iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 14/02/2025

What 80/20 advice do you have for being preemptive with n + 1s?

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 29/01/2025

“Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?” Absolutely, this is exactly what I did for my startup. Rails 8 + inertia + shadcn has given us the full modern monolith. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4283...

news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025? | Hacker News

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 26/01/2025

Would love to hear any stories from both sides, posting paid bounties and anyone that has completed bounties. Reach out as well if you’re interested in doing some for us at scribesocial.ai!

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 26/01/2025

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Has anyone had success with bounties for 3rd party integrations for your app or API? I’d love to start working with the community on getting both SDK integrations and no code integrations with systems like Make and Zapier going!

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 20/01/2025

Super easy! I think the weirdest part was that I couldn’t get the default schemas to load correctly, but once I added the manual db migrations, it was as smooth as specifying the same connection string for each of those entries in the database.yml!

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 20/01/2025

Agreed, I ended up consolidating to 1 for all the new Solid integrations.

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GitHub - MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler: Profiler for your development and production Ruby rack apps.

For those using Inertia + Rails, since the routing here is still defined in the server controllers, it’s as easy as bundle add rack-mini-profiler to add SQL performance profiling to your app per page! I have it set up to have profiling on prod for admins as well! github.com/MiniProfiler...

github.com

Profiler for your development and production Ruby rack apps. - GitHub - MiniProfiler/rack-mini-profiler: Profiler for your development and production Ruby rack apps.

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Congrats man! That’s awesome news 🎉

Yes! So many things to be grateful for here. Decisions too, it’s so easy to second guess if you’re the only one there. Advise from the outside is helpful, but often being on the inside, you’re the one that knows best. Having a co-founder on the inside to bounce back and forth with is invaluable

100%, put a follow up comment, but super grateful that I knew and have worked with one of my co-founders before and go to know the other before jumping into business. Agree and have seen people struggle with finding co-founders. Highly recommend joining communities and YC co-founder matching!

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I know someone needs to hear this right now. I’m fortunate to know one of my co-founders from back in college where we were hacking together, the other we met through the YC co-founder platform. Go meet someone, in person or online. Find someone you want to do life/ business together and go!

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 18/01/2025

Get a co-founder. I see so many indie devs are one person business stories where they either get burnt out or would move so much faster with a co-founder. Help fill the holes you are missing, have a partner to keep you motivated and shipping. Your business will flourish. I’m so grateful for mine!

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One thing I’m valuing the most on our founding team is that we have differing opinions. Often, at least one of us offers a new perspective on the issue or opportunity. It’s refreshing to have a founding team that is comfortable with this and ultimately it allows us to come to the best decisions.

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 17/01/2025

Take every meeting with people that you can. Seems counterproductive, maker schedule anyone? But being able to connect with people that I know or want to has been amazing. I’m a firm believer in having a breadth of knowledge and connections. Connecting dots later happens in unexpected ways

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 15/01/2025

Is anyone using any Zapier or Make flows with LLMs as a core part of their business? Would love to hear about any awesome examples you’ve seen!

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 15/01/2025

I’m incredibly excited to be able to be completely full time on scribesocial.ai Two days in, it has been incredibly freeing. I have a long list of plans for the tech and marketing, but what I can ship per day has skyrocketed. Reach out if you’re interested and I’d love to chat! 🚀

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 14/01/2025

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1 all day. Remove the fluff, get to the value for the customer

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 12/01/2025

On the contrary, a whole new world of products that weren’t possible before are now unlocked! There were perceived walls on things that weren’t possible before that now are. With scribesocial.ai for example, who thought that we could have mass videos being analyzed by AI? Exciting times to me!

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 12/01/2025

Don’t outsource what is a core part of your product is something that has always resonated with me. This works in software and just life. I learned how to do electrical, basic rough framing, tiling etc because I know I’ll use it in the core of my life and kids. Completely agree for one time thing

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 12/01/2025

100% agree. Garry Tan has seen a ton of startups come through agrees that “creator led business are the future”! Building scribesocial.ai, we’ve been working with multiple creator businesses where we’ve seen the success firsthand. Creator-led marketing is what consumers trust and is the future.

