Daniel Lockyer
@DanielLockyer
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long distance runner + generalist swe currently: - engineer @ghost - server guy @nomadlist @remoteok + https://t.co/eioKZWjrNt
Amsterdam
Joined December 2010
2:57 in the bag 🤙🏻 Conditions were good so my legs were just rolling. A totally unintentional sub-3 to celebrate my 29th birthday 🎉
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Vercel pricing is absolutely insane, it blows my mind. Data transfer starts at $150/TB with 1TB included. Hetzner gives 20TB free, and then it's €1.19/TB. So 20TB on Vercel is $2850, on Hetzner it's free (included with VPS). And then you have to pay extra per request?. Perhaps.
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For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for @levelsio (Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others. I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:. ⚙️ Post.
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In the Netherlands, the cucumbers are from Spain. In Spain, the cucumbers are from the Netherlands. How can this make sense? What's the underlying market force at play here?.
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Update: server survived, no stress.
If the server can survive an @elonmusk tweet will we have proven the VPS simple stack thesis once and for all?.
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My favorite thing about the PHP stack is it lends itself to simplicity. You run Nginx + PHP-FPM, and point it to some files. Website updates = replace the files. No application restarts, no container issues, no complex deployment strategies, no crazy stateful application logic.
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working on side projects is like a video game. you're on a difficult mission. and you gotta find your way through the level. sometimes you die and go back to start. but you learn.
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Meanwhile, @Hetzner_Online doesn't even want my money 😅
Uh oh, AWS found me now. I don't even use any of their services, I just signed up to check their UI once, and now I'm receiving invoices from them?
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If you currently use Docker Desktop, I can highly recommend switching to @OrbStack: It's faster, lighter and has other great features like:.- automatic local HTTPS.- full Linux machines w/ shared mounts.- native K8s engine.- not incredibly painful to use.
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Most people are missing the point of having a simple setup. How much time has been saved by not having to deal with the ever-changing mess of "modern" development? . Time better spent building features, marketing, making money or enjoying life.
The CPU % on my VPS server even went down not up since @lexfridman podcast and @elonmusk tweet. While traffic more than tripled and revenue doubled. Not serverless, not edge, not kubernetes, not auto scaling. Just 1 simple VPS for all my sites. Thx to @DanielLockyer my DevOps guy
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🎉 Today is my 25th birthday!. As usual, I've written my year-in-review: To celebrate the day, I went out and ran 61km 🏃♂️
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🖥️ Need server help?. 🔥 Performance optimization.⚙️ Server maintenance.🔐 Website security.
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⚙️Today I was adding my upcoming trips to @NomadList but I realised how slow the user pages were so @levelsio and I spent a few hours speeding them up (using techniques from - making them 61% faster! 🔥
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Decided to run a marathon on a running track a couple of days ago. Been wanting to do this for a while and it did not disappoint. Expected hard mental effort but 3.5 hours flew by. 10/10 would do again
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💀 The @linode server powering @NomadList and @remote_ok went down and then corrupted a couple of days ago. 👍 I managed to fix it and get it back up within 1 hour. ✍️ I wrote about what happened and how it was fixed.
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So we've had AI for a while now - where are we at with AI automatic bug fixes?. Receive error (Sentry whatever) -> come up with fix -> open PR -> maybe auto-merge if high confidence?. Is this a thing yet?.
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I wrote about how I use ⚙️open source tools and 🔎custom scripts to monitor @levelsio's 🗺@NomadList and 💻@remote_ok 👉
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Don't overthink what it takes to run your own servers.
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Even the @official_php website is still running PHP 5.6, which reaches its end of life in 69 days ⚙️
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Putting the Cloudflare free plan in front of your site (takes a matter of minutes, depending on DNS) is one of the quickest wins I can think of for increased speed and security.
This is why I love Cloudflare. Owning your own hardware doesn't mean you can't contract with a bodyguard. We do that and it saved our bacon a few months ago when we were attacked.
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Remember, software development is just a means to an end. For @levelsio, running a business and making an impact is more important. Refactoring code, updating to the latest version of xyz framework, or figuring out why his code isn't deploying is not a productive use of time.
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@t3dotgg A fair point! But this is such a dangerous footgun for the average developer/team. Looking forward to the video :).
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I rewrote a small part of a library I use all the time into @rustlang and I got a 3.5x speedup!.
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Don't place ads from a 3rd party on your site if you want to keep it fast. I'm looking at a 300ms loading time (7 requests) site that turned into 5.3 seconds (177 requests) with just 3 ads added to the page. 23 more DNS lookups and 3 cancelled requests. 🤯.
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I've just discovered by @zakirullin and it's fantastic. Strongly recommend reading it. I literally think about cognitive load every day - it's one of the most overlooked issues in software dev, and we only seem to make it worse every year. 🧵 examples
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I went to sleep for 8 hours and wake up to @levelsio telling me he's launched another site which is launching on @ProductHunt in 20 minutes.
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If you're using the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics scripts just for tracking page views & stats (like most of us), you might be interested in switching to It's a lightweight (just 2% of GTM+GA size) alternative that's been working great for me.
