Software engineer. Building @usefathom since 2019. Sharing all the technical details from behind the scenes.
Joined May 2008
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I’ve spent nearly seven years documenting how we built Fathom: outages, DDoS attacks, migrations, $100k AWS savings, my cofounder’s retirement, and a divorce. I write transparently because I want other people to learn from my mistakes. These 18 posts tell the story:
The exploits of the last few days are a good reminder of why we use SaaS. Our company pays for ~20 SaaS services. If we self-hosted them, we’d now be responsible for all of the security patches this week. Instead, our small monthly bill pays for their teams to handle everything.
I've lost my patience with GitHub. Going to be migrating our CI pipeline off of Actions because I'm fully tired of the regular outages from this platform. I know they're having growing pains, I get it, but I'm so tired of issue after issue. They have Microsoft money!
There are more vulnerable PHP sites right now than patched ones. Most people have no idea what went down today.
Look at how every vendor behaved today in response to the gigantic PHP security release and make your future choices based on the evidence. Laravel was the winner today. DigitalOcean was six hours late and sent nothing yesterday. Better late than never, I guess...
A huge thank you to the Laravel team for everything they've done (and are still doing) in response to the critical PHP security advisory. We took preventative measures yesterday and I was very happy to receive a "we are handling it" email from them. Well done to all involved.
One of the top exchanges I've seen on this platform. Someone tries to dunk on PHP developers and... well... 🤣
I gave the same audit prompt to Opus fast mode on Cursor and Conductor with my Claude subscription powering it. I paid Cursor $3.61, which is API pricing, but the audit was finished in 2 minutes. Conductor was still going after 16 minutes. Cursor caught everything. Time is money.
I have Cursor Ultra, Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Plus. The only harness that gives me a flow state is Cursor. You pay API pricing to move rapidly and the harness is absolutely top tier. But if you're happy with your current setup, don't try Cursor, because you'll be hooked.
Last night I asked ChatGPT to build a replacement for an app I pay $10/month for. I wanted to build out some features specifically for my use case. Today I woke up and checked it, it was the perfect clone. Then I decided that this project was a waste of my time and deleted it.