cliftonc
cliftonc on Hacker News
Posted by
cliftonc on Monday October 12, 2026 @03:41AM
from the movinghouse.app dept.
So my mother in law and I disagreed about how much of her furniture might fit in their new flat (they are downsizing), so like anyone today I thought 'I can build something fast for that' .... so movinghouse.app was born. Then I thought "this could be fun", so I built a game for it. There are certainly moments when I am absolutely convinced that jevons paradox is 100% correct, and the ~7-8hrs i've spent on all of this (and two paying customers so far!) are definitely proving that right :D feedback and ideas welcome - just wanted to share.
I use this a lot, but find it a bit hard to manage if you want a persistent tunnel locally to use for dev (e.g. webhooks etc), so I added a wrapper around it that you can easily use:
https://github.com/cliftonc/cfld
Posted by
cliftonc on Sunday March 08, 2026 @05:47AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.drizby.com
Hello everyone! I am working on an open source reporting tool, that was mostly focused on the 'Embed analytics in your app' use case, which I found was either not great or not flexible or expensive, or all three!However, I decided today to use this library wrapped in an app that makes it work like Metabase (and I use 'like' in its broadest sense here as it is quite early in its life). I have...
Posted by
cliftonc on Monday January 19, 2026 @06:58AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://try.icelight.dev/
I spent some time this week wiring together all the pieces to build a "complete" end to end product analytics platform using the new (in beta - use at your own risk) Cloudflare Data Platform, and DuckDB (as I have been wanting to experiment with it for some time).It works surprisingly well! You can deploy it with one command once you are logged into Wrangler, and it should work on a free...
I really disagree, skills are really quite useful and there is a lot of usage + community - e.g. take a look at
https://github.com/obra/superpowers which I know is used by a lot of people to smooth out their workflow with Claude with great results (not forced spec driven development just better context use + better results). Just this week I used skills to help encapsulate a way to document legacy services ahead of a rewrite (given that my experience now is that rewriting becomes a valid path vs refactoring in many instances):
https://github.com/cliftonc/unwind.
At this point it would rely on the person embedding it in their app to get that data, put it somewhere, and then add a Cube definition on top of it - so this is purely solving the visualisation / report building part of that puzzle (but in a fully embedded / non iframe way).
I used Cube as inspiration, and actually the rest API for drizzle-cube is compatible with the cube-js schema definition. The main difference is that I chose to model the cubes in typescript, so they can be validated in the IDE easily (autocomplete, catch issues early) and not have an option for YAML, but the semantics are exactly the same.
Posted by
cliftonc on Sunday December 28, 2025 @03:42AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://try.drizzle-cube.dev/
I've been working on this as a side project for some time, but now I think it has reached a point to be genuinely useable and useful - would really appreciate any feedback or comments!
Posted by
cliftonc on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @07:49AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://try.drizzle-cube.dev/
This is a project that I have been working on, after extracting it from a side project that is going nowhere fast, but has been quite a learning experience.It's a complete analytics stack that you can embed in your own application, that provides a semantic query engine (based on cube-js definitions) that allows you to give your users the ability to safely create their own queries, and as a...
Posted by
cliftonc on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @03:42PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://try.drizzle-cube.dev/
I have extracted this module from a SaaS application I have been working on for some years, it is based on Drizzle, and the UI components just React + Tailwind. The idea is that it allows you (if you have an existing DB and Drizzle schema) to very quickly offer a self service dashboarding / analytics (or just use it yourself to add reports / dashboards / data widgets in a maintainable way). ...
I definitely meant Excel, we use office365 - easily as shareable as Google sheets these days. Agree anaplan and friends also have downsides, but for me the complexity you end up in as you change things through the year and need to explain the impact of the change becomes too complex in Excel. We manage a team of about 220 people, when I had a team half the size it was more manageable.
Excel, but it's painful - as any change's through the year make it very hard to compare and contrast actual to budget (e.g. a simple rate change from a supplier vs adding someone to a team, moving different rate people between teams) and quite challenging to do different scenarios (e.g. impact of different inflation levels for different roles / countries). It is possible but requires a lot of discipline and excel expertise from everyone to make it work. I am exploring using a planning & budgeting tool (anaplan, pbcs).
