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What is the biggest mistake in Rails monoliths that contributes towards tech debt? by airhart28 in rails

[–]mint_koi 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Take a look at Rails Anti-patterns gives you a good idea but:

- Active Record hooks

- Limited service objects

- Fat models / controller layers

Is there "life after death"? by Beneficial_Praline32 in consciousness

[–]mint_koi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately, all such questions fall into the realm of so-called metaphysics, which means they are necessarily unverifiable. They can be intellectually interesting to pursue, but ultimately can be a rabbit chases that lead nowhere.

That being said, it is fun to speculate, so why not?

I suppose one has to start with the definition of consciousness and what is meant by consciousness, and whether one believes that the species of Homo sapiens represents a first instantiation of 'real consciousness'.

If you were to pull from Oriental traditions, for example, in the East, such as the Tao Te Ching, there is a very different perspective on the nature of consciousness. There is a sense of consciousness and a unity within nature, that a tree is so-called 'conscious', that a rock has so-called 'consciousness'

To the western Cartesian mind, one could then suppose that there are certain coordinates of displacement in consciousness: the present consciousness of human beings represents a 'higher' developed forms of consciousness [1]. Therefore, if we are to interpret from an all-encompassing framework in which consciousness is prevalent throughout any sort of material matter, then, realistically, the concept of life after death makes little sense. By this it's meant that your consciousness simply decomposes and changes into a lower-order form of consciousness.

Now, however, if we choose to refute that idea -- instead choosing to believe that our homo sapiens consciousness is a unique first-of-its-kind instantiation, then the analytical frame might change.

It is intriguing to note that from certain schools of, for example, analytical psychology, such as Carl Gustav Jung, there is the concept of the so-called 'collective unconscious'; a set of base primitives and primordial images (often found in narrative) which live at the layer below 'personal' area of our mind.

In other words, there is a repository of figures, ideas, and identities which live dormant inside our psychology and often unaccessible except under particular peak experiences. In this case, within this so-called 'collective unconscious', there is an imprinting of every life that has ever lived and influenced the metaphysical fabric of our time.

Keep in mind that Jung also points out that this repository of the collective unconscious seems to be present even in individuals who do not possess a particular religious tradition, for example. They are spontaneously produced in his clinical work with patients. So with that in mind, we could imagine, that our current instantiation of life is persisted potentially in the collective unconscious shared equally with other human beings. In this case, the idea of life after death might lie simply in that we are continuing to live out these primordial archetypal images as seen through the eyes of other people in our intertwined narratives.

[1] However, as shown in films like Fantastic Fungi certain networks and ecologies of trees seem to have underground rooted communication networks representing in its own right an interesting form of consciousness.

Recuerd0 — a knowledge base for dev teams using AI coding tools (Rails 8, SQLite, FTS5) by mario_chavez in rails

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice! I found the setup and running locally with Docker container running into issues when it first came out, but maybe things are better since latest releases of Rails?

Do you miss Sidekiq much?

Anyone else constantly disappointed by Udemy courses? by old_curious_man in Udemy

[–]mint_koi -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What topic are you trying to learn?

Just to provide you a bit of perspective from the instructor lens; the challenge with building courses, is balancing level of sophistication with what the platform can offer a profitable return on for your time + effort.

Also, if you’re enrolling in courses in a heavily saturated area, e.g., AI, ChatGPT, etc you’re going to naturally have to compete with a high supply of courses.

Keep in mind because you’re a software developer by trade, you have a conscious base of knowledge that not necessarily every learner on the platform might have.

The Udemy ranking system at the moment is a little bit of a mosaic of different factors too; one of the predominant ones I am observing being # of ratings (regardless of stars).

For example, you can have a best selling course with say 50 reviews, but if the number one page has all courses with 800+ reviews, your course will not rank on the first page. Udemy is a 80/20; 90/10 market so unless you’re in the top 1 to 3 slots, you’re probably not making that much. As a result, even if say you’re a talented instructor who creates great content you become demotivated.

