Lewis Buckley

@eileencodes "Engineering rigor is more important in the AI world than it was before." - yes!

I wrote a performance toolkit for bundler and wrote about my experience building it and what role AI played (and didn’t play) railsatscale.com/2026-03-18-eng…

Open source + money is a tricky path, full of dead ends. I have seen a model that works at 37signals: build and sell a product, then open-source the tech behind it. The product is the anchor and aligns incentives: open source serves the product, and the company sustains itself from it. Just the last 5 years of 37signals open source is 🤯: gist.github.com/jorgemanrubia/… I wish we had more of this in the industry.

most agent best-practices are human best-practices too. docs, safeguards, bug repro steps etc.

The UK has announced plans to fast-track legislation requiring “age verification for VPN use”. The correct term, however, is not age verification but identity verification. A law like this would require everyone to identify themselves in order to use a VPN. This would pose a risk to whistleblowers, violate human rights, and represent yet another step toward an authoritarian society.

@usewhawit @ilyesm @dhh @vigilbase Oh and re: latency monitoring I want to do more work there so that Upright has a better performance monitoring set up OOB. It does report web vital metrics via Playwright probes but I want to flesh that out more.

@ilyesm @lewispb @dhh @vigilbase This is the right pattern: local probe still pages when “home” is down (otherwise you built a single point of silence 😅). Q: do you quorum alerts across probes/providers to avoid one-region DNS/BGP weirdness? And do probes buffer + backfill events when Grafana comes back?

We built Upright to replace Pingdom at 37signals for monitoring all our services, and now we've open-sourced it too. Global checks, playwright smoke tests (with video recording!), detailed uptime tracking, and feeding into Prometheus + Grafana. Enjoy! dev.37signals.com/introducing-up…

@usewhawit @ilyesm @dhh @vigilbase Yes, we warn on partial failure and page on total failure. Each Prometheus / Alertmanager alerts independently to PagerDuty. PagerDuty de-dupes alerts.

@ilyesm @dhh @vigilbase Yes upright itself includes a Prometheus and Alertmanager, using the OTel Collector we also ship the logs, metrics and traces back to our internal infra. You could use Grafana Cloud free tier to do the same thing, as a backup. Grafana Cloud expose an OTLP endpoint

@lewispb @dhh @vigilbase This is interesting. You do this using Kamal right? I’m new to it so maybe am misunderstanding. Doesn’t the proxy still rely on a single machine?

@bytebot Upright predates Claude actually but it was super helpful in various parts, with careful supervision of course.

Cool, also, I only see one commit co-authored by Claude, so was the LLM use on this very minimal?

@bytebot @dhh a fair amount! but one intentional feature at a time with plenty of back and forth, review and simplification.

@dhh Thanks for good opensource! How much of this was LLM aided?

@hiekkapoks @dhh totally!

@lewispb @dhh So I could configure it so that I use this single instance to monitor "my-internal-app.dev" and "fancy-saas-setup.ninja" domains with some ? If so, that is great! Especially the part of being able to configure playwright to do stuff!

@hiekkapoks @dhh you host it yourself, but it's a Rails engine so you can write your own Playwright probes in Ruby.

@dhh Seems cool - as a non-rails user, is this meant to be "in your app" or more of a stand-alone thing that can monitor multiple apps? It talks about setting up a new rails app and bundling this in it, so I assume it is meant for the "in your app" use-case.

@ilyesm @dhh @vigilbase we run it on multiple VMs and point it at two other Prometheus instances. We can lose two of our data centers and will still be alerted.

@dhh Very nice! However this still has a single point of failure, meaning if the VM/provider for the main app is down, no notifications get sent out. The @vigilbase team and I have been working on Watchdog, a fully decentralized monitoring stack inspired by the AWS/Azure/CF outages

@kingdrale It’s tricky but possible. Playwright has all we need to drive the browser and then we have a HEY account to receive the magic link and log in to Fizzy. Upright has a session state cache so not every probe needs to do auth.

@lewispb How are you authenticating with Fizzy which uses magic links?

