Wrote a new blog post showing my AI guidelines to allow me to say to an AI agent "Work on ticket DEV-133" and it reads the ticket, fetches the info, and creates a pull request for review - iain.rocks/blog/my-ai-g...
My AI Guidelines | Iain Cambridge
The technical musings of Iain Cambridge.
iain.rocks
@teorth.bsky.social I’m looking for some tips on the best way to start learning mathematics at a high level. Can you give me some directions? Such as books and/or courses to look into?
Get ready for an awesome #Symfony meetup in Berlin 🍻 📅🙌 Join the community on Tuesday, September 16th at Appsfactory Gmbh from 6:00 PM for a night of great talks & networking Register now for free 👉 bit.ly/47HgmH8 @iain.bsky.social @symfony.com
Symfony/PHP Meetup Berlin by SensioLabs, Tue, Sep 16, 2025, 6:00 PM | Meetup
We’re excited to be back supporting the Berlin community! Join us for an evening of practical talks, Q&A, and hallway chats with fellow developers. Come share ideas, listen
bit.ly
GitLab's UI is so bad I actually wonder why they're still around. I've never been on a platform that made me hunt for repositories as much as GitLab.
I've finally added the audit logging I wanted in BillaBear for months. You'll be able to see what has been happening in BillaBear and by who. You'll also be able to see who made what changes to Customers, Subscriptions, and more. #buildinpublic
And I just spent 20-30 minutes trying to debug an ElasticSearch query until I realised that I needed to have my test sleep for a second so ElasticSearch could catch up.
Hubspot's API is so poorly documented even LLMs such as GPT and Gemini can't help you figure stuff out. Jeezo.
That moment when you use something you designed to be flexible with something else and it's as flexible as you hoped and just works.
a man is wearing a tutu and jumping in the air in front of a group of people .
ALT: a man is wearing a tutu and jumping in the air in front of a group of people .
media.tenor.com
A new integration for BillaBear is incoming! It's nice to get started with the CRM integrations! #buildinpublic
"FOSSBilling is under active development but is currently very much beta software. This means that there may be stability or security issues and it is not yet recommended for use in active production environments!" after 5 years I guess that means it'll never be prod-ready
Cold Calling Sucks but that's why it works is such a good resource for just getting started cold calling. It helps not even starting with bad habits and it so much of it makes complete sense if you've been reading about copywriting and creating landing pages. So much overlap. #buildinpublic
I signed up for Google Voice and suddenly my account needs to be verified. Kinda screws my cold-calling plans. Hopefully, it gets solved quickly.
I’ve been working on cold calling scripts. Gemini really does a good job creating a base script that can be tweaked slightly. #buildinpublic
Docker the tool to solve the "works on my machine" literally broke only on my machine. For some reason, a docker image got corrupted deleting it and re-fetching solved it. I spent far too much time trying to figure out what was wrong with my configuration.
I've sent a design brief off for the new marketing site for BillaBear but since I want to release 2025.01.01 on Monday I'm going to make some quick changes that hopefully improve it until the new site comes. #buildinpublic
After a few signups it's clear that the new onboarding process is a big improvement over what was there before. Before I was having people sign up and enter a card but never use the product. Now they're using the product straight away. #buildinpublic
Work in progress but I'm changing the billing page design for the cloud billing page. I think it looks cleaner this way. #buildinpublic
Me when I discover yet another funded new billing startup:
a baby is covering his face with his hand and saying `` omg '' .
ALT: a baby is covering his face with his hand and saying `` omg '' .
media.tenor.com
One of the common issues with rewrites is they're often slower than what they're replacing. Production code has generally been optimized over the years and when rewriting things the optimizations are generally forgotten. This results in you're super duper new code being worse than what was there.
I wrote some "Open Source Alternatives to X" posts for SEO purposes this week. One already got a hit from Google. A small little win but I'm happy that idea kinda panned out. I was never expecting lots of traffic but it's somewhat high intent. #buildinpublic
The downside of using a swagger code generator for SDKs is that if there is a deprecation in a language you have to manually go through and solve that deprecation. But it does beat writing my own SDKs for 5 different languages. #buildinpublic
I'm a complete stats nerd. I love looking at stats to see how they are going. One of the silly pointless stats I look at is lines of code. (Helps remind me how much I've done). BillaBear's, a standalone billing system, PHP code is twice the size of my generic general-use boilerplate Parthenon.
I've been doing SEO keyword searches for the past few days. Everything I'm finding has a search volume of less than 10. That makes sense, it's not like you're searching billing daily. Seems like SEO isn't a good option for BillaBear at this time and other channels will be needed. #buildinpublic
I decided to check out the open-source alternative directories and two of them have a 6 month wait period to get listed unless you pay them. Honestly, at 6-months they're kinda hurting themselves. Their entire value proposition if you can find alternatives but if you're not listing them...
It's kinda sad that if you post something that isn't using a FOSS license on HN pretty much all the comments are going to be about the license.
I'm improving the tax threshold system for BillaBear and making it aware of transaction thresholds and threshold types (calendar or rolling yearly). Tax sucks so much. #buildinpublic
I've reorganised the dashboard for BillaBear. Make the chart not take up the whole screen and have panels at the side. Now for more charts. #buildinpublic
I'm adding a payment totals chart to BillaBear that splits up the amounts by plans.
