Ostap Brehin

Ostap Brehin

@ostapbrehin.com

21 y.o indie hacker from Ukraine. Working on a SaaS product. Curious about programming, DevOps and music production.

168 followers425 following223 posts

Ostap Brehin reposted

Any time you ship anything -- design, website, code -- others will see it, and some will copy it. The better your ideas, the more likely they'll be copied. It’s the cost of doing great work. So don’t get worked up about it. Just do more great work, and you’ll win.

TIL: Amazon Comprehend flags the iPhone apostrophe character, marking as the message as offensive even if it isn't. Be sure to replace all your special unicode characters to normal ones on the server.

I love servers. Infinite scalability and multi-regional setup is not needed until you hit the scale. And of course any setup would need backups.

Turns out low confidence can be solved by sharing experiences with another person who's on a similar path, and listening to a lot of music throughout the day.

IMO Sidebars are overrated. I now find it easier to start building web products with just a top menu 🙂 Usually in the beginning there aren't as many options to have the need for a sidebar, it'd feel clumsy.

Huh. #RubyOnRails is unable to start a session unless you write something to it? But what if I need an anonymous user id via `session.id`? A bit strange IMO. Compare this to Laravel, where you can get an empty session whenever you need it. Sounds like a contribution opportunity.

Seems that using that out-of-box session ID might actually not be a good thing. I shall generate my own and put it as a session key 🫡

If you're wondering why the web page fonts look so pixalated / not sharp, this can be solved via .antialised in Tailwind, or these CSS properties: -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; Night and day difference with Inter. #web #tailwind #css

Learning to sell is more important than programming. Now how do I write that convincing landing page copy... Any materials/book recommendations?

Self-host anything for 1$/mo: @scaleway.com, a French cloud provider has a special server instance - STARDUST1-S (1GB of RAM & 1VCPU). Normally, it would cost about $5/mo, but if you remove the "Public IPv4" and keep the "Public IPv6" option - it goes down to $1/mo. #hosting #servers

What can this instance be used for? You decide - Moltbot/Clawdbot, N8N, Rails/Laravel SaaS, Ghost blog. The only caveat with unchecking ipv4, is that if you're hosting sites - put them under Cloudflare/BunnyCDN to ensure people without ipv6 support can still connect.

If you're not tech-savvy, Claude or other AI agents can easilly configure the instance for you. I like to throw in SQLite with Litestream for easy backups.

Spent a few days checking out Hotwire to see what it's about, but came to conclusion that Inertia.js is still the best option for modern, highly interactive user interfaces. Stimulus and server-side templates just won't do it for me.

I no longer get why someone would avoid modern JavaScript. It feels so wonderful having functional components that take props and always produce the same desired outcomes. The bundle size can be slimmer thanks to @preactjs.com

With Inertia.js, all the complexity is gone too. It's just server-rendered data and pages, forms, links. Practically no state to manage, unless you actually need it. I say it's even simpler than Hotwire, because we're thinking components and not frames or streams. 🧠

TIL there's now a GitHub Copilot CLI, which is mostly like Claude Code. For 10$ it lets you use Opus 4.5 which is pretty neat. They call it "premium requests".

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What’s the way forward? Only to pick one project, focus on it, and start doing marketing experiments. Otherwise, it's a waste of time, even if sometimes fun.

Why am I sharing this? Primarily for accountability - to avoid making the same mistake later. I guess comment if you've ever experienced this "shiny new project" syndrome 🙂

Folks who manage/have servers: surely you don't only store ssh key(s) on your main laptop in ~/.ssh? You'd at least make a backup somewhere like Bitwarden or 1Password? Curious about what your server access methods look like. #servers #cubersecurity #ssh #backups

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Upd: I guess starting small is fine - backup ssh keys and have `unattended-upgrades` on debian servers to ensure ssh version is always up-to-date from security perspective.

Folks who manage/have servers: surely you don't only store ssh key(s) on your main laptop in ~/.ssh? You'd at least make a backup somewhere like Bitwarden or 1Password? Curious about what your server access methods look like. #servers #cubersecurity #ssh #backups

I also saw someone use @tailscale.com as a way of accessing their servers and closing down SSH for "improved" security. But for now - I'm sceptical: what if Tailscale gets hacked or goes out of business? Why'd someone rely on a third party for access?

Does Phoenix LiveView lose in-progress uploads on rolling deploys? Let's find out! Will reply with an answer shortly after testing. #elixirlang #myelixirstatus

How can folks read existing OOP Ruby code these days? Everything feels so "untyped": I look at the code and don't know what class it's using. I can only guess purely on the property name. It is the complete opposite of PHP, where we can clearly see what each thing is.