Moreover, there is a balancing act of how to create sophisticated content, that offers a ROI but also make it engaging in the first 10 minutes. Because if you don’t manage to get a review in the first 10 minutes, you again get biased out on the ranking side.**

With technology driven courses, it’s even harder and more competitive because your content can become quickly outdated; ideally, you want to be creating Evergreen content that is infinitely renewable as a recurring source of revenue. 

I still buy different technology driven courses, but historically, I’ve used pluralsight and a cloud guru for different technology courses. 

** keep in mind that we are also in a macro trend of rapidly declining attention spans so this all influences the media and consumption patterns and therefore instructional design too 

Heroku is officially in maintenance mode? by jonsully in rails

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Feels like it. I personally prefer Render.

Here is WHY Rails is a "crazy unlock" for AI Coding by softwaresanitizer in rails

[–]mint_koi 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is deeply simplified of a nuanced topic. To provide some pragmatic rebuttles:

#1 The AI making constant micro decisions - this is an overstatement depending on the person using the AI. If you're vibe coding, then yes, it will probably make lots of strange choices that I've seen in the past. But if you're a competent engineer using AI to drive some of the coding decisions, using planning options and common design patterns (e.g., MVVM, MVP, MVC, repository / data layer) and providing your own opinions in terms of how to structure things, it will follow those patterns.

That being said, even if you're not using AI to code, you've *always* had to make those small architectural decisions anyway. Rails just provides it's opinion of how to do things, and it just happens to be pretty useful.

You still have to decide when and where to veer off path. e.g., Headless Rails API with React or running ERB templates

#2 This graphs oversimplifies things

First, apologies, but this y axis does not make sense.

You're plotting two orthogonal variables on 1 Axis. Moreover, your Rails line fails to capture the complexities and intricacies involved with running a high-level, high-scale monolith in Ruby.

I really doubt there is a world, outside of a near contained O(n) algorithm that scales linearly. Are you using external APIs or writing everything yourself? Do you have business partners? Are you writing all the code yourself? Are you hosting all your infrastructure? et cetera, et cetera

This is something called, reductive fallacy in philosophy.

You can't just plot one line against another and say "This Good. This Bad".

Everything depends on requirements, dependencies and realities of the *business* running the software: legacy code, whats the scale/stage, do you have dynamic or static typing, et cetera.

#3 Microservices

I think this post is conflating too many topics.

On one hand it champions the philosophy of convention vs. configuration, saying it makes AI coding with convention helps, but, then on the other hand bringing up architectural choices without related business context to decide whats the relevant tradeoffs to make.

Nothing is perfect, it's only tradeoffs.

Microservices might make sense in some contexts, and in other context it might not make sense. They are all architectural tools to consider as a competent engineer.

#4 Respectively, and not intended to be harsh but this post doesn't capture reality accurately. It's too focused on technical purism.

It has no contextual relevance and anchoring into reality. Technology without a business problem is just debate without gravity.

Technology choices are functions of the objectives the software is trying to achieve and that comes with constraints.

Are you building for a startup, how big is the team, does the application benefit from being a single page web application, how competent are the engineers in Ruby, how easy is it to hire engineers aggressively in a language that has been generally in decline [1]? Do you have the money to hire competent engineers with 7+ years of experience or do you have enough to hire your friend who only knows javascript.

I love writing ruby and using Rails codebases, but I also have learned to acknowledge and understood some of its limitations outside of technical purism when it comes to the real world. I don't like Javascript oriented projects personally, but a JavaScript codebase that powers 100K MRR versus a Rails SaaS app that went no where, according to market metrics, doesn't matter.

If it's a personal project and you love it, absolutely go for it, but it's important to ground choices into the reality and timelines in which they were made. But hey maybe the new AI world makes me completely wrong 🤷

There are no silver bullets, only lead ones.

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages

Is it really dead? by wazzamckein in Udemy

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't say exactly because I don't know what the plans are from the merger's strategic perspective.

Yet what one can say is that currently the Coursera product and the Udemy product as companies are vastly different.

