iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 29/12/2025

Thank you to the 193 individual contributors from over 44 countries that helped us build @vendure.io in 2025! Let's collaborate again in 2026 💪 2025-wrapped.vendure.io

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 14/12/2025

Age 42, getting my kickflips back after 20 years Just repeat and repeat.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 23/11/2025

Landed 2 solid tre flips today, first time in like 20 years. Only got the fails on camera though 😭

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 21/11/2025

Checking out TanStack Start. Yeah sorry about the horrific thumbnail that's what happens when I give the guy total creative freedom 🤣 youtu.be/X_NnM72RN90?...

youtu.be

We are all excited about this framework

YouTube video by Vendure Headless Commerce Platform

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 24/10/2025

Got this feedback on our Discord this morning. Totally validates our thesis behind completely rebuilding our dashboard.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 17/08/2025

I'll be speaking there! You should come too!

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 17/08/2025

Every time I come back to Manchester it looks better

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 01/08/2025

If you delete the issue template I will find you

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 31/07/2025

Just got the last part of my mini pedal board. It's literally everything I need: octaver, Rat-style distortion, delay/reverb, looper/drum machine. With this combination I can do all music.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 31/07/2025

Last night at @viennajs.bsky.social: give a talk about dotfiles and key bindings and you are guaranteed to be swarmed by devs for the rest of the night 😂 Great talk by our new @vendure.io team member Housein 👏

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 25/07/2025

And overall the excitement is the far stronger feeling. Today I'll be building more of the new @vendure.io dashboard at 10-50x the speed of my younger self. 🚀

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 25/07/2025

It fills me with both dismay and excitement 😂 Dismay at the "lost" hours, days, weeks. Excitement at the realization that during that process I learned deep fundamentals that newcomers may now have little incentive or opportunity to master.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 25/07/2025

I think back to the hours of my life spent painfully trying to figure out how to make JavaScript work. Copy-pasting from random forum posts. This was even before Stack Overflow (RIP). Yes I'm that old. And I compare it to the velocity I now have using AI tooling.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 24/07/2025

6,666 commits over 7 years of building @vendure.io that's an average of 3-4 commits *every* work day for the past 7 years. Consistency. Just show up and get the work done.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 21/07/2025

The types flow instantly from your GraphQL document, right into your React code, with ZERO waiting on code generation. Shout out to @jovidecroock.com & @kitten.sh for gql.tada which powers the magic that you see here 🙏

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 21/07/2025

And with our new Dashboard, we're leveraging GraphQL to help you build custom UI with speed and productivity you won't find anywhere else. First post contains a clip of what it looks like to build a fully type-safe list view.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 21/07/2025

But after seven years, I'm still glad we chose GraphQL. The unmatched DX of Vendure would simply not be possible without it: - Type safety from backend to frontend - Extend any response with custom fields - Dynamic, type-safe sort & filter on all list queries

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 21/07/2025

Sometimes I hear that it was a mistake to build @vendure.io on top of GraphQL. "Too complex", "Can't be cached", "Poor performance", "It was all hype" Yes, every technology has its tradeoffs. I'm keenly aware. There *are* some aspects you need to be mindful of when working with GraphQL.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

Not explored that yet. We have much simpler requirements for the back end part.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

Yes, of course we did, what else?! github.com/vendure-ecom...

github.com

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

In every case, no matter how ambitious my requirement - Vite made it positively *intuitive* to implement. Bravo to @evanyou.me, @rich-harris.dev and the whole Vite team & community for producing this beautiful piece of software 👏

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

➔ Automatic type safety from GraphQL _without_ a codegen step ➔ Auto-generated list & detail view based on your GraphQL queries ➔ Dynamic components that adapt to the exact data types in your custom schema

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

In our case, we're using it to power our brand-new React-based dashboard. I've gone pretty deep building out some very cool Vite plugins that really make it feel magical to build UI extensions to your Vendure app.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

