Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
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Building @usefathom, the simple, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. Tweets about scaling web apps, Laravel and my health optimization journey.
Canada / UK
Joined May 2008
Something big happened in my life and I'm not joking around this time.
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And this is why Cloudflare has been banned from being used at our company. Our experience wasn’t an isolated incident. Told you.
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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 don't understand why everybody is being so negative about Slack automatically using our data to train their global AI models. I'm personally really excited about it and our team is too.
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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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We've just finished load testing. 21 billion requests per month. 20ms response times. Zero errors. Each request writes to a database. Using PHP. How much is this going to cost us? Assume a peak of 10,000 req/s.
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Is anyone using the Apple trackpad as their primary mouse?.
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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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The strangest thing about the JavaScript community is that they outsource their auth to third party providers. I’ve never once thought “I wish someone else controlled my users table”.
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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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New rule: If your site doesn't use Shopify or Stripe, I'm not entering my credit card details. What a day.
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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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We just benchmarked the same code but written in Go. That code can handle 52 billion requests per month (2.5x what PHP handled), 17ms response times, peak of 20,000 req/s, for a third of the cost. This is 100% infinitely scalable. 200,000 req/s? Easy. 2,000,000 req/s? Instant.
We've just finished load testing. 21 billion requests per month. 20ms response times. Zero errors. Each request writes to a database. Using PHP. How much is this going to cost us? Assume a peak of 10,000 req/s.
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That's so weird, mine is showing something different.
Excuse me what?. Never has behind-the-scenes drama been so public-facing. And so destructive to the community that has nothing to do with it.
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Nope. We use serverless and managed services because hiring 24/7 DevOps (internal or external) would cost more than our total monthly AWS spend.
Modern developers will pay ANYTHING not to connect a server to the internet themselves. A tax on learned helplessness the hyperscalers are only too willing to collect.
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I can't believe this is real life. Anyone defending Matt is an idiot and I have a bridge to sell you.
This has happened several times before, and in line with the guidelines you agreed to by being in the directory: . Best of luck with your version. We're looking forward to making ours amazing for our users, using the best GPL code available.
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Wordpress' attack on WP Engine is unhinged. Their current trademark policy aggressively targets WP Engine for using "WP" in it's name. In 2010, when WP Engine was founded, the Wordpress foundation told people to use "WP" in any way they see fit. Now they're mad? Come on now.
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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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They need to fix this. Because right now they have goodwill, people think “oh I use Cloudflare and it’s great”. But then as more happy customers get treated like shit by their enterprise sales team, it’ll compound negatively. PLEASE fix your sales process, Cloudflare!.
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Has there ever been as much of a shit show in tech as the one we’re witnessing with WordPress?. I can only think of the Basecamp drama but this WordPress drama is on a whole other level.
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One of the core financial principles of our company is that we always pay freelancers' invoices as soon as we receive them. Paul and I spent many years freelancing before we started Fathom, and nobody should have to wait to have their invoices paid.
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Postmark was acquired two years ago by ActiveCampaign, a company with ~1000 employees. The only changes I've seen since then are price hikes, extra cost for adjusted email retention period & now an SMTP SSL certificate expiring. What's your favourite change that they've made?.
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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 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’ve just hired our first full-time software engineer for Fathom 🥳.
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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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Demanding 8% of gross revenue is insanity. Not net, gross. That’s revenue before expenses. This fight is about Automattic’s investors wanting to make more money after they poured $1 billion into the company. I believe WP Engine is a scapegoat.
We've published our term sheet and details of past negotiations with WP Engine:
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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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Woohoo! AWS refunded us ~$4,000 from the DDoS attack we got in November. Drinks on us 🥳.
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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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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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Paul has officially retired from Fathom. We signed the deal 3 days ago and I'm now the sole founder. I'm unbelievably excited for the future and happy that we finally found a way for Paul to retire. I will highlight some things and answer some questions.
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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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Apple: "Up to 18 hours of battery life".Docker: "Hold my beer".
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I want to publicly give a gigantic shout out to the amazing CTO/head of engineering at the company I work for. In previous roles, I've had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to pay down technical debt. But this guy really gets it. He doesn't argue with me, he just understands.
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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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1.5 billion requests. 83ms average response time. AWS Lambda:.- Under $2,000/month (Lambda, ALB, data, etc).- Multi-AZ.- Autoscaling.- Updated & monitored 24/7 by AWS team.- Compute isolation. Total: $24,000/year. 150 million requests: $200/month. Serverless is worth every cent.
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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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@arvidkahl The article is solid. They NEED to fix their sales team, it’s gross. I think the tech is great but we won’t touch them ever. Both me and Paul were disgusted with how they behaved with us.
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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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It’s not a $5 VPS. It’s a $5 VPS plus 24/7 monitoring by 1-2 DevOps folks on retainer. If you need uptime. What are you spending to have round the clock server monitoring? 1 or more people on call?. We’re staying serverless, FYI, I’m just trying to add reality into the debate.
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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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I'm on a journey to lose 80lb after failing to do so by myself for about 7 years. I'm now working with one of the UK's smartest doctors and I'm down 15lb so far. I will have a ton to share (tests, learnings, etc.). Are my tech folks here interested in the details of this story?.
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Refactoring code is 10000000x harder than writing code. Cloning software is easy. I remember when you could buy a "Facebook clone" PHP application but the code was pure junk. Sure, it worked, but good luck supporting it. Maintaining software over time, that's the real challenge.
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Why did nobody tell me about this function? I've been converting objects to arrays for years in order to use Arr::get(). This changes everything 🙈
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Really excited to start work on my new side project this weekend. It’s a new type of CMS, with community plugins, multiple users, content revisions and so many other cool features. I’m going to name it WordPull.
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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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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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@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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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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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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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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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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Deleted my Vercel Fathom redirect tweet from yesterday. Their CEO emailed me with context that supports what Lee said about it not being intentional. I believe them.
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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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A Formula 1 team is now a Fathom customer. Nothing to see here 🏎😎.
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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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Also today I decided that I’m going to start tweeting on literally everything I’m working on. I’ve fixed my experience on this platform, so this feels like a much more fun place to be, and the positive digest is making me want to share my work more. So let’s do this.
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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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Well, TIL. Me: "Everyone tells me to use feature flags in production but you can't exactly use them when you need to restructure a 30+ billion row table to make the feature work". Carl: "Use database views for now and deal with the migration once the feature is ready to launch".
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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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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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No, I seriously give up with AI, it makes me rage. 1) I give it my current solution and why it won't work.2) It gives me a new solution.3) I tell it why it's new solution won't work.4) It gives me my current solution as the solution to the problems that it's new solution caused.
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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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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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Before: Managed WordPress hosting. After: Managed hosting for The-Software-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
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If you’re not using Laravel, I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems and Next.js ain’t one!.
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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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