Luke Morton

Cloud region selection used to be a latency decision. After Iranian drones hit three AWS data centres, it is a geopolitical one too.

Iranian drone strikes hit three AWS data centres on March 1st. 109+ services went down. Banking, payments, ride-hailing — all offline across the region. We've gone from cyber to physical warfare being on the risk register.

Vibe coding has probably bought my startup 3-6 months of extra runway… but not in the way you think.

I suspect it will slow down most new entrant disruptor / YC style startups in the short term. This gives me an advantage.

Long term I’m less confident!

Oooo just got preview access to Copilot Workspace.

Anyone already using it?

(Especially with VS Code.)

This week has been a real week.

In a massively good way.

But boy I’m finishing early and spending some time with my daughter.

Does anyone care that DMs on Bluesky are centralised?

We will have to see what Starmer has to say about this “plan for change” but shame on Labour for not being on the front foot coming back into power.

I guess you can’t argue that this wasn’t expected from the budget that focused on taxing business.

But what about creating a growth economy? What’s the plan for that?

So easy to spend money, so much harder to make it.

It’s too easy to fall into unintelligent spending,

whereas every bit of revenue is hard won and fast to lose.

Mildly impressed that IASME uses blockchain tech for their cyber essentials certifications.

Also: FirstStage is now cyber essentials certified 🥳

Street is organising a community leaf clearing effort next weekend.

I’ve definitely reached the age where this feels heartwarming and good*

*Rather than an impossible task with a hangover

Yep definitely a privileged position for me to hold that opinion and only valid in certain contexts.

This is probably because I’m a Bluesky n00b but is it just me or do the notifications come through really slowly?

Nice metaphor.

I think I’m over these labels altogether now.

They don’t really help with anything but ego (which links to retention I’ll admit).

Diabetes maintenance slowing me down today, perhaps gladly. Not sure.

Two hospital trips for regular check up and prescription pick up with a couple of hours in between. Kinda ruins the flow!

Should be seeing it as recovery time… last couple of weeks have seen some all nighters (coding).

Case in point ✂️✂️

Try calling a next redirect() in a void promise…

Do you have any questionable bets or hypotheses?

Not sure whether all these bets are sensible but they make startup life fun:

- Bootstrapped and profit focused
- Micro team (do more with less)
- Augment with AI
- Offer SaaS platform for free
- Charge for AI to operate SaaS
- UX to be proud of (rather than embarrassed of)

Still, you have to outsource some stuff to IaaS/PaaS/SaaS and that is a trade off decision.

I’m just surprised with how much I’m preferring build.

Well defined boundaries at app and internal lib still paying off for fast change. Easy to lop off chunks, as much as add and replace.

Yep investment can definitely offset impact of SaaS… delaying to far off future.

But you still compromise in UX often.

And that bill is coming for you one day.

There are other bets to make like just build faster with AI and smaller teams.

Counter intuitive that development can be cheaper.

This reminds me of debates I used to have with @craigjbass.bsky.social and other old colleagues 😅

PaaS still wins over IaaS, for sure still. This mostly has downside for DX rather than UX.

When it comes to control over user experience, custom wins all day for me now.

Where open source used, must be in foundations like Nextjs or Tailwind, or in niche areas of expertise like otpauth or nanoid.

I used to err on the side of outsource everything when building software. Strong pref for open source deps or third party SaaS.

Now I’m leaning way more into preferring custom software for even things like auth.

SaaS is just so damn expensive and in many cases poorer UX.

Surely not? Surely I can just download it on an existing TV?!

Reading the website they certainly make it look like you must buy a new TV. Doesn’t make sense in a world of TV apps?

So confused.

Yes I think as with most things, increasing surface area increases risks (bugs, etc)

I’ve found strong use of boundaries within an application and testing of those boundaries defends against this well enough though.

Fewer but stricter boundaries: app vs internal lib, use case vs gateways vs domain

My experience of coding recently is that verbosity, repetition and “clever” domain-specific abstractions are way less important.

Mostly because I’m happy for AI to be writing more verbose / repetitive code. Same goes for test cases.

Are big files and procedural coding styles back in vogue now?

Yes, this 👍

It’s Saturday morning and I’m thinking about this again.

LLMs are commodity. What happens if composition of LLMs into agents becomes commodity too? Can it even?

Surely composition and downstream UX are the only differentiation and innovation variables we have.