Look, I've been around a while & remember when we used to bundle with Grunt, then Gulp, then Webpack. So isn't Vite just an incremental take on what has gone before? No - Vite has something that makes it magical. An absolutely sublime plugin API that feel like you can build *anything* with it.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 18/07/2025

> @vite.dev is my new favourite thing. If you're a @vendure.io developer it's gonna become your new favourite thing too, very soon! I was vaguely aware that it was slowly taking over the frontend world - every framework seemed to use it for some reason.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 16/07/2025

I don't always get this perfectly right, still. But I can promise you that for Vendure developers I am fighting to bring simplicity to the often complex and over-engineered world of enterprise commerce.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 16/07/2025

It's all fun and games until, 6 months later, you need to debug something and proceed to spend 5 hours figuring out what the hell is even supposed to be happening here. This message is brought to you by 7 years of hard-won lessons building @vendure.io

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 16/07/2025

Could it have been a for loop? Could it? If it could have been a for loop, please write a for loop. This manifests in devops as things like ridiculously complex constellations of services and (gasp) microservices to power an app that could have run on a consumer pc.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 16/07/2025

But whenever you get the urge to bound over to your colleague to explain your incredibly clever solution, and get a pat on the head and a "good dev!"... "look, by using partial application and meta-programming we can dynamically construct a pipeline of operations that..."

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 16/07/2025

Every developer goes through that phase where they get drunk on their own mastery over complexity. On their own damn cleverness. I most definitely have been there! And yes, some problems contain *inherent* complexity.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 16/07/2025

There's one lesson that has taken me years to *really* learn in software development: Simplicity should be prized above all other things. Simple code. Simple logic. Simple dependencies. Simple deployments.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 04/07/2025

OMG what. The web dev stuff is cool and all but now you truly have my respect.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 04/07/2025

I love building stuff for developers. Here's what's coming in the new @vendure.io dashboard:

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Reposted by Michael Bromley

Miro @meeroslav.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

“This is how big the pile of money is I got from my dad to work on open source” 😂

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Reposted by Michael Bromley

HalfStack @halfstackconf.bsky.social · 23/06/2025

𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝𝐬 𝐚 𝐛𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞. @michlbrmly.dev reminded us at HalfStack Vienna that “it depends” is a valid answer ✌️ Watch his talk: youtu.be/WBpzS36-eIc Submit your CfP for Vienna 2025! 🔗 halfstackconf.com/vienna #TechWithoutTribalism #HalfStackEvents

youtu.be

You Aren't Gonna Need It...Until You Are?

YouTube video by HalfStack Events

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 20/06/2025

New weekly record for npm downloads this week for @vendure.io

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 19/06/2025

This is what it looks like when an abandoned open source project comes back to life

github contribution chart showing long period of inactivity, with lots of recent activity.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 13/06/2025

Extremely annoying LLM behaviour

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 11/06/2025

I'm excited to speak at the upcoming @viennajs.bsky.social meetup alongside @tkdodo.eu I'll be talking about life as a full-time OSS maintainer. Anything you wanna know about? viennajs.org/en/meetup/vi...

viennajs.org

ViennaJS June 2025

Everybody is welcome & feel free to share this invitation!

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 07/06/2025

Had a few "ooh I felt something new there" in the back area today, but nothing too bad 😂 This is a place called Jumpin Warrior in Vienna.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 07/06/2025

First back flip landed at age 41. How much harder is it to land one on flat ground?

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 12/05/2025

I like NestJS - which can work with both express or fastify.

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 12/05/2025

Achievement unlocked: I actually started a conversation with a stranger in Mandarin while waiting with my kids at a doctors office. It was very, very basic but we managed to make it work 😂

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 07/05/2025

9yo made a working sniper rifle from Lego

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 28/04/2025

Just sat next to some teenage girls who were chatting in German and referring to each other as "bro". Is that a thing now?

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Michael Bromley @michlbrmly.dev · 26/04/2025

Some premium presentation on tonight's glazed belly pork 😋

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