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The Hetzner box that I run multiple production apps (including place card me) on is so cheap they just decided not to bill me this month. 🤯

Any time you solve a problem with more than ten browser tabs open, you should be obligated to write up the answer so other people can find it in the future.

Django is arguably the startup tech world's best-kept secret. Here's why you don't hear about it: 1. The personality of the community is to not be self-promotional. This is probably related to it being community-led, not run by a celebrity like rails or Laravel, or a company like ~everything in JavaScript. 2. Many Django people moved to Mastodon in the fallout of the Elon purchase, moreso than for other frameworks, due to some combination of politics and nerdiness. 3. It moves slowly. In part, because it is already so good at most things. 4. The lack of opinions about front end makes it harder for beginners to make flashy demos quickly. 5. Most people building on Django are too busy shipping. In a way, Django's (lack of) hype is a victim of many of its best qualities. It is mature and full of features. It is stable and something you can be sure will be running similar to today in five years. It is security obsessed. It is powered by consensus and a community that has been bitten too many times by bad choices and is now very careful about adding things. And it is fantastic at handling all the boring but extremely-time-consuming aspects of building a product that no one really talks about because they happen behind the scenes and don't make for viral content.

All my projects from the last decade. And here I thought I was supposed to get better at this over time 🙃

After typing "git push --set-upstream origin <branch>" for the 4,000th time I finally decided to google whether you can make this behavior the default. Turns out it's trivial: git config --global --add --bool push.autoSetupRemote true You're welcome.

I'm running for the Django board! Here's my personal statement: I love Django, I’ve built my career on it, and I want to see it succeed for another 20 years. My platform is relatively simple. I don’t want Django to get left behind. I’ve seen old frameworks like Rails and Laravel continually reinvent themselves, bringing new cohorts of web developers into the fold, while Django has largely stayed the same. Part of the issue is Django’s reluctance to adopt modern technologies— with better front end being at the top of my list. But I don’t have unrealistic aspirations of adding HTMX, Tailwind, or React to Django, so much as starting the conversation about how the Django ecosystem can have a better story for people who want to use those things. The other part—and the part I hope to help with more—is cultural. Specifically, getting Django to do a better job at selling itself. This means working harder to pitch and position Django as a great, modern framework for building apps. As well as creating more opportunities and incentives for funding Django. If elected, I’ll try to be a voice on the board that pushes Django forwards, while understanding that I will often get pushed back. Let’s keep Django great for another 20 years!

The idea that you should give up on a product if it's not an immediate hit is so misguided. Place Card Me made $300 in the first six months. Now pays me $1-2k/mo on autopilot. Pegasus took a year to build and made less than $1k in the first three months. Now it's how I make a…

I explained to my kids that - unlike most people - I don't get paid on a schedule, but whenever someone decides to buy something from me. Now every time I drop them off at school my 4yo says "bye dad, hope you get some money today!" I wonder what the other parents make of this.

Still a work in progress but I got streaming working on the Pegasus Chat UI. Tech is Django + Channels + HTMX. I couldn't find any good content on how to do this. Like this tweet or let me know if you would like to see a blog post / video about how it works.

The main reason that everyone's talking about Laravel and no one is talking about Django? It's not features, quality, speed-of-development, or anything you might expect. It's marketing. Laravel has always been about businesses, while Django is OSS/community-first. You can see this in the leadership, and it permeates through everything: fundraising, governance, roadmap, etc. Laravel now has 57 million reasons to get you to use it while Django is still run by a small group of smart, dedicated, and mostly-nerdy coders living off donations. I think there's a huge opportunity for Django to gain more adoption and mindshare. The framework and ecosystem is so, so good, but it feels like it's falling behind the likes of Laravel and Rails because no one knows how to pitch it well. I believe with a small amount of improved tooling and marketing we could convince a lot more people to use Django and they would love it. Currently thinking about how I can do my part towards making that happen.

Indie hacker psychology.

The Hetzner box that I run multiple production apps (including place card me) on is so cheap they just decided not to bill me this month. 🤯

Any time you solve a problem with more than ten browser tabs open, you should be obligated to write up the answer so other people can find it in the future.