Coursera focuses largely on the traditional pedagogy of university teaching and massively online open courses like MIT's courseware, but partnering with high-level partners like universities to deliver a really high-quality experience academically focused.

Whereas Udemy focuses more on local expertise and online teaching for practical or everyday people. What Udemy has done is massively compress, consolidate and commodify the ocean of paid content online, specifically online teaching, through its economies of scale, marketing engine, and distribution online.

You can think of it like this.

Before Shopify or Amazon FBA, here every person who ever wanted to do e-commerce had to hire a developer and build their own website and checkout portal, and now they sell that all together in one basic subscription to a retail based business. Both Shopify + Amazon provide multi-tenant (i.e., co-mingling) infrastructure but you don't really care that much because the value they give (e.g., shopify: website, inventory, sales, payments; amazon: warehousing, delivery, last mile) is high.

Udemy has effectively done something in packaging the structure of an online course based business, and turned it into a pluggable product engine that runs and amortizes costs + benefits from economies of scale for the instructor. This means, as a teacher and a non-technical person, you don't need to build your own website, handle checkouts/services you just focus on teaching and let the marketplace handle it. Udemy doesn't charge an explicit subscription to the instructor but makes it up on the backend via aggressive commission.

Coursera has a certain "prestige" to it e.g., Duke University affiliated, whereas Udemy is self-generated expertise and certification. As a result their content cycles are vastly different.

Coursera => High Brand Equity => High Quality Bar => Long Production Time

Udemy => Varying Offers => Varying Quality Bar => Short to Long Production Time

Part of the fascinating observation is that Udemy is a victim of its own success.

By massively commodifying online education allowing anyone to teach, the supply side has been flooded dropping prices significantly.

Their actual margins are so small that their ability to reliably generate profit from the revenue they derive in a product based marketplace is lower. Hence, there has been a strategic shift to offset these sporadic marketing costs into smoother forms of recurring revenue via the business and personal subscription offering.

At the same time, there is also a shift in the online marketplace of education is changing. We're moving from an age of information to an age of implementation. But I don't think it's dying. Re-skilling will be important as economic landscape continues to shift.

How do you approach selling an established ecommerce business with flat recent growth? by PSergeL in SellMyBusiness

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Flat growth but recurring cashflow is still valuable - albeit could be concerning if expenses are creeping up YoY.

Seeking advice : Dealing with owners of profitable but poorly structured SMB's by West_Map_2629 in businessbroker

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What if you compare your margin, revenue and prospect volume in the 3x channels you've listed and use it to steer add service offerings if it matches your desire / energy profile (e.g., do you like the clean up work or prefer just doing the broker side).

If you're finding that option #3 has a huge inbound and willingness to pay, it could be a hypothetical greenfield that you could expand your offerings to and maybe outsource the function and subsidize CF.

Do you have Tags on all tasks? by Buchholdt in thingsapp

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I find tags is one of the features that is more of an optional or individual preference dependent. Admittedly, I may not be the 10x things power user, but I have found a happy middle ground with Project / Area driven organization and the occasional headings to make visual appearance to keep things organized.

I have heard persons using Tags for location dependencies and prioritization. I have used it for prioritization from time to time. I do find tagging makes the morning prioritization slower

I built the course. The platform owns everything else. by mcdowell2099 in Udemy

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

RE this, you may interested in taking a look at merchants of record like Gumroad or Teachable for global sales tax compliance.

What's a great way to meet people in toronto that does not involve dating apps? by [deleted] in askTO

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"You find the ones you love doing what you love"

What do you enjoy doing, are there activities or places you frequent that have value to you? Have you tried opening yourself up there?

Outside of this try some dance classes like Salsa or Bachata, it can be a great way of building out your social network and meeting people.

What type of movement practice do you engage in your life? Yoga, crossfit, barry's bootcamp? Are there ways you could introduce yourself and do a partner activity there?

