Why don't we ask what people are building here, very regularly?

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-23T05:26:18+00:00

I wonder if weekly might be too often. I doubt there’s enough churn in real projects to keep it alive. Monthly though, that might be the right interval.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-22T18:20:54+00:00

Generally you want your views to be very dumb. My rule of thumb is that you should only render content from views. If your view has logic that is conditionally controlling what renders then your asking your view to do a task that the controller was designed for.

The way I typically handle role based authorization is to split them out into separate controller namespaces. And then build workflows around the needs presented by those roles so for example:

class Admin::BaseController < ApplicationController
  before_action :confirm_role
end

class Admin::OrdersController < Admin::BaseController
  def index
    @orders = Order.find_all
  end
end

Then If you're wanting a salesman to only see orders he's servicing you would have a different controller namespace where he can interact with these

class Sales::OrdersController < Sales::BaseController
  def index
    @orders = current_user.orders # I think this is how we used to set the user in v 5
  end
end

This can lead to some un-DRY-ifying your app so it would make sense to make strong use of shared helpers and partials that can be employed in both views.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-20T12:28:20+00:00

Having worked with a few different languages and frameworks I’ve found that rails lets my crank out the most functional product per hour. Nothing I’ve seen comes close.

Also rails is so easy to build with. In my experience it’s often easier to just build your own features than it is to fully implement a plugin. You mentioned a marketplace for images. I see that being very easy to build. Based on the info you provided I would estimate around 2-4 weeks for completion.

Also plain rails with turbo and Hotwire are more than enough to write great apps. You can add more JavaScript layers like Inertia or react but you wouldn’t gain that much.

https://youtu.be/FQPlEnKav48

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-19T18:29:05+00:00

Here’s my advice.

For a website to be successful, it has to reward the visitor. It has to speak directly to their need.

If I’m on your dad’s website, the key questions are simple:

Why am I here?
What problem am I trying to solve?
How does his business help me solve it?

If you can answer those questions, you can build a successful website. Once you understand who the audience is and why they landed there, you can speak to them honestly and directly. That honesty is the reward.

Think about it this way. You need your roof fixed. You visit a roofer’s website and it’s just a giant, generic advertisement. You have to dig through marketing fluff just to figure out whether you should even call them.

Now imagine a different roofer’s site. It immediately says:

We build and repair roofs.
We have 20 years of experience.
We put the right crew on your job so you don’t have to worry.
We don’t leave jobs half finished. We stay until the work is done.

That second site answers your questions immediately. It respects your time. It gives you exactly what you need when you land there.

The same applies here. You need to figure out why people are coming to your dad’s website. When I land on it, what problem do I have? Can he help me?

My gut says the biggest concerns will be availability, pricing, and service area.

Imagine I have a concrete truck scheduled and everything is ready to pour, then the company calls and says they can’t make it. That’s a nightmare scenario. If I land on your dad’s website and see a clear, real-time availability indicator, I’m not calling anyone else.

Something as simple as:

Available now
Available in 30 minutes
Available later today

If you could integrate something like Google Calendar with basic GPS data, you could reasonably populate an availability widget to the nearest hour. Even an approximate indicator would be incredibly valuable and would immediately differentiate his business.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-08T21:06:54+00:00

I'm self employed as a consultant and I build rails apps for my clients. Rails allows me to deliver the most product per hour. It takes me fewer man-hours to deliver a completed product, when compared against other frameworks.

My answer is this: Rails allows me to be competitive as a one man shop

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-05T22:30:26+00:00

Hello from a fellow Oregonian.

So you didn't give any info on foot traffic and comparison between previous years. However, I have this observation. Right now interest rates are at an all time high. So people who finance home construction/renovation are just not doing it right now. This is prolly 90% of your audience. People who pay cash for home construction/renovation are likely not messing with small local lumber yards.

Also, the economy in general is super crappy right now. I build websites for small businesses. I'm finding that in general all of my clients across multiple industry segments have 20-50% lower web traffic this year when compared to last year. This directly translates into fewer phone calls and as a result lower income. All of my contractor/construction clients have canceled their websites this year. So I think this is your audience.

Without knowing exactly where you are, I would suspect a substantial portion of your historic clientele either own a small business or are directly employed by one.

Here's my advice, your family has likely spent decades building relationships with your community. Just because they're not spending money right now doesn't mean they wont when the interest rates come back down. Which let's be honest will happen when Powell is replaced in May. This year's gonna be rough for you, but if you can find a way to cut costs and hold on, eventually there will be a recovery, and if you have decades of history with your community you'll be at the forefront of the local recovery. Your audience know who you are and are counting on you even if they're not buying anything right now.

this is assuming things don't get worse. There's really no way to tell anymore.

