Chris Kottom

Building applications and MVPs for customers and bootstrapping SaaS for me, developing in Rails and JS, 🇺🇸 in 🇨🇿
Wrote:

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

@kylefox @claudeai Fat controllers are the new hotness in 2026.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

@kylefox Would be nice if Claude could take a hint now and then from devs with 20 years experience in Rails rather than getting cute. It’s like, dude, you’re only like 3 years old.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

@kylefox No, it’s saying that your validation is guarding against a condition that’s already guarded against by the unique index, which… sort of but not really the point.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

@marclou @stemonteduro @jacob_jacquet Successful people give up on all kinds of things. Their edge is choosing the right thing(s) not to give up on.

[Ryan Castillo @rmcastil]

Do I know any founders who write their own content and would participate in a UX interview for Knowatoa's new onboarding for $$?

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

git blame - for those times when you've figured out "what the fuck?" and you're ready to move on to "who the fuck?"

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

Don't you wish that buying that clever domain name actually counted for as much progress as it feels like it does?

[Jane Portman @uibreakfast]

We're live on @ProductHunt today 🚀🔥🔥

Please come support the all-new @userlist https://t.co/OmCVaEZD1I

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

Love this GIF at the bottom of the changed files view in the new @github PR interface.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

Build your MVP with the expectation that it's actually a v1 that will need to be extended and maintained for years to come.

If you're wrong, you'll cost yourself a little time, but if you're right, you'll have saved yourself potentially years of carrying costs on crappy code.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

I can completely understand the idea of building a quick MVP to validate the market.

But it's worth asking yourself: what happens if this works? I've never seen a company start to get traction and then put everything on pause to rewrite the app. There's no time.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

The takeaways here?

Document your assumptions.
Build in some form of monitoring early - at least in production.
And remember - technical debt isn't always about cutting corners. Sometimes it's about the system environment not turning out to be what you thought it would.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

Most of the time when we think of technical debt, it's in the context of making a trade-off between "Doing It Right" and "Getting Shit Done". That's certainly one form, but there's another type that's more insidious.

Read on...

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

With The Time Bomb, though, you probably didn't think about any of that, so when it does show up, it comes as a complete surprise. And unless you've got good monitoring and instrumentation, tracking down the root cause becomes a nightmare.

[Chris Kottom @chriskottom]

@_avdept Both have their place, but if you need an iron rule, then universal named args is less risky.