Introducing Upright: open source synthetic monitoring • Playwright, HTTP, SMTP and traceroute probes • OpenTelemetry and Prometheus metrics • Rails engine • Run it anywhere dev.37signals.com/introducing-up…

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any sites a shadowy cabal of European media elites deemed against their interests. No judicial oversight. No due process. No appeal. No transparency. It required us to not just remove customers, but also censor our 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver meaning it risked blacking out any site on the Internet. And it required us not just to censor the content in Italy but globally. In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online. That, of course, is DISGUSTING and even before yesterday’s fine we had multiple legal challenges pending against the underlying scheme. We, of course, will now fight the unjust fine. Not just because it’s wrong for us but because it is wrong for democratic values. In addition, we are considering the following actions: 1) discontinuing the millions of dollars in pro bono cyber security services we are providing the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympics; 2) discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users; 3) removing all servers from Italian cities; and 4) terminating all plans to build an Italian Cloudflare office or make any investments in the country. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. While there are things I would handle differently than the current U.S. administration, I appreciate @JDVance taking a leadership role in recognizing this type of regulation is a fundamental unfair trade issue that also threatens democratic values. And in this case @ElonMusk is right: #FreeSpeech is critical and under attack from an out-of-touch cabal of very disturbed European policy makers. I will be in DC first thing next week to discuss this with U.S. administration officials and I’ll be meeting with the IOC in Lausanne shortly after to outline the risk to the Olympic Games if @Cloudflare withdraws our cyber security protection. In the meantime, we remain happy to discuss this with Italian government officials who, so far, have been unwilling to engage beyond issuing fines. We believe Italy, like all countries, has a right to regulate the content on networks inside its borders. But they must do so following the Rule of Law and principles of Due Process. And Italy certainly has no right to regulate what is and is not allowed on the Internet in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, Brazil, India or anywhere outside its borders. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT FIGHT AND WE WILL WIN!!!

For Unraid users I've put together a Docker template to self-host Fizzy. gist.github.com/lewispb/49007f…

INTRODUCING FIZZY Have you noticed that every issue and idea tracking tool you loved slowly morphed into boring, sluggish, corporate bloatware? Trello put on 40 pounds of cruft. Jira started charging by the migraine. Asana tried to become everything to everyone. GitHub Issues slipped into a steady state of decline. The whole category is a 20 car pileup of complexity. Time to route around that mess. Today we’re introducing Fizzy. Kanban as it should be, not as it has been. Fizzy is a fresh take on cards and columns, with a few twists, human-nature inspired defaults, and a vibrant interface that’s the opposite of the bland and boring software the industry has been flinging at you for years. Kanban has been around since the 1940s, and Trello brought it into the mainstream in 2011. Since then, some version of column-based kanban-style organization has found its way into any collaboration tool worth its salt. But most have over salted the dish. What was simple is now complicated. What was clear is now cluttered. What just worked now takes work. Fizzy presses reset, reconsiders what really matters, and presents a refreshing way to kanban that just feels right. It’s friendly, colorful, straightforward, and fast as hell. We still use Basecamp for our big, intensive projects, but lately we’ve been reaching for Fizzy to run the smaller ones. It’s perfect for tracking bugs, issues, and ideas, and it shines for lighter, self-contained workflows like podcasts or video production. We didn’t expect it, but Fizzy’s so good it might even cannibalize Basecamp on the lighter side of project management. We’d be thrilled. How much is it? It’s not much for so much. Everyone gets 1000 cards for free. Beyond that, we’ll host your account for just $20/month for unlimited cards and unlimited users. One price for all and everything. No tiers, no “contact us.” No pricing chart at all — just a price tag, like on a pair of jeans. And here’s a surprise... Fizzy is open source! If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever. Have a great idea? Submit a PR to contribute to the code base and improve the product for everyone. It’s the best of all worlds. No excuses. Every idea comes back around. It’s time for take two on kanban. Fizzy’s our hat in the ring. Let’s make this platform insanely great, together. Come on in! Visit fizzy.do

@dhh my first computer!

What a gorgeous machine. Back when computers weren't afraid of showing some color. Red escape, blue return, green shifts. Love it.