I am a very happy Bunq customer for 4+ years, and as a user of other Dutch banks (for a mortgage - ABN amro, in the past UK banks like FD), their overall service levels great - if I chat via the app I have always been helped quickly, flexibility with accounts, cards, automation via the APIs etc is absolutely worth the price hike. These are things I am happy to pay a few extra cups of coffee a month for as they make my life with an extended family much easier to manage day to day.
This looks like a copy of an idea we built a few years ago (
https://github.com/tes/compoxure) - still in heavy use at my previous company, along with lots of other folks like Zalando (
https://github.com/zalando/tailor).
We ended up deciding that with the move to component based front end frameworks (react, storybook etc) that the overhead of this wasn't worth the benefits - every developer needs it running, along with lots of services etc.
I'd love to understand what others are thinking about composition on the front end these days. I guess the fact this just got created means that the problem we were trying to solve in 2014 still exists - so perhaps I have my answer?
Posted by
cliftonc on Tuesday May 14, 2019 @01:44PM
from the techcrunch.com dept.
Why not use a headset? They work really well at blocking out background noise (we use the plantronics ones). Worth every cent.
It looks like they've lost a chunk of data - the last items in my news feed are from the 14th of July.
Fair comment, they just seemed like good interactions to begin with as they are well understood. Given we can take this in any direction, what other dynamics do you think might be of interest?
I started building this because I have a requirement at my current company, and wanted to understand the problem space before I figured out if there was anything out there I could just use ... Then I got hooked and just kept writing code ;) I originally used the Twissandra project for inspiration (huge thanks). Ultimately looking for feedback on how useful this is to anyone else, and ideally other contributors who can help flesh it out and get some client libraries for various platforms built.
Posted by
cliftonc on Friday February 13, 2015 @06:10PM
from the show-hn dept.
Posted by
cliftonc on Saturday September 06, 2014 @04:13AM
from the medium.com dept.
I've been playing with Prismic.io during this beta period and think it looks like an awesome product with great potential, but I just can't bring myself to actually use the writing side of it for any length of time.
Is there a way to turn off all the skeuomorphic design elements? Paper background? Lots of sliding panels, it's really hard to navigate around and very busy, even on a big screen. I think they need to completely cut it back and simplify, and I'd use it in a heartbeat.
The API based separation is a good idea for real sites (vs blogs), I think it will catch on and is a much better design than the all in one CMS design behind things like Wordpress, Drupal or Ghost.
A lot of the simplification was definitely down to flattening the structure that was represented in 20-30 tables down into a smaller set of documents in ES. But the functional approach to then rendering these documents simplified it further.
A functional map is definitely analogous to a visitor pattern, but don't underestimate how much of a productivity boost arrives by being able to see all of the code in a small set of terse statements in one place, vs having a set of fairly abstract classes with accept/visit scattered all over the place.
We just found that the OO solution resulted in more code and it was more difficult to hold the resulting model in your head as the number of things that could be visited grew - we run a very big site.
The other big enabler vs a traditional CMS approach is that we have a very clear separation between the part of our stack that allows editors to create content, and the part that renders it (connected via messaging) - so we aren't mixing r/w domains and our rendering pipeline isn't burdened with the additional complexity of having to understand how content changes, it just renders what it is given as fast as it can.
Hi, I'm the CTO at the MailOnline so can comment. The biggest reduction in loc was due to the move from a relational DB to elastic search containing flatter representations of our content. This basically meant that we could delete thousands of lines of boilerplate and create a very simple processing pipeline to render content, and for this clojure really shines of course.
The REPL made the first week of exploring the problem and solution space really effective, and even as a node guy I was impressed with what could be done.
I can say that there is definitely a big productivity boost, but as others have said it isn't purely the language, but rather thinking about the problem in a completely new way that really did it. I do credit clojure though with giving our engineers the ability to think differently, as that is often the hardest part.
There was a comment I made in a speech recently about functional programming being frictionless for content management system design, this is what I was alluding to.
I don't want to start a flame war, but we built an earlier version in ruby (with one of the best OO guys I know leading it), and it was much more complex through attempting to model our home page as a set of inter related objects, using visitor patterns to traverse etc., than the clojure version.