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"Billions were wasted on Hadoop startups, and the same will eventually be true of Docker".
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Uh oh, AWS found me now. I don't even use any of their services, I just signed up to check their UI once, and now I'm receiving invoices from them?
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Just spent *literally* 1 minute with from @aidenybai and found a loose React onClick handler in @Ghost's settings UI which was causing the sidebar to re-render multiple times per click. Super cool tool 🤩
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Just found some old photos from my consultancy work 5yrs ago. This one was a PHP 5.6 to 7.2 upgrade - ~140% CPU to ~10%?. It was one of those times where the graph is so unbelievable that you need to double-check the website is still running (it was) 🙈
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I've recently been binge watching @awesomekling's YT videos about building @ladybirdbrowser. I'm not usually into programming videos but it's fun to see underneath the hood of a browser, and to follow debugging and feature dev outside of my usual areas.
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Just added a new feature to my running pace calculator with 1 sentence in Cursor - the ability to input custom distances. I could have done it myself, but I can guarantee it'd take more time than it takes to write a sentence.
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@levelsio @bchecketts @newrelic I tried to stop him but he had a weak moment and was starting to rewrite everything in Laravel.
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By far one of the best hacks/solutions I've ever seen.
Upgraded 🌎 to PHP 8.2 with Opcache enabled which has reduced its page load from 1000 to 2000ms to ~250ms (so 4x to 8x faster). Opcache caches entire PHP files in-memory, and me and @daniellockyer hacked it in a funny way: to keep the entire Nomads data
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I ran 100km for the first time last Saturday 🥳. Recovery is going well and I'm pretty eager to get back into doing some races 🎽
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If you use 1Password, one of my favorite local setup tips is to move all those secrets you store in bashrc/zshrc/config etc into it, and switch to the CLI to inject them into your commands/scripts. Such a nice experience to use Touch ID to auth all access.
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⚡️ now loads a lot faster, as we reduced the WAIT time to just 7% of the original by using techniques from ⚙️ Images below are before and after 👇
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Absolutely wild pricing, $120/mo for a 500MB Redis instance 😱.
Just upgraded one of my app's Heroku Redis plans to Premium 3 to handle the volume of background jobs for large customers. I have a strong feeling that paying $120/month for a managed Redis instance with only 500 MB of memory in 2024 is pure robbery 😡.
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⌛️ It's finally time to upgrade your PHP installations. Both PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are being set to End-Of-Life status in ~2 months and will lose future security updates. I can help upgrade your server and code to the latest versions - DM me. Why is this a big deal? 👇
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@dhh Hetzner has unbelievable pricing, now if only I could actually get through their signup flow without being banned.
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⚙️ Having server problems? I run a free Telegram group called Server Help where we help each other with issues. Feel free to join us! 👇
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And it's worth pointing out it's not just for Rails apps, but anything that can be containerized . Seeing a lot of friends using Kamal these days, and it looks like a great offering, so go run your apps on your own VPS!.
Kamal 2.0 has been released! Now with a own bespoke Kamal Proxy, which brings auto SSL certificates and multiple-apps-on-a-single-box, with virtually no configuration. It's never been easy to avoid PaaS, embrace your own server, and deploy to prod.
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Controversial opinion but I think AWS is massively overrated and overpriced. You can get much better alternatives for cheaper. For example, @backblaze B2 vs Amazon S3 vs others 👇
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My firebase bill is usually $50/month, but I was surprised to see a ~$70,000 bill in one day. Now Google is mentioning in 10 days it will be sent to debt collection. Can anyone help??
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Recently switched from an 14" M1 Max MacBook Pro to a 13" M3 MacBook Air and I think it was a good move. Battery life is insane and it's so incredibly thin/light. Never heard the fans for my workload on M1 so not concerned about them not on M3. Downsides: no HDMI, speakers not.
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After years of trying, I finally redpilled Pieter into doing cardio.
🧪 Went for a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) yesterday. VO2Max went up from 🟥 28 (very bad) to 🟩 42 (good). I did a Bruce test 2 years ago in Thailand and my cardio was pretty bad the cardiologist said cause I only lifted weights. Since then I've added ~15min cycling to
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Hetzner Object Storage pricing has been announced (starting November 1st) 👀.
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🎉 It looks like support is being added to 💎 @rubygems for building 🦀 @rustlang native extensions. This is great news and will mean it's easier to write fast + safe code modules (like @Deliveroo did - .
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@levelsio @ashishlogmaster @newrelic Yeah not sure. I don't think we've got auto-upgrades on for this package. It's possible our application code started to hit some bug in the agent. There's no single repro from their GitHub issues.
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Internships are by far the best way to figure out what you like/don't like doing whilst you're still studying. I did 3 internships whilst at uni and changed direction after each one!. Would recommend :).
For the first time since 2015, Gumroad will have a summer internship program in 2025!. Join us in NYC June-August for $16K/mo, and help us design, build, and sell Gumroad, Flexile, Iffy, Shortest, and more. Once school is over, we’d love to have you join.