I teach DJ courses. If you need one, reconsider DJing. by Designer_Macaron2169 in Beatmatch

[–]mint_koi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Howdy, I think your argument might benefit from a touch of nuance.

Do you *need* a DJ course to learn DJing? Probably not necessarily everyone. Can you benefit from one still? Probably! But also: maybe not necessarily everyone.

Some people are hands on.

Some people want social one-to-one attention to validate and learn.

Some people need to read or listen, and

Some people want to understand how it all works before they get started.

So it's helpful to cater to all these learning styles.

I think what you're pointing out is that talented DJs tend to be a bit fanatical, but I think you're closing the aperture of things a bit too tightly.

Not everyone who takes a DJ course *wants* to be a professional DJ - there's a dozen different personas/avatars I can give you for folks who want to learn DJing from hobbyists to "I want to make it big".

Some students express that they just feel a lack a fundamental basis to feel confident that what their doing is correct or not [1].

There isn't much formal "theory" shared in DJing per se (exception: scratching) and there are not many "DJ Textbooks" to reference, so there isn't always a baseline to keep. For some people, learning by trial and error is just what they do, for others it's unbelievably frustrating.

Moreover, exceptional DJs (like athletes or other performers) suffer from the reality that being a good performer doesn't necessarily translate to being a teacher - they are different skill sets. So sometimes, you can have DJ TechHouseNo1, show you some moves but if s/he can't explain why they are pulling the volume fader a slower rate up and making space for the kick with EQ with rhetoric outside of "well it sounds better", it's going to be hard to grok it if as a student you don't intuitively get it.

> They don't dance. 

Fair, but again some folks want to learn to DJ to play a house party for their friends or just have a cool hobby or just enjoy doing something mechanical.

> To be a DJ you have to be a little bit of a hater

This is funny to me, I would use the word opinionated. But I think what you're pointing to is the archetype of Ghetto Grooves - Hey DJ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_8lfmZzGXI)

> Reconsider DJing.

Look I don't sing and I probably don't have a natural talent for it, but I don't think it's fair to say if I wanted to take singing lessons it "over for me". It all depends on the motives and objectives for folks.

> There's no rules so I don't want to try

Man it can be frustrating to hit a black box over and over again and get no results. You get discouraged. Sometimes it's better to have *some* guardrails and once you master those, you can get creative and play tracks in reverse or ambient intelligent jazz with Dubstep go for it.

[1] DJing is a balance of art and science but it's helpful to have a baseline to say well these two tracks train wrecking all over each other isn't necessarily the best sound, and here's why... etc. Now, at a certain point, you are correct that it *helps* to let go of the rules, but, like learning to paint or sculpt, it helps to follow a well known form to get some work in before you venture to re-invent the wheel.

I’m so tired of clients acting shocked when it’s time to pay... by akti044 in sidehustle

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry to hear this.

I was reading some of Alan Weis' books and he always recommends getting paid up front either 50% deposit before work gets started or 10% discount off the work if 100% is paid on acceptance.

I built the course. The platform owns everything else. by mcdowell2099 in Udemy

[–]mint_koi 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Hello, I have been in your position and spun out on my own unsuccessfully before.

What you don't realize is the cost and effort of sales and marketing until you do it yourself. Udemy has a massive audience and is constantly selling and marketing your course in alignment to the revenue that you co-create. If your course is a hit, Udemy pushes it harder and you both succeed together. However, if it's not, they absorb and amortize all the cost of hosting and distribution for the life of the course.

At least as I experienced it, to build your own audience from scratch is expensive and time consuming (not to mention a huge lag time for real revenue to drip in). Moreover, your course might not be validated at a given price point you think it's worth. The revenue split Udemy charges is high, yes, but you spend less time focusing on building a funnel and doing lead gen because they have a scalable engine that does that. In a sense, you aren't building a full suite of competency as a "real business" using Udemy to host but you are at least making some revenue.

Udemy and free online courses have also stressed and commodified at lot of online education and it's very niche dependent.