Django is arguably the startup tech world's best-kept secret. Here's why you don't hear about it: 1. The personality of the community is to not be self-promotional. This is probably related to it being community-led, not run by a celebrity like rails or Laravel, or a company like ~everything in JavaScript. 2. Many Django people moved to Mastodon in the fallout of the Elon purchase, moreso than for other frameworks, due to some combination of politics and nerdiness. 3. It moves slowly. In part, because it is already so good at most things. 4. The lack of opinions about front end makes it harder for beginners to make flashy demos quickly. 5. Most people building on Django are too busy shipping. In a way, Django's (lack of) hype is a victim of many of its best qualities. It is mature and full of features. It is stable and something you can be sure will be running similar to today in five years. It is security obsessed. It is powered by consensus and a community that has been bitten too many times by bad choices and is now very careful about adding things. And it is fantastic at handling all the boring but extremely-time-consuming aspects of building a product that no one really talks about because they happen behind the scenes and don't make for viral content.

All my projects from the last decade. And here I thought I was supposed to get better at this over time 🙃

I'm running for the Django board! Here's my personal statement: I love Django, I’ve built my career on it, and I want to see it succeed for another 20 years. My platform is relatively simple. I don’t want Django to get left behind. I’ve seen old frameworks like Rails and Laravel continually reinvent themselves, bringing new cohorts of web developers into the fold, while Django has largely stayed the same. Part of the issue is Django’s reluctance to adopt modern technologies— with better front end being at the top of my list. But I don’t have unrealistic aspirations of adding HTMX, Tailwind, or React to Django, so much as starting the conversation about how the Django ecosystem can have a better story for people who want to use those things. The other part—and the part I hope to help with more—is cultural. Specifically, getting Django to do a better job at selling itself. This means working harder to pitch and position Django as a great, modern framework for building apps. As well as creating more opportunities and incentives for funding Django. If elected, I’ll try to be a voice on the board that pushes Django forwards, while understanding that I will often get pushed back. Let’s keep Django great for another 20 years!

The main reason that everyone's talking about Laravel and no one is talking about Django? It's not features, quality, speed-of-development, or anything you might expect. It's marketing. Laravel has always been about businesses, while Django is OSS/community-first. You can see this in the leadership, and it permeates through everything: fundraising, governance, roadmap, etc. Laravel now has 57 million reasons to get you to use it while Django is still run by a small group of smart, dedicated, and mostly-nerdy coders living off donations. I think there's a huge opportunity for Django to gain more adoption and mindshare. The framework and ecosystem is so, so good, but it feels like it's falling behind the likes of Laravel and Rails because no one knows how to pitch it well. I believe with a small amount of improved tooling and marketing we could convince a lot more people to use Django and they would love it. Currently thinking about how I can do my part towards making that happen.

Been noticing a split between older, more experienced founders recommending boring, full-stack tech like django, rails, laravel, etc. and younger, newer founders being all in on that latest JS shiny object (Next.js, Svelte, etc.). What's less clear is whether the old guard is wise/right or whether we're becoming outdated as the world shifts from under us.

The idea that you should give up on a product if it's not an immediate hit is so misguided. Place Card Me made $300 in the first six months. Now pays me $1-2k/mo on autopilot. Pegasus took a year to build and made less than $1k in the first three months. Now it's how I make a…

After typing "git push --set-upstream origin <branch>" for the 4,000th time I finally decided to google whether you can make this behavior the default. Turns out it's trivial: git config --global --add --bool push.autoSetupRemote true You're welcome.

Does anyone have any good ideas? It's ridiculous that 5+ years in, this is still my hero image.

For people who have switched from Cursor to Claude Code in the last few months: what were the key things that made you switch? I keep hearing how good Claude Code has gotten (I haven't used it in a few months), but I have trouble the with the idea of leaving the IDE.

I've started thinking about buying BTC again, which—if my past behavior is any indication—means we are approaching the peak.

Indie hacker psychology.