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I'm not a big fan of Docker, but this tool looks really cool. I wonder if TUI programs could help manage other aspects of a server.
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TIL that the first shipped version of Rosetta 2 (which allows you to run Intel apps on Apple Silicon) was basically written by one engineer 🤯
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📊 I made a PHP script to generate pretty histograms of real world response times from PHP web apps 👇
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🤔 Are you developing a site and it's a little slow?. 👉 Throw it into and send me the report. For a quick consultation, I'll tell you exactly what you need to do to speed it up. 🐌 Don't be stuck with a slow site.
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⚙️ I made this using @brendangregg's Flame Graph visualizer and XDebug trace output. Combining it with is how we've made huge performance gains recently ⚡️ I wrote about it on my blog 👇.
The performance graph @DanielLockyer just made of looks eerily close to the ancient ⛩ temples in Myanmar 🤔
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Does anyone else still get a little bit nervous when you press `← Back` on a payment form/checkout?. will it work? will it break my basket? where will my payment go? 😱.
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Laravel tooling is some of the best I've ever seen, the Node.js ecosystem doesn't even come close to having anything like this.
Nightwatch is application monitoring obsessively optimized for Laravel, and one of the most thoughtfully designed applications we've ever built at Laravel. I think you're going to be blown away. Early access will begin soon — we would love your help and feedback as we put on the
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Update: @Hetzner_Online helped me figure out why I was failing verification, and now I have an account! 🎉. Pro tip: read thoroughly before signing up.
@dhh Hetzner has unbelievable pricing, now if only I could actually get through their signup flow without being banned.
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Recently worked on optimizing the loading speed of a Shopify e-commerce store. Just my changes alone (which included a 40% drop in load time) increased their conversion rate by 26% from 1.8% to 2.3% 🤑
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15k commits in the last 14 years, and 13k of them were in the last 5 years 🥹
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📢 RUBY DEVELOPERS. 🎉 I recently released v0.3.6 of rbspy - which supports newer versions - so if you've got some slow code, give it a whirl!.
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@mirkancal @AverageProMax @levelsio @bobbyiliev_ @lexfridman @elonmusk I can't even get past the signup step, I was insta-blocked.
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@dvassallo @Hetzner_Online please take some points from this, you could easily increase revenue by making it easier to spend money 😀.
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✅ Chiang Mai Marathon completed!. That's around a 35 minute PB from my last official time, so I'm pretty happy with that. It was pretty weird to start running @ 3am, and then finish before sunrise but the experience was worth it.
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My favorite one-liner life/code improvement when working in vanilla JS is:. const $ = (id) => document.getElementById(id);. Inspired by the great jQuery, and makes the code more terse and readable 👌🏻.
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Today's running thought - treat your body like a business:. - invest in long-term growth and success (cardio, strength, nutrition, sleep, recovery, massages).- cut the risks that could derail progress (alcohol, stress).- don't be afraid to pivot; it's never too late to start.
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@SamarthJain29 Ah, you might benefit from pm.max_requests, default is infinite. We have it set to 1000 (arbitrary number).
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Currently downloading 2400 days worth of images from the Mars Curiosity rover for a side project 📷
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~160 people in the community now. Already loads of great questions about tooling, hosting platforms + specific setups. Going to be working on a deep dive into the server setup for @levelsio this weekend. to join.
For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for @levelsio (Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others. I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:. ⚙️ Post.
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🥳 Today is my 24th birthday!. I wrote about all the things I've done in the last year 😄.
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People live in wishful delusion if they think this doesn't happen at their hosting provider. It does, and they lie to you on the support tickets.
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I love these high-density info sites, comparing products against each other. No flashy design, just hard numbers. This one is I wonder what else you could build one for?
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💻 The @googlechrome team are looking into shaming sites that load slowly, directly within the browser. Even more of a reason to ensure your site is loading fast ⚡️.
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Literally this, 99.9% of the time. And you can often get the server back within minutes. Some bug deep in a dependency somewhere? Debugging for days.
@9gel @levelsio @lexfridman @elonmusk @DanielLockyer I've seen way more outages because of complexity and software failures than server being offline.
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I wonder how many tech problems already have solutions but they're hidden away online in non-English languages, and therefore not "Google-able". Does AI help with this?.
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Many such cases.
I moved a small app from Heroku to DigitalOcean. The owner says it feels way faster than before and the cost are down from ~$300/month to about $60 per month.
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Most people on Friday evenings: Netflix, party, alcohol. Me: formulating my own sports nutrition products
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Traction is going great (hi all new members! ❤️), but I've since discovered that Stripe's processing fees are WILD for such small payments. Going to be upping the subscription fee soon to cover all the costs. It's worth it though, promise.
For the last 10 years, I've managed servers for @levelsio (Nomad List, Remote OK + PhotoAI), Ghost and many others. I've learnt a lot, and met a bunch of helpful people, so I thought it'd be nice to have a community dedicated to server problems:. ⚙️ Post.
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Is it me or has torrenting become much less popular these days?. When I was younger, I remember everyone would torrent films/TV shows, but now everyone is shelling out $20/mo to like 7 different streaming services?.
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