know what the hell he’s doing chose the same stack as a sign that I was on the right track. I’ve read your post twice since then, thanks so much for writing it! ❤️
I’m so glad that I’ve maintained being a stickler about:
- Doing the work to systematize things, especially design assets
- Adhering to using Mac-ass Mac Apps unless absolutely necessary
I broke my wrist during Helene cleanup, so I’ve needed to get a Stream Deck to make up for lost time due to one-handed typing. Elgato’s default icon sets are very minimal, making it hard to get something readable quickly.
Buuuut because I’m using Sketch and I did all the work to make a design system around Wren’s branding work for Practical Computer, I was able to:
- Open a new sketch document
- Use the design system’s library
- Make a 96x96 icon artboard
- Plop a Sketch symbol in there
- Use overrides + Font Awesome’s local fonts to quickly churn out icons
They’re not perfect, bad even! But they’re readable, and it was a trivial amount of time, and shows the power of systematizing.
Nanoc continues to be one of the best tools I’ve ever learned. I built out a whole chain for Postmark template emails (mustache) using:
- Cerberus
- plain ol ERB for templates & layouts
- premailer to prep the pages for Emails, and generating plaintext versions
- unlimited previews using static JSON files, rendering the results for each variant
All with like, maybe 200 lines of code?
This gives me "checking the blinking lights on my Linksys router back when they still had the blue front face" nostalgia, thank you
I'm trying my best to make systems understandable. Years ago I read about how macOS (and software writ large) got rid of status bars, syncing/activity windows, and it stuck with me. So for Little CRM, I’m adding status lights to show if JS appears to be working, and if the Web Sockets connection was successful.
Every day is further proof that we simply need to use UTC across the board. No more timezones.
They have played us for absolute fools
I’ll have more to show and a proper writeup soon, but it’s extremely cool that LittleCRM has replies & threading, with realtime updates. And because it’s CableReady/mrujs, I was able to reuse a ton of code & keep the cognitive load to a minimum
JavaScript provides developers with a way to emit custom events that developers can listen for with the Element.addEventListener() method.
We can use custom events to let developers hook into the code that we write and run more code in response to when things happen. They provide a really flexible way to extend the functionality of a library or code base.
Another example of why UJS is so powerful: you start thinking in events.
Fixing the Rails networking stack is published
I just published ~3K words + diagrams + code samples + demo videos on the frontend networking stack I’m choosing for Little CRM, and all my apps going forward.
I know that’s a ton to dig into, but I believe this is a very strong path forward for resilient and maintainable web apps.
The idea of throwing out Turbo & going to CableReady + Mrujs might feel like it’s a step “backward," less tested, or that you’re forging your own path by not sticking with what Rails ships with.
But I’d argue the exact opposite. It uses what the browser gives us! The concepts & protocols are universal, not a bespoke framework! And it tees up your app to be resilient by default.
I am honestly worried about the cargo-culting around Turbo and how that’ll cause this to either be ratioed or downright dismissed. 🫣 I think there should be multiple options. I have philosophical disagreements with Turbo & see clear technical shortcomings that are hard to work around. But I’m also human, so I know I’m fallible.
I want a frontend stack for our community that can ultimately grow the ecosystem at large, help us attract & keep new blood, and build significantly better apps. From my perspective, this approach accomplishes all of that. I don’t need everyone to adopt it (I want that, because I believe in it 😜), but the overcorrection to “don’t do anything outside of what the framework provides” worries me. Especially on the frontend, given Rails’s history of jettisoning multiple iterations while never having sat down and truly thought out how the code lives on the client side.
I’m not saying this is the option, but it is an option. And it’s my strongly recommended option—the one I believe to be the most robust and easy to use.
Cat's a bit out of the bag on this one it seems 😅
I'm working on a detailed breakdown of Little CRM's networking stack, complete with real code samples and everyone's favorite: diagrams!
We don’t talk about technical ideas that have good aspects, but we don’t fully agree with. Everything is so focused on finding The One True Way. We love to talk “it depends” in our dayjob, but not our posts. Ultimately, it stifles creativity.