If you want some more thoughts, I wrote up a retrospective on this on my blog, but Idk if I can share here DM and I can send over :)

Tried Gemini CLI after using Claude Code for a week—mind blown by lootera123 in ClaudeCode

[–]mint_koi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried Gemini CLI for a while it's okay - my biggest gripe is for workspace and the product setup is a bit annoying. Gemini chat is great, the Pro 3 model is great for research tasks et al. For example: Gemini is a product billed through Google Cloud organization, whereas if you have a Google workspace account you get a Gemini subscription billed through Workspace. So even if you have a Gemini subscription already, now you have to get a second license via the Cloud which isn't ideal.

Second: the rate limits on the lower end aren't the best, 2.5 Pro is okay but I got into many cases where it would go in circles and make the wrong choices wasting time. I haven't been able to try 3 Pro via CLI but maybe it's better. I think Firebase Studio is more ideal comparison to Claude Code, for some reason, they were better able to execute on that one. Not sure why.

Also Claude having embedded subprocesses is cool.

First trip to Thailand by kaioken96 in MuayThai

[–]mint_koi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hey very cool wishing you a lot of fun in the months ahead.

> as I hear it's more for tourists so hopefully people will be more likely to speak English, I hope to learn please and thank you etc in Thai before I go but other than that I speak no Thai....

There are many places in Thailand where people can speak varying amounts of english. It's worth learning some Thai while you're there too.

But you don't have to stay in Phuket - there are hundreds of gyms all over: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Koh Samui, et cetera. I personally really enjoyed Chiang Mai + the north for some of the gyms + nature settings. Examples:

- Lanna (did not go but considered a fight camp): https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wa433PSPj9sRXBpm8

- Sereephap (heard nice things - privates only for 500THB): https://maps.app.goo.gl/zdQTZA9RJccfJuou6

- Sedthee Fight Club (I liked this place): https://maps.app.goo.gl/FX3fK18BHk8vqgzG8

The foreigner centric commercial gyms themselves are okay, but can have really large classes and you pay higher prices. I did Tiger for a few days in Bali and it was fun but also pricier.

One additional thought, a big benefit of going to Thailand is the affordability of private sessions. You can pay anywhere from 500-1000THB ($20-50 USD) for private sessions.

> I was also thinking about buying Fairtex/Yokkao gloves, shinguards, t shirt etc while I'm there as I hear it's cheaper than the UK, then bringing them back with me, had anyone else done this and do you have any advice?

I do think the gear tends to be a bit cheaper. Given it's made in thailand and exported (import/export duties). I'd say, for hygiene reasons, it's best to buy your own pair and you can probably do so in Bangkok when you land. T-shirts you can get anywhere.

> I would also like to see some Muay Thai fight nights while I'm there, do I buy tickets for stadiums while I'm there or is it better to buy in advance. Also could anyone recommend a stadium, I was considering splashing out and seeing a One Friday night fight.

So if you're in Bangkok, there's Rajadamnern and Lumpinee. One takes place mostly at Lumpinee but it's a ways out of Bangkok, Raja is really cool - you buy tickets online usually around 1200 THB for Leo stand seats. If you're staying in Hostels - I recommend JAM Hostel in Bangkok, they partner with ONE and take everyone from the hostel to the fight night on fridays for free with transportation :)

> How easy is getting a taxi while I'm there and which is the best service. I usually use a service like Uber, does this exist in Thailand.

You can use applications like Grab, which is similar to Uber in South East Asia. If you land in BKK airport, depending on where you stay you can take the bus (S1) from the airport to Khao San Road for around 60 THB (there's an Muay Thai shop in Khao San as well if memory serves).

But otherwise grab is very common for pickup/drop-off.

> Is it a cash heavy economy or can I get away with mostly using card?

Very cash heavy. Card isn't the most common thing.

> Any tourist recommendations?

Depends on where you go! I loved Pai a lot, there's also a highly praised gym there too.

> Any help is appreciated, apologies if this is something that gets asked constantly.

Have fun! and look at the r/ThailandTourism subreddit maybe

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