Hacker News: reichertjalex

New comment by reichertjalex in "Show HN: I created a 2025 Wrapped for WhatsApp Conversations"

reichertjalex — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 02:22:50 +0000

Love this! It would be great if the PDF export worked better, it seems to just use the "Print > Save As PDF" functionality?

I'd love to export everything to a nice PDF and then request that all the data be deleted :P

Or, even better, generate a bunch of cute graphics that I can share with the other person in my chat!

InstantDB: A Modern Firebase

reichertjalex — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:14:24 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/instantdb/instant

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137101

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by reichertjalex in "Show HN: Velvet – Store OpenAI requests in your own DB"

reichertjalex — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 14:43:19 +0000

Very nice! I really like the design of the whole product, very clean and simple. Out of curiosity, do you have a designer, or did you take inspiration from any other products (for the landing page, dashboard, etc) when you were building this? I'm always curious how founders approach design these days.

New comment by reichertjalex in "Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase"

reichertjalex — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 15:28:58 +0000

In case it's helpful for anyone, I did a little write-up of my experience using Instant a couple months ago to hack together a simple weekend project: https://www.alexreichert.com/blog/ceramics-with-instantdb

tl;dr -- I'm a big fan :)

New comment by reichertjalex in "On finishing projects"

reichertjalex — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:18:39 +0000

> "We need to know what 'done' looks like."

Ugh, yes... I wish I had internalized this sooner!

New comment by reichertjalex in "On finishing projects"

reichertjalex — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:15:41 +0000

Yeah, definitely. I know this is a somewhat controversial opinion, but I do think there's value in developing the muscle around "grinding it out". I think the tricky part (depending on your personality type) is knowing when it makes sense to give up and move on to something else.

New comment by reichertjalex in "On finishing projects"

reichertjalex — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:07:16 +0000

Ooh I like that! I definitely feel that in some sense when I have a good streak of commits per day, where I don't want to break the streak. Or for workouts, it's suuuper motivating to see the number continue to go up.

But oftentimes when a project or essay is incomplete, it's hard for me to think of a good "number" to track that would be a good motivator (since i.e. lines of code, or the number of words in a draft, don't necessarily feel like a good proxy for progress all the time). I'm curious if there's a metric that would work better?

On finishing projects

reichertjalex — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 18:03:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.alexreichert.com/blog/finishing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41293219

Points: 228

# Comments: 100

Finishing projects is hard

reichertjalex — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 16:19:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.alexreichert.com/blog/finishing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41257695

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Linen – Make your Discord community Google-searchable

reichertjalex — Tue, 24 May 2022 17:19:17 +0000

Article URL: https://www.linen.dev/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908

Points: 80

# Comments: 29

New comment by reichertjalex in "Sorbet: Stripe's Type Checker for Ruby"

reichertjalex — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 20:38:55 +0000

I remember having mixed feelings about Sorbet when I first joined Stripe in late 2018, but by the time I left, I found it indispensable. Especially after the VS Code extension was released internally... holy crap, that made such a huge difference (vs having CI fail 20 mins after pushing up a PR because you forgot to run the typechecker script ahead of time, ugh).

This article also made me laugh, because it reminded me of one of my small pet peeves about the Ruby codebase at Stripe: the fact that you would often find `merchant`, `account`, `invoice`, etc used as method parameters that represented the _ID_ of the resource rather than the resource itself. So Sorbet definitely helped with that, but it also could've been nice to just write `invoice_id` instead... :P

Makes me nostalgic though, good times!