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rorylaitila commented on Tell HN: I underestimated how lonely building solo can be    · Posted by u/paulwilsonn
rorylaitila · 20 days ago
I've worked independently, then had employee programmers, now back to independent. It's a mixed bag. It's all on my shoulders now, it's lonely, and progress is slower. On the other hand when I had a team, I had to organize the priority, check the work, motivate them. It was quite a distraction in many ways. I also felt I was creating too much make-work just to keep people interested.

But now I struggle with my own motivation having no one to share the burden. Co-working and colleagues doesn't really improve the loneliness much.

I don't have an answer though. I'll probably go back to a team some day.

rorylaitila commented on Apache ECharts 6   echarts.apache.org/handbo... · Posted by u/makepanic
rorylaitila · 20 days ago
I feel I've tried them all. Echarts is the best overall charting library. Fast, complete, easy to start, advanced options, looks great by default, good examples, server and client rendering, SVG and canvas.

My only complaint is the chart-data data structures. Each chart type takes a different structure and axis data structure. They bolted on a data table feature (columns and rows), but it's not as documented and last I tried, incomplete.

rorylaitila commented on Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?    · Posted by u/unsupp0rted
rorylaitila · 20 days ago
Don't think about the task at hand at all, like don't think about what you need to get done or how you're going to accomplish it, in advance. This creates anxiety. Just think about how good the end goal will feel to have done. Virtually eliminates procrastinating and analysis paralysis.
rorylaitila commented on The Big Oops in type systems: This problem extends to FP as well   danieltan.weblog.lol/2025... · Posted by u/ksymph
rorylaitila · 23 days ago
I mostly agree. I have quipped once that I write "spaghetti and meatballs" code. The meatballs are the core domain objects, explicitly typed. The spaghetti is the business rules, untyped. With experience you get a good intuition where to draw the line. But the untyped code needs extensive testing.

Where I disagree with the article is on refactoring. It's identically hard both ways. Migrating to new business rules while simultaneously running the old and new system is the hard part. I don't find static typing helps or hurts me in particular. Compiler warnings are useful, but my unit tests catch the dynamic parts as well. Either way a lot breaks and often needs temporary scaffolding between the versions.

rorylaitila commented on Ask HN: Will AI push more of us into freelancing?    · Posted by u/gashmol
rorylaitila · 23 days ago
So I've been full-time independent for 12 years now. In general, I don't think AI is a major driver of employee vs contractor decision but we'll see.

The market has been trending towards specialists for a long time. AI may help employees in the short term be more effective generalists, and so be able to compete with specialists. AI may help specialists be even more effective in their niche, while also serve wider needs, and so compete better with employees.

Something I do see happening is companies are doing a lot of low hanging fruit themselves in my space (I do revenue and business analytics). Today, they will get 80% of my specialty done themselves. That is enough for most companies. But that last 20% for those who want it, still requires a specialist like me who knows the domain entirely.

rorylaitila commented on I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains    · Posted by u/cesargstn
rorylaitila · a month ago
12 years into my graveyard of side projects and making a modest income, nothing has ever "taken off", but I have survived. I yearn to be "pulled" by the market inextricably, but that is unlikely. The reality is almost every business (and I mean almost every one) is "pushed" up the hill, interminably, like Sisyphus. Even my most successful clients never feel "ahead". Something always breaks in the business model, given enough time.
rorylaitila commented on URL-Driven State in HTMX   lorenstew.art/blog/bookma... · Posted by u/lorenstewart
trentnix · a month ago
I’ve been building a Golang web platform for my own web apps and I wired up toaster notifications using hx-swap-oob. I just populate a ‘notifications’ slice in my view model and hx-swap-oob makes sure my toaster messages get loaded irrespective of what content is actually being swapped.

It sounds like a similar use case to yours.

rorylaitila · a month ago
Gotcha, I think I looked at hx-swap-oob before for inspiration, but didn't see it working for this case, I'll look again.
rorylaitila commented on URL-Driven State in HTMX   lorenstew.art/blog/bookma... · Posted by u/lorenstewart
trentnix · a month ago
Isn’t that what hx-swap-oob is for?
rorylaitila · a month ago
Maybe, I'm not an HTMX user, but looking at hx-swap-oob I think that solves another issue. My need was when other links can exist in any place, and they need to match the URL after its clicked. I didn't want to have the performance hit or remember to add extra swaps just to get links up to date. The feature basically is "when a param is marked to be synced, ensure all links on the page are updated to match the changed param"
rorylaitila commented on URL-Driven State in HTMX   lorenstew.art/blog/bookma... · Posted by u/lorenstewart
rorylaitila · a month ago
I didn't see if you were doing this, but there is an additional use case that I had when using hot swapping like HTMX: updating other links on the page to reflect the URL state, when those links are outside of the swapped content.

While the server can use the URLs to update the links in the new HTML, if other links outside that content should also reflect the changes params, you need to manually update them.

In my progressive enhancement library I call this 'sync-params' https://github.com/roryl/zsx?tab=readme-ov-file#synchronize-...

rorylaitila commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
motohagiography · a month ago
superb and immensely valuable, this is a history of desire.
rorylaitila · a month ago
Indeed :) The aspect I like most is seeing through the advertisers lenses what they thought the public would care about the most.

u/rorylaitila

KarmaCake day336April 11, 2024
About
Full stack developer, analyst and entrepreneur focused on analytics, revenue, sales & marketing and BI. I help companies scale product revenue https://salesinsights.io.

I've also built https://humancrm.io and https://docs.chartsql.com which are tools I use in my firm.

As a hobby I collect vintage advertisements that I am cataloging at https://adretro.com

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rory-laitila/

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