LLM-based support chat probably. It's a pretty ripe opportunity to build something analogous to Amazon's support experience, especially when combined with Shop Pay. Putting payment provider, retailers, potentially suppliers, customers and documentation into a single conversational interface will be quite convenient for the end user.
It also didn't restart the app for me, so took me until I missed the starting of a meeting to realize the workflow was broken, and THEN my launcher app couldn't find the name Cron (IE, the aforementioned uninstall). Then, opened it finally, and had to also redo Google SSO Auth, but there's a malformed request error (that seems to be a Google issue...) and I can't log in.
It seems like a gap in the law/regulation if a former owner (in this case, the pre-Elon Twitter management) can make verbal pronouncements that the new owner is beholden to, without a paper trail. With that said, the complaint does state that promises were made post-acquisition, although this is only mentioned once.
It seems even more puzzling to enforce this on non-profitable private companies. The precedent that would be set here would severely undermine the ability of a private company to operate if it came in far under revenue targets, and was beholden to pay out bonuses to employees.
It's EVEN more puzzling that Twitter, a Delaware corp owned by X, a Nevada corp, is being sued by an employee based in Texas, under California law.
When my team cut our monthly Netlify costs by $1.5k, Netlify didn't inquire why, contrasting with GCP's prompt response to a similar spending reduction. Our departure from Netlify was due to significant bugs in Netlify's Next.js Edge and double billing us when Git contributors didn't map cleanly to Netlify accounts, despite us using Github OAuth. Support individuals were great, but it seems like their advocacy for us fell on deaf ears within the Product/Engineering camp.
Even more puzzling was that a few months prior, their partnerships team had been working with us to get our customers' ecommerce storefronts on the platform. Netlify's (then) head of partnerships left and nobody else followed up ever. Our customers are now pointed at Fly.io instead, and everyone is quite happy with that recommendation.
My anecdote, and this article, seems like evidence of Netlify's reactivity to Vercel over customer-oriented growth. Vercel, in contrast, is more focused on developing open-source projects that organically brings people in.
These "stacks" ONLY work if you are building hobbyist apps, or if you want to sell services. A fast-moving product company has many better alternatives that are probably far more tailored to their business objectives and team composition.
Maintaining these things in production for many years is often painful and cumbersome. Moreover, they usually are introduced by a single person who has a lot of enthusiasm to maintain it, but when that person leaves all hell breaks loose. Even more fun is when the underlying infrastructure provider decides to deprecate an API that requires a ton of bespoke fixes (e.g. Netlify's Next.js edge plugin which recently had a behind-the-scenes change to how Lambdas are spun up causing bugs with state leaking between requests).
With that said, it's good to explore new technologies. I just wish these sorts of posts (which are thinly veiled product marketing/tutorials) would expand to actual direction/feedback about how to use new tools in production effectively.
Toronto is about to have a mayoral by-election next week, and Mark Saunders is the more conservative candidate, who is a former police chief. It's a highly contentious election because the leading candidate (Olivia Chow) and Saunders have been sparring along culture war lines.
Breach Media is a thinly veiled partisan opinion news organization. Their about page gives a bit more context into their political position: https://breachmedia.ca/about/ but wraps it up in Canadian politeness.
The part I like about Coherence is that they aren't pretending to be more than the UI/DX layer around things that are free and open-source.
I'm so not a fan of what YC has done in the last year by funding every "Heroku killer" under the sun without calling out the elephant in the room that Heroku was the accessible DX into AWS, and nothing more. That stuff all exists in the open source world.
I'm not interested in litigating Porter (which I imagine is awesome) vs. other systems, but it does seem like your target market are dev teams which are light on DevOps skillsets, because you can run these systems for free with a modicum of DevOps chops on the team.
That doesn't make this story any less puzzling from a technical decision-making standpoint.
I've felt like v2 is MUCH better than the v1 system, and pricing is still much better than alternatives.
With that said, our core systems are still on GCP and we use Fly exclusively for Next.js UIs so the comparison is to systems like Netlify and Vercel, both of which are far less reliable in our experience, and far costlier (Netlify is at the point of nickel and diming people).
So they went from Heroku buildpack-based ops, to Kubernetes on EKS, through a 3rd party orchestration service? The post is essentially just content marketing for Porter.
This is like a case study in what not to do and I think a future followup to this post will read like a mea culpa. The level of complexity they took on unwittingly is massive, and it seems like little research was done if they chose EKS -- which is easily the worst Kubernetes offering of any of the big cloud providers. Wonder what their billing will look like next month.
Folks getting off Heroku: do yourself a favour and either go to Fly.io + Dockerfiles, use a fully managed service like Render, use ECS in AWS, or if Kubernetes + major cloud is the important part for some inexplicable reason: use GKE.
what do mckinsey and thumbtack have to do with startup wealth?