Jay Harris “I swear if you say ‘we have forgotten the old ways’ one more time [with regard to building sites that work without JS]”
Me: “this sounds more like a collective ‘we’ problem than a ‘me’ problem”
Y’all couldn’t put any sort of weighted algorithm on this? Like, I know almost all of these are rude in some capacity, but this just feels like a footgun waiting to happen
Little CRM is underway
After over a year of planning, chipping away at the problem, and designing the foundation for reuse; I’m finally starting on Little CRM.
The thing I’ve learned is that every time I decide the right thing engineering-wise, even if it’s just the bare-minimum version, I’m better off that it’s done.
I have found it; the saddest, unintentionally funniest podcast ad of all time
Blue Ridge Ruby 2024
I went to Blue Ridge Ruby, and it was an excellent time! I'm extremely grateful there's a regional Ruby conference (only a 90-minute drive away!) with great speakers and great company to boot.
My apprentice, Josh O'Halloran, got a sponsorship ticket and was immediately welcomed by the community. After 12+ years as a Rubyist, I had forgotten just how quickly & warmly we embrace newcomers. It's something we should continually practice.
Also, we need to make weird projects again! Talking about _why, Tenderlove, conference talks of yore, and other watershed moments in the early days of Ruby made me realize that we've been so focused on legitimizing, optimizing, and working with Ruby that we've stopped making dumb, silly things. If there's one critical thing I took away from my time in Asheville among folks that use the language I love every day, it's that we are better when we're collectively goofing off.
That, and root beer taught me the importance of B2B sales.
The lowest latency combination between Hetzner ARM and Crunchy Bridge
tl;dr: The best combination of Hetzner's ARM servers and Crunchy Bridge's regions are:
- Hetzner:
nbg1-dc3 - Crunchy Bridge: AWS
eu-central-1 - Benchmarks at the end of the post
I’ve been working on getting the first Practical Computer app out of beta (a dispatcher app for service companies). It, and the rest of our smaller apps, have the following constraints:
- Extremely shoestring budget. $30/month operating budget. Not much to work with!
- Since it’s production data, there’s responsibility for the data to be redundant, safe, and secure.
Given those, I ended up choosing Hetzner’s ARM servers, given the sheer power + cost combination (even with them being in the EU; and this is a US-based project).
I’ve had great experiences with the Crunchy Bridge team, and 18+ years of experience have taught me that I really want someone else to make sure the database is secure for me. So even though it’s 10% of my operating budget here, it’s worth it (because the database is the most crucial part of the app!).
The problem is that the app server & database are on two separate networks; I don’t get the benefit of an internal network, so I had to benchmark what combination of regions would work best.
The previous iteration was completely misconfigured: Hetzner’s Helsinki region for the app, AWS eu-north–1 for Crunchy Bridge. This turned out to be awful for performance. After some benchmarking and experimenting, I found that the following combination gets pretty dang close to good performance given the constraints:
- Hetzner:
nbg1-dc3 - Crunchy Bridge: AWS
eu-central–1
(I’ve got benchmarks at the end of the blog post, don’t worry!)
Lessons learned
I wanted to write this not only to help other folks find the best combination easily; but to talk about the mistakes I made and lessons I learned.
- Mistake: I should have benchmarked different options & done more research. My first Crunchy Bridge cluster was actually in
eu-central–1, with the Hetzner server in Helsinki; and if I’d benchmarked & explored my options I would have avoided an unnecessary database migration. - Win: When spooling up the Hetzner server, I did my best to use Ansible to provision the server, and use Dokku for a PaaS-like experience. This made it so that spooling up a new server in
nbg1-dc3was significantly easier. This is why I advocate for “automate as you go”, especially for infrastructure. - Win: choosing the right vendors. Hetzner allows me to quickly & cheaply spool up a small project, and having Crunchy Bridge’s support & their tooling made spooling up the replicas & promoting them dead-simple.
Alternative solves
To be clear, I had a few other options available to me, some of which I could still choose, and have implemented:
- Application-level caching: This is done, and basically a given for any production app. I ended up using Redis here.
- Making a read replica on the Hetzner instance; use that for reads (a heroically misguided, but technically feasible idea!)