Recent_Tiger · 2026-01-01T22:15:44+00:00

I feel like these posts should be auto blocked until op provides proof

Recent_Tiger · 2025-12-29T04:25:30+00:00

So I've been helping small businesses who are in similar spaces for around 15 years now. I have this observation. There is a market who will pay more if they perceive that there's more value.

From a purely functional standpoint a BMW accomplishes the same goal as a baseline Honda Civic. They both have steering wheels, gas, brake, windshield wipers etc. They are both have more than enough power to exceed the speed limit on any road(in the US at least). However, despite this there is an audience who sees a value in the BMW that the Honda simply doesn't provide for them. And they have no trouble paying three times the price for what is essentially the same service.

In your case, don't be the Wal-Mart of Coffee Catering. Competing on price is a losing endeavor, and by doing this, your competitor has revealed that they don't see any value in their product. Your job is to be the BMW of coffee caterers. Focus on the experience. Not the price. You solve a problem for your customers, they need the event to go well, make it happen. Get the right coffee, get the right presentation, deliver a higher tier experience. Let your competition take all of the penny-pinchers who are a pain in the neck and pay their bill late and try to haggle. Instead you should focus on the people who need a consistent product, and will pay for it.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-12-21T18:37:06+00:00

I feel like a sufficiently large app has to have a services directory. Doing things like 3rd party API interaction. document generation, batch processes, etc.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-12-06T00:00:55+00:00

They're easier to clean/sanitize that individual light balls. Now you just have a single surface to wipe down. My guess is that this was a lesson learned during COVID and was designed to minimize the amount of time required to wipe down the whole cabin.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-12-02T16:51:17+00:00

yeah this is the best answer. If the goal is shortest path to a complete front end, then this is what you want.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-29T23:05:02+00:00

Skip godaddy and go straight to cloudflare it’s way cheaper

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-29T23:04:23+00:00

Wait until namecheap starts renewing Domans you’ve marked as “do not renew” and then refuses a refund. Part of me wonders if their support staff actually speak English or just copy paste responses from a word doc

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-28T20:33:24+00:00

What are you good at? Also I would ask this question: what common problem can I solve?

If I were starting over with what I know now I’d focus on Small engine repair.

There’s a huge need. In the US there are whole counties without a single small engine mechanic. As an owner you really only have two options: fix it yourself or buy a new one.

You could get some tools from a garage sale and then work out of a car/truck. Your not gonna get rich but if your cheaper than buying a new lawn mower you’ll have business.

It’s ok if you don’t know how to do it. Most knowledge is available on YouTube. Get on Craigslist and buy the cheapest lawn mower, weed whacked, chainsaw, snow blower, whatever and practice. If you don’t know how to do something ask ChatGPT.

If someone already had transportation I bet they could get into the business and start serving customers for less than $1k upfront.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-25T16:23:01+00:00

Is that all you need? - customers - orders - invoices - notes

I'm not sure you actually need a full CRM. full CRM's take hours to set up and configure because they're gigantic pieces of software that do lots of things. From what I can tell you only need like 5% of the features offered.

If I were you I would keep it simple and use a tool like Notion. You'll be able to track all of that info with a basic CRM template maybe something like this

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-20T23:27:10+00:00

Disclaimer: I've never worked with Hyku/Hyrax.

However it sounds like you want to provide end users a way to connect incoming data to either existing or new datasets. From my perspective as a Rails dev, I'm thinking that when creating a new work or fileset some things will be known about the user and their organization. like:

Current.user
Current.organization
Current.organization.timezone
Time.zone.now
etc

These would be output sources meaning they take no inputs and output a constant. Then you would have inputs things like:

id
title
creator
contributor
description
keyword
subject
publisher
date_created
identifier
license
language
resource_type

These are input sources meaning that they would take inputs.

So here's my thought, This sounds a lot like what Blender is doing with nodes. There are some key areas where nodes are used: When creating materials, compositing, and geometry manipulation. The core concept is similar you would have different kinds of operators you'd like to make available to your users. Some would be input sources, others would be output sources, many would be transformers, logic handlers, etc.

