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jbrooksuk

1,550 karma · joined October 12, 2012

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jbrooksuk··on Show HN: One More Letter
I enjoyed this. I’d like unexpected word points but this is nice.

One More Letter #7

5/5 words · 1:34

https://playonemoreletter.com

jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?
Mintlify generates an llms.txt and llms-full.txt for all documentation sites. These work really well:

- https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms.txt

- https://cloud.laravel.com/docs/llms-full.txt

jbrooksuk··on Zed 1.0
Notepad++ is now on macOS too! https://notepad-plus-plus-mac.org
jbrooksuk··on Show HN: Berroku – A fresh logic puzzle that's delightfully addictive
Hey all, for the last few evenings I (but moreso Claude) have been working on an iOS game called Berroku.

It's a delightfully simple, yet addictive puzzle game. Sudoku Minesweeper. I've long wanted to turn this into an app with achievements, leaderboards, offline play and more.

(Heavily) inspired by Blueberry Trio by Circle Moon Puzzles. https://circle9puzzle.com/bbtrio/

jbrooksuk··on Microsoft Outlook app now showing paid spam/phishing ad's
Imgur doesn’t work in the UK, is there a mirror?
jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
Personally:

- The Laravel Artisan Cheatsheet - https://artisan.page

- Cachet, the open source status page system - https://cachethq.io

Professionally:

- Laravel Cloud's "Private Cloud" offering - https://cloud.laravel.com/enterprise

jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://james.brooks.page
jbrooksuk··on The next generation of Laravel Forge
Yesterday we released the next generation of Laravel Forge. This is the biggest update we’ve made since we originally launched back in 2014. The web has changed a lot since then, and so have our expectations of what a server management platform should offer. That’s why we added a whole bunch of new features including:

- Instant Laravel VPS servers - Zero downtime deployments - Free on-forge domains - Health checks, Heartbeats, & real-time metrics - First-party Nuxt.js and Next.js support

Aside from being created within 10 seconds, our new Laravel VPS servers - backed by our partnership with DigitalOcean - also offers a cool new feature: Team terminal sessions. You can open an SSH session straight to your server within Forge and also pair with your teammates!

jbrooksuk··on Tweet.new
Thanks! Glad you found it funny too! :)
jbrooksuk··on Tweet.new
Well, there's a few reasons:

1. It's funny. 2. It's actually useful. 3. I'm a dummy.

Hope you find it funny and useful though!

jbrooksuk··on Is Tableau Dead?
I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.
jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
Sure! https://james.brooks.page
jbrooksuk··on Companies must stop using Google Analytics
Yes, you should absolutely not be using Google Analytics. They don't need more data, your users don't want to see cookie banners and most of you really don't need 99% of the data that you can filter through...

I can't recommend Fathom (https://usefathom.com) enough. They have a huge focus on privacy-first tracking. You don't need to show a cookie banner and you can still track events etc.

If you want $10 credit for signing up, use https://usefathom.com/james but otherwise, https://usefathom.com

Seriously, Google Analytics sucks. Use anything other than that.

jbrooksuk··on Show HN: I'm trying to guess your personality by your comments with an NLP model
At first I was offended by how accurate the SodaStream comment was, but hey... we all want to create our own bubbly drinks.
jbrooksuk··on Show HN: Polestar Finder
Hey HN! I wrote a script to find a Polestar 2 that matched my specification.

Turns out, a lot of people wanted this too so I added a front end to it and now you can be notified when your spec is available.

Let me know what you think!

jbrooksuk··on Show HN: Checkmango – The Full Stack A/B Testing Platform
Hey everyone!

I'm James, aka @jbrooksuk. For over a year I've been working on Checkmango, a full stack A/B testing platform.

I started working on it after I left my old role at an online travel agency. We wanted to do A/B testing, but any meaningful platform was costing several £k a month.

Checkmango is my attempt to fill a gap in the market of small — medium sized businesses that want to do A/B testing.

Everything is API based and you can check out the API docs at https://developers.checkmango.com (thanks to Bump.sh for hosting the OpenAPI spec).

If you have any questions, please let me know!

jbrooksuk··on Tell HN: HN London Meetup
Me! I'm in Staffordshire, so would be better to travel to Manchester than London.
jbrooksuk··on Vite – Next Generation Front End Tooling
We (Laravel) have just switched the frontend tooling from Laravel Mix (a webpack wrapper) for Vite. https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/vite#main-content

The speed gains are super impressive from Vite.

jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: Share your personal site
Thanks! :)
jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: Share your personal site
https://james.brooks.page

I don't blog enough really, but it does serve as a nice mirror for my Laravel blog posts.

I also share what hardware and software I use at https://james.brooks.page/uses

jbrooksuk··on Austrian DSB: EU-US Data Transfers to Google Analytics Illegal
If you don't want to pay it, then you probably don't need it.

I don't have experience with alternatives though - they just don't do as good of a job as Fathom does.

jbrooksuk··on Austrian DSB: EU-US Data Transfers to Google Analytics Illegal
And that's why, as a responsible developer, I exclusively use Fathom for my own projects. As far as I know, they are the only analytics company who are correctly following the law here AND they always try to do more.

They completely isolate EU analytics from their US databases, which you can read more about at https://usefathom.com/features/eu-isolation

Aside from this, unlike other startup analytic solutions, they've actually spoken to lawyers to read through the fine lines of the law and ensure their solution is legal. Go get it!

jbrooksuk··on ‘Wuhan lab leak’ may be the biggest economic shock for decades
Paywall free link: https://archive.is/2021.05.31-224815/https://www.telegraph.c...
jbrooksuk··on Eric Carle has died
It's so good to see Jon Klassen getting recognition on HN!

His books are superb! Short, sweet and extremely funny :D

jbrooksuk··on DigitalOcean S-1
We had the chance to buy a support plan with DO in a previous job. May be worth asking if that's something they can help with?
jbrooksuk··on The Secret Math Society Known as Nicolas Bourbaki
I also checked to see if they were mentioned! It’s interesting how a band can make you aware of something very obscure (outside of my domain, that is).
jbrooksuk··on foo@bar.com
Out of interest, how did this happen without any investigation into possible consequences etc?

It’s a huge change that surely warranted special attention before making it happen?

jbrooksuk··on Ask HN: What is your favorite motto?
If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
jbrooksuk··on Apple sends a letter to Hey: Change your app or get out of the App Store
> Apple have (freely) provided Basecamp a platform to grow their business via the App Store, whilst giving Apple (effectively) nothing in return.

It's not free though, is it? You have to pay $99 a year, and purchase Apple hardware to develop and test software for their platforms. Basecamp, who hire 50+ people most likely all run Apple hardware, so that's tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars to Apple over the years.

jbrooksuk··on Lightweight Alternatives to Google Analytics
I've been happily using Fathom Analytics: https://usefathom.com and I have zero complaints.

No tracking. Privacy focused. Lightweight. You embed from your own domain. They even do site monitoring now!

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