- Move from Hetzner to AWS. This would only make sense for an app that’s actually generating the profit to justify the switch. It’s hard to bear Hetzner’s price & power combo here.
- Move the primary DB back to Hetzner (not ideal. Again, 18+ years of experience have taught me that I don’t want to manage a bunch of databases)
Benchmarks, as promised
# Benchmark script
# x.report("crunchy-eu-central") { ApplicationRecord.connected_to(role: :crunchy-eu-central){ Organization.first.onsites }}
# x.report("crunchy-eu-north-1") { ApplicationRecord.connected_to(role: :crunchy-eu-north-1){ Organization.first.onsites } }
hetzner-helsinki:~$ dokku run dispatcher
rails@aaaaaa:/rails$ ruby script/benchmarks/database_performance.rb
…
ruby 3.3.1 (2024-04-23 revision c56cd86388) +YJIT [aarch64-linux]
Warming up ————————————–
crunchy-eu-central 1.000 i/100ms
crunchy-eu-north-1 1.000 i/100ms
Calculating ————————————-
crunchy-eu-central 9.788 (±10.2%) i/s - 49.000 in 5.031111s
crunchy-eu-north-1 14.124 (± 7.1%) i/s - 71.000 in 5.045164s
Comparison:
crunchy-eu-north-1: 14.1 i/s
crunchy-eu-central: 9.8 i/s - 1.44x slower
====================================================================================================================
hetzner-nuremberg:~$ dokku run dispatcher
rails@5e9d1df43591:/rails$ ruby script/benchmarks/database_performance.rb
…
ruby 3.3.1 (2024-04-23 revision c56cd86388) +YJIT [aarch64-linux]
Warming up ————————————–
crunchy-eu-central 1.000 i/100ms
crunchy-eu-north-1 7.000 i/100ms
Calculating ————————————-
crunchy-eu-central 20.452 (± 0.0%) i/s - 103.000 in 5.037650s
crunchy-eu-north-1 96.340 (± 2.1%) i/s - 483.000 in 5.016063s
Comparison:
crunchy-eu-north-1: 96.3 i/s
crunchy-eu-central: 20.5 i/s - 4.71x slower
====================================================================================================================
/// Spot-check of query latency
hetzner-helsinki:~$ dokku run dispatcher
rails@aaaaaa:/rails$ bin/rails c
Loading production environment (Rails 7.1.3.2)
irb(main):001> 10.times { p Benchmark.ms{ ApplicationRecord.connected_to(role: :crunchy-eu-central){ Organization.first.onsites } } }
1637.3784099705517
103.8463581353426
106.55084392055869
105.82964192144573
102.70471591502428
102.40731597878039
107.70620591938496
112.95577604323626
111.48629407398403
105.25572090409696
=> 10
irb(main):002> 10.times { p Benchmark.ms{ ApplicationRecord.connected_to(role: :crunchy-eu-north-1){ Organization.first.onsites } } }
1040.9399520140141
72.33657804317772
73.68614105507731
77.82750786282122
75.32874401658773
73.2035799883306
77.43134815245867
72.01353716664016
71.68629695661366
74.11726214922965
=> 10
====================================================================================================================
hetzner-nuremberg:~$ dokku run dispatcher
rails@aaaaaa:/rails$ bin/rails c
Loading production environment (Rails 7.1.3.2)
irb(main):001> 10.times { p Benchmark.ms{ ApplicationRecord.connected_to(role: :crunchy-eu-central){ Organization.first.onsites } } }
846.7416610001237
54.84945299758692
56.269697000971064
55.53825500101084
54.511651000211714
54.32877099883626
57.52018099883571
59.374027001467766
63.36915899737505
55.06629299998167
=> 10
irb(main):002> 10.times { p Benchmark.ms{ ApplicationRecord.connected_to(role: :crunchy-eu-north-1){ Organization.first.onsites } } }
168.30048900010297
11.614236002060352
12.266477999219205
15.882210002018837
15.326369000831619
11.819797000498511
14.219884997146437
10.650393000105396
11.742956001398852
13.63104199845111
=> 10