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I know right, great last name you got there 😉

Absolutely awesome product man! Exactly what you need when you have kids

With Next, there are so many ways to handle it. I can use Redis, oh some people use Upstash, Vercel KV, wait Next headers are async now and what’s the middleware situation these days? Etc With Rails I can simply add: ```  rate_limit to: 10, within: 1.minute, only: :create ``` And keep on shipping

The completely separate views with React feel fantastic with Rails MVC, and my shipping speed has gone way up. I can just focus on the business logic. Recent example, I’m building out our platform for scribesocial.ai, and I would want some sense of rate limiting on the open public APIs.

100% agree, I’ve split a lot between Next.js fullstack and Rails with Hotwire. Rails helpers are great and stimulus was a good tool with trade offs. But the ecosystem is so strong in React and honestly with Inertia, it’s felt way more like the “rails way”. Stimulus to me creates overengineering

Transcribe Video - Scribe Social

We’ve been loving Mintlify. Used it for our docs here docs.scribesocial.ai and they are just beautiful. Let’s you try the rest API right in line with the documentation as well.

docs.scribesocial.ai

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 09/01/2025

Have you been able to get a feel for any shipping velocity increases yet? I imagine it might be easier once things are migrated and normalized 😃

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 09/01/2025

100%. We are still really early in AI development and so many people that have tried it, have only used copilot or copy and paste from Claude. Composer is just a completely different level.

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Man, marketing is getting advanced these days😆

If you’re already using VsCode, you can transfer all your settings! Cursor is literally just VsCode with some AI features integrated with first class support! Highly recommend giving it a try with composer mode. Hard to go back

I’ve been an “Apple notes for everything” kind of guy forever now. With Basecamp turning back on their free plan, it’s got me thinking if I should upgrade my project management game. Anyone have any tools they recommend they use daily to keep organized?

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That’s a good point! I know some people that do a “death clock” of their own life expectancy, that is just too negative for me😅 Similar concept here though with the startup. Perhaps we can have an incoming request sort of map to see adoption increase and revenue

Love composer. A flow that I’ve been found of lately has been using composer, choosing o1 model for translating my high level plan into a step-by-step tech spec as markdown. Then I have composer swap to “agent mode” and have Claude sonnet execute the plan step by step. Has been widely effective.

That’s such a smart idea. Even with a small number of employees reconfiguring based on what hats we’re wearing or what we’re doing that day would be so beneficial. Great one, definitely putting wheels on the desks and tables!

We’re thinking of a screen with revenue and a sort of “death clock” to use as motivation each day

After working remote for years now, I’m incredibly excited getting an office for our startup. What are some game changers any startup founders have added to their office?

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The result in my experience, was was only effective in a very close copilot sense. I felt in this way, I may as well be using Cursor myself with composer mode and completing the task with the AI co-pilot. It does not feel like it's ready to tackle anything of substance independently.

The goal for me where this would be useful, is given the tool a tech spec, most likely o1 assisted written by me, and the result would be an agentic completion of each step unless it gets stuck, and then it'd jump in to unblock.

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I onboarded Devin like I would a junior dev and gave it more autonomous, but more scoped, entry level tasks and I wasn't able to get task completion.

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It wrote a migration that would've resulted in data loss and typically took wayy too long between iterations. Many times it hit full work units without making any iterative progress and put itself to sleep.

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Has anyone had any success with Devin? The past month we did an experiment to try it out, and our personal results were pretty horrible.

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There are many files, but you really appreciate the "convention over configuration". Everything ends up being where you expect it and a flat file structure. Compared to some frameworks without convention where you're 10 layers deep in files and DI/abstractions to figure out what's going on.

Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 03/01/2025

@kokev.in reach out if you want to get set up to try it out! We’ve been piloting with a few creator discovery/management platforms as well as some larger companies to really nail down our API. docs.scribesocial.ai if you want to check it out. Launching vision support this next week!

docs.scribesocial.ai

Transcribe Video - Scribe Social

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Cole Robertson @colerobertson.dev · 03/01/2025

@kokev.in in general, we’ve found the YouTube autogenerated transcripts to be pretty horrible. One of the reasons we built www.scribesocial.ai Best in quality transcription models and we do all the heavy lifting to take any social URL and get LLM ready transcription markdown and insights back.