Jack Ellis

@JackEllis

Software engineer. Building usefathom.com since 2019. Sharing all the technical details from behind the scenes.

Canada / UK

usefathom.com

Joined May 2008

Pinned
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Jul 13
I’ve spent nearly seven years documenting how we built Fathom: outages, DDoS attacks, migrations, $100k AWS savings, my cofounder’s retirement, and a divorce. I write transparently because I want other people to learn from my mistakes. These 18 posts tell the story:
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 11
PSA: Don't use a specialized database for a cache workload. Even if you have 400GB of free memory, don't do it.
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 11
@robwalling The episode you did with Julien was great, thank you. I don't always get time to listen to the pod but appreciated how "to the point" with actionable info this was. Keep up the great work sir!
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 11
The world is full of companies that don't care about you. You can look for early warning signs (crazy amounts of external funding, IPO or acquisition chasing) but even the bootstrapped ones can sell you out to private equity. RIP to the time tracking OG.
Mike Martin
@MikeMartin604
Aug 8
This is actually criminal. I’ve used @harvest for my freelance business for 13 years and now my Solo plan ($211/yr) is about to auto-renew as an Enterprise plan ($2547/yr).
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 10
You can’t label a country based solely on one metric. New Orleans and other places bring US homicide rate up tremendously. But that doesn’t mean all of the US is unsafe. Same with UK, you have bad and poor areas (Blackpool, Luton, etc.) but that doesn’t make all of the UK poor.
DHH
@dhh
Aug 8
The europoor meme just got some devastating statistical backing. The UK seems uniquely fucked. Just sad.