iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

woah that Cloudfront SaaS manager thing looks like everything I've ever wanted. Can't wait to try it

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Now feels like a great time to deploy to prod

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

golang embed.FS is the cooooolest thing: pkg.go.dev/embed#hdr-Fi... going into something like "hmm I wonder if this would be doable" and not only is it doable, it takes like 2 lines of code

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Can't help but think about this every time I see something related to apple intelligence www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0V5...

youtube.com

Apple Intelligence is for the Stupid Ones

YouTube video by CNET

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

by sheer coincidence, every piece of code i touched lately needed a regex in some way or another and its so satisfying how my brain went from "what the heck is this" to just reading regex in realtime. brains are cool

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

RDS blue/green deployments are a blessing

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

this was some next level sleepy code

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

step 1: setup dynamodb table with keys not suitable for making targeted deletes step2: let it grow to 500gb step3: trouble & bills

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Optimizing our scroll-triggered animation logic ended up looking like a science fair

A screenshot of a figjam showing graphics created in the process of determining scroll-triggered web animation logic

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

How we're doing global cache invalidations in 1s with "no infrastructure": 1. user publishes site 2. we generate a short random key 3. save it to dynamodb table 4. dynamodb does global replication 5. edge uses key in request hash for cache 6. ... 7. profit

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Last year we spend most of the time rebuilding our core product at the expense of the legacy version not getting any updates. The efforts are finally paying off with us being able to crank out long-awaited features in no time

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

oh dang just tried out the new github runners and almost cut the ci/cd time in half for what's gonna cost us like $30 a month

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

no matter what you do, sooner or later you'll get another strange npm lockfile/build/cache/etc issue. Nobody is safe

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

I feel like spotlight search is somehow getting worse with every macOS update so I finally tried raycast and holy shit is my life immediately so much better.

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

If you're a SaaS with a small team and need some user-facing analytics without much fuss I cannot recommend clickhouse enough. I switched all of our stuff over from a legacy system in two days, including migrating all existing data and rewriting all the queries from scratch

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

I once wrote my own database engine. Partly for fun but also because I was missing a time-series database option that wasn't all like "datalake, petabyte, enterprise, call us for quote" So glad I found @clickhouse.com. It's everything I ever wanted 💃 Now I can put my questionable attempt to rest.

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

Life hack for small teams: keeping a log of things you're doing day to day. This helps everyone stay in sync and tbh it helps me remember what I've been up to. Can also help with short-term planning and reducing overall cognitive load

a screenshot of a slack channel where i'm logging the things i'm working on during a normal work day

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

slack webhook avatars are an important form of artistic expression

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

just a smaaaaaall little feature we've been working on that spans nearly all of our services 👀

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

it baffles me when small companies send their marketing email from a no-reply address. Like don't you want to hear from the people you're trying to talk to?

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

In software if you're thinking you'll just quickly do this one easy thing. Prepare to not

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

fun fact which I think is really cool for a startup of our size: we have a 1:1 staging copy of our ENTIRE infrastructure: app, api, databases, load balancers, cdn, edge network... Our product has a lot of moving parts and this setup allows us to test how everything works together before deploying

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

I love working on the weekend because it feels there's less of an expectation of me getting any work done. Which is ironic because i'm my own boss

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

The way Disney+ messes with you when you try to cancel it should be illegal. Obvs they're not alone in this but jeez

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Day two of practicing motion graphics! Pretty cool huh? 😅

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Really getting into motion graphics these days 🤣 I mean jokes aside I did this within 15 minutes of opening the animation app for the first time ever so not bad.

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

restarting a service with a 648 day uptime. Wish me luck 🙏

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Really starting to appreciate senja.io (no affiliation). Such a nice tool for getting, managing and displaying testimonials. Not 100% polished but definitely great already and good enough for production

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

We finally redesigned our signup screen because it's mostly been unchanged since 2018 🙈. Conversion rate is up 12% ⬆️ and conversion time is down 16% ⬇️. Not bad!

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 06/01/2025

Intercom has become one of my favorite saas tools. I think I used to dismiss it in the past due to its price but it now definitely seems worth its price even though its a bit expensive. still got a lot of shortcomings but still fun to use

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

this is one of the most fun ways I have seen AI used so far www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytom...

youtube.com

Controlling Blender with my voice using LLM

YouTube video by Polyfjord Deep Dive

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Did you know that you can make your life 10x better just by adding your favorite gremlin to your infrastructure diagrams?

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Finally sent a product updates email after barely sending anything all year. Every time I do I feel like somebody's gonna be mad at me 😅. At least we got a decent setup now for email composing and sending

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 01/01/2025

I got no new year's resolutions but I do like the vibes of fresh energy that come with a new year. Feels somehow less burdened.

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

It's the new year! Don't forget to update the year in your footer and increase your border radius by 2 pixels.

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

imo the most mentally demanding thing to do as a software developer is to review a refactoring PR of someone you’re mentoring. You have to understand what the old code did, what the new one does, why it did that, how it was changed, why it was changed, how else it could be changed, if it’s complete

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

omg just found what's probably my favorite bug of the year

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

setting up my first ever discount campaign in six years 👀

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

Back at work after taking a week off to recharge and spend time with family. Feels good

Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Using AI to build your app will help you with the first 90% of development but you’ll still have to do the remaining 90% yourself.

Zuzana Kunckova @zuzana-k.com · 11/12/2024

Reposted by Alexis Taylor

I just published my 27th post. A bit personal and vulnerable, and I really wonder how I'm going to feel about it in the morning, but for now - here it is: www.zuzana-k.com/articles/som...

zuzana-k.com

Some dreams were only ever meant to be dreams

Zuzana K - Web developer, Founder, Public Speaker, Writer

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Proud of coming up with this CSS: I want half a section "within" a with a max with boundary and the other take up the rest of the viewport. Can't use a max-width parent container. So instead calculating the left offset to be the same it would've been if there was a parent container with max-with

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Alexis Taylor @alexi5.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Why finish a feature if you can start a new, even shinier feature ✨ (I would never do that)