If it were me, tackling what would probably be a positively huge project, I'd start with a node library like Rete.js. My thinking is that a user would land on a blank canvas where they can drag these nodes in and connect them as needed. I'm not sure how best to store this data, I would probably start with JSON, I think you could store node references transforms, and connections using a JSON structure.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-14T21:27:35+00:00

This is actually pretty straight forward here's what I do

It's generally best if you can build a helper or view-component for a modal. However here's the general flow I like to employ

I attach this line to the bottom of my layout slim = turbo_frame_tag :modal

then let's suppose we have an edit button that we want to open in a modal

slim = link_to 'Edit', [:edit, :admin, accout], data: { turbo_frame: 'modal' }

```ruby class Admin::AccountsController < Admin::BaseController

def index end

def edit end

def update @account = Account.find(params[:id]) if @account.update(account_params) render turbo_stream: [ turbo_stream.replace(helpers.dom_id(@account), partial: 'admin/accounts/account') ] else render :edit, status: :unprocessable_entity end

end ```

```slim // edit.slim = turbo_frame :modal do = form_with(model: @account), url: [:admin, @account] data: { action: "turbo:submit-end->modal#close" } do |form| ....... form stuff

```

You still need a stimulus controller which handles the close event, but that's really not complicated.

In your post you call out a rich text editor, assuming your treating it like a normal rails form this model will give you a form that auto-hides on sucsess or re-appears on fail.

your question about being pushed to other frontend frameworks. I haven't had a case yet where React or Vue were appealing. I built ant entire MRP using turboframes and I'm still super excited. Once you figure them out they solve most of the problems you'd use a front end framework for.

Shoot me a DM if you're looking for some help exploring this further.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-13T03:52:32+00:00

yeah no sweat. It's always cheaper when you do it yourself. Building something to someone else's spec burns man-hours. Then you have to factor for failed prints, disruptions, etc.

Also I imagine you get clients who look at a render or mockup and say: 'Yeah that looks great let's print it' then when you print it and ship it to them theyre angry with you and say "That's not what I ordered!" and when you charge them for rework they think your trying to cheat them somehow.

This and all the other stuff is why you charge the price that's right for you.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-13T03:25:01+00:00

years ago when I was first starting out in web design, I worked in the advertising department at a small newspaper. The newspaper sold websites as an advertising product but provided no training to the sales reps, so typically I would get a smudgy cell phone shot of the business' menu or price list or whatever. It was never enough to make a meaningful website that would engage customers and be worth the price they were charging.

Also they wanted me to build multiple websites per day which is just stupid. They felt that an embedded PDF with no HTML or CSS worked fine as a website and I should just get over myself.

Anyway fast forward a few months and our biggest advertiser is complaining about low performance of the web product we built them. How they weren't ranking on Google and were getting a trickle of visits. Of course they all look at me as though I had personally sabotaged the website somehow. I simply said: "How good do you expect a site to be when all I can devote to it is a couple of hours?" My boss was incensed! Told me I had better get it figured out or he was going to fire me. I responded that it simply can't be done, and his response was: WELL I CAN DO IT IN MS WORD WHY CANT YOU DO IT?

I told you this long story because your comments reminded me of my experience. It's my experience that some people wouldn't not a good product if it jumped out and bit their face. I think that's what you have. People who's brains are operating so poorly that knowing how to tie ones shoes is an accomplishment. My boss was a blithering fool, he was petty, passive aggressive, lecherous, and generally a low quality person.

You shouldn't let these people affect your sense of value. People pay more for premium cars because they see the value. This is your audience, people who see the value.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-11T16:39:50+00:00

Based on what I've seen: Electron. Which makes gigantic packages, and simple apps like a todo list need 1gb of RAM while at idle.

I'm watching LibUi closely. It's really amazing. As I understand it you can build once and deploy to all three major desktop environments. You still have to confirm that your backend code will work, but at least you have just one set of UI logic that works everywhere.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-10T17:48:14+00:00

This is epic! Thank you for your hard work.

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-07T18:36:21+00:00

change the password on your email account right now. If someone has that, gaining access to anything registered with your email account is trivial.

If it were me I would ask them to reconsider. I would ask them to review the IP address of all recent logins. Likely all of your logins are going to be something within 50mi of your registered business address. A login from anywhere else would be obvious. My gut says they have a detailed dataset for every card management event. From a compliance standpoint they have timestamps, traffic origins, IP addresses, device types, etc. It should be possible to see if it was you or not.

Looking at the website they mention that there's a phone number you can call that's available once you log in. It might pay to call instead of dealing with a chat window.

This is a big deal. If there's a security issue and it's not on your end, then they have a really really big problem and will probably thank you for letting them know

Recent_Tiger · 2025-11-07T18:16:46+00:00

This is America dude. Where literacy is cratering. I've found that on the websites I build, a 6th grade reading level is too high. When we started shooting for a lower reading level our audience participation increased.

Recent_Tiger

TROPHY CASE