Jack Ellis

@JackEllis

Software engineer. Building usefathom.com since 2019. Sharing all the technical details from behind the scenes.

usefathom.com

Joined May 2008

Pinned
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Jul 13
I’ve spent nearly seven years documenting how we built Fathom: outages, DDoS attacks, migrations, $100k AWS savings, my cofounder’s retirement, and a divorce. I write transparently because I want other people to learn from my mistakes. These 18 posts tell the story:
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
8h
I can't remember the last time I used OpenAI's models for programming. I used to use GPT-5.5 Extra High daily but then Grok 4.6 launched and changed the game for me. Everyone on Cursor should be using Grok 4.6 as a base now, don't waste your money on OpenAI models.
OpenAI
@OpenAI
8h
We’re ending our partnership with Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX. Under our proposal, Cursor’s direct access to our models would end on November 12. We know that the people most affected by this decision are the developers who rely on OpenAI models in Cursor. We care
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 26
Coding is solved. I haven’t written a single line of code since 2025. But software engineering is more alive than ever. If you’re building something that matches a known pattern, AI will deliver perfection. But as soon as you get into deeply complex, novel work, it produces slop.
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 26
Quite proud of this. Not a game changing feature launch by any means but we've had to move from a "Goal ID" based approach to an "Event name" one, which has been super hard because removing primary keys isn't easy. This "boring" work paves the way for a huge new feature launch :)
Fathom Analytics
@usefathom
Aug 26
We've made managing currencies for your events much easier! You can now set currencies straight from your dashboard: a site default, per event, or a wildcard like "Purchase: *". We've also moved event blocking into the Firewall, where you can now Block or Allow junk events
Jack Ellis
@JackEllis
Aug 26
Just cancelled my Claude subscription. The reason I'm dropping Claude is because the model was constantly combative, would point out issues without offering solutions and talking to it felt like pulling teeth. It didn't help me grow and I gave up trying to refine the base prompt.