Adam Fortuna / is on Nostr

Hey hey! I'm a full-stack product developer in Salt Lake City, UT. I love enlivening experiences, visualizing data, and making playful websites.

🧑‍💻 Formerly Course Director @ Code School.
📚 Currently founder @ https://hardcover.app

✏️ I write about personal growth, building websites (#ruby #nextjs #rubyonrails), #minimalism, #mindulness, #FIRE, recovering from an ACL tear, and awkwardly posting on TikTok (😂).

Last Notes

2024-10-05 22:20:54

New updates on the Hardcover Book Page are looking good - and with nice caching for network activity.
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/113/257/142/778/894/110/original/ed9c847436963155.png

2024-08-18 19:36:21

Looks like the time has finally come for me to learn the basics of Kubernetes. 😂
The cost of hosting Hardcover on Vercel has climbed from $20 -> $350 in just 3 months.
I've tried hosting it on Heroku, but Next.js's caching balloons the RAM until the server needs to be restarted. Reminds me of the early days of Rails when we had to restart it every hour. 😂
Next stop: Kubernetes on DigitalOcean.

2024-08-14 14:09:45

A 3-year old tech decision finally bit me yesterday: making Hardcovers book cover images public in our Google Cloud Bucket.
Someone used this opening to download up to 10k covers a second… for 8 hours. We don’t even have that many images!
Luckily it was only a $300 mistake. Yesterday I quickly made all images private, switched to using signed URL, and created a way for API users to get access.
This is your periodic reminder to use signed URLs for all assets on GCP/S3. 😅

2024-05-01 23:20:34

I've been pretty quiet the last few months here, but I'm still around, usually just reading. 😂
Major things going on in my life include:
Spending two weeks in South Korea! I'm writing a big blog post with pictures.
Working with an online personal training and nutrition coach. The added accountability has been great.
Major update to Hardcover shipped today (finally) and we just hit 100 subscribers. 🥳
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/112/368/391/623/351/072/original/6c9ac5d883de8545.png

2023-09-10 21:16:18

Sunday funday project: Add a simple reading page to my blog! 📚
I wanted something simple that would showcase what I've recently read and highlight 5 ⭐ reads (The Will of the Many by James Islington is my most recent).
I used the Hardcover GraphQL API, fetching the last 100 books I finished.
There are soooo many things I could do, but this was a good start.
https://adamfortuna.com/reading
Side note: If you have a book page on your blog I'd love to see it. 🤙
@npub1kt3…5004
#books #bookstodon #blog

2023-08-27 14:50:09

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@npub17re…t0hg Too true. 😂 We always used to use Keynote for making courses at a past job of mine, but I wanted to try something more interactive and native for front-end focused content.
Months later we just went back to Keynote. 😅 I’ll have to check out that library next time.

2023-08-15 19:28:14

That Hardcover release is going well so far.
✅ Rails Updated
✅ API Updated (Hasura)
✅ Next.js 12 -> 13 with the App Router
✅ SQL like queries -> Algolia for search
✅ React providers for current user -> Redux
✅ Passing props -> Apollo Client's useFragment hook
✅ Migrations and counter columns updated
Still in progress:
⌛ Updating search index on Algolia (365k/650k books updated)
I'm working my way through bugs now, and will have an official release soon after bugfixes.
https://hardcover.app/books/the-way-of-kings?referrer_id=1

2023-08-14 16:35:01

Yesterday I implemented the simplest data export on Hardcover: a button that makes a single GraphQL query to get all of the users data and outputs the result in a textarea.
It doesn’t use Rails, CSV or anything except Postgres, Hasura and the users browser.
Later on readers will want other exports in different formats I’m sure - CSVs, RSS feeds, json representations, maybe a Google Sheet sync - but for an MVP this will hopefully get people asking for what they want specifically.

2023-08-11 15:26:28

I spent a few hours e yesterday attempting to speed up Hardcover by changing FontAwesome to straight SVGs.
My hypothesis was that it would speed up performance - and it did! …some. Loading solid, duo and regular icons took 50ms each & some bandwidth. Not loading the library cut it down to just bw.
Unfortunately my Google Page Speed didn’t budge, and even went down 😭
I’m at 54 performance in mobile, 75 in desktop now. Next step to try is inlining critical CSS.
#JavaScript #css #WebDev
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/110/871/680/178/958/840/original/5babea3fa04df8bd.png
https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/110/871/680/360/442/707/original/52818d83e067de99.png

2023-08-10 02:37:29

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@npub1uvh…8dl9 I can’t wait for software patents to get a legistative overhaul (once we have a tech-smart group). Have you heard of Nintendo using thier patents?

2023-08-04 14:36:08

One of the best data visualizations I’ve ever seen is The Histomap.
https://www.thehistomap.com
It condenses 4,000 years of history into a single poster.
I remember seeing it on the wall of a used bookstore when I was a kid. I spent an hour just staring at it - exploring each part in detail.
I’ve been thinking about making a “Social Media Histomap” detailing the rise and fall of social media over the last 30 years.
Anyone interested in working together on this?
#dataviz #creativecoding #sciart