*Update 2026.02 - More ways to publish changes*
New Features
* AI-powered writing engine
* New LinkedIn integration
* Improved Twitter/X integration
* Reworked embedded widget
* Improved GitHub integration.
Read more at https://t.co/SMCOmtIurD
Today's new release adds a bunch of improvements to auto generation process, Unsplash integration and some editor updates.
Read full changelog - https://t.co/V3qpDAWIDM https://t.co/V3qpDAWIDM
Gitlab Integration
Updatify now supports importing data from GitLab. Bring your Merge Requests and Releases to use them as data source.
Other changes: Added AI tone setting - now you can configure how LLM rewrites your text.
Did you know LinkedIn still does not support text formatting?
You can only do that using unicode symbols which totally kills search and SEO for your posts
I just deployed new tool I used internally for @updatifyio
Meet https://t.co/VyzhjddiJi - free link shortener without registration and with api and web UI support
Fully private, no ads, no other shit
Post to X(twitter)
Happy new 2026 ๐ ๐ปThis new 2026 release adds a way to share your update notes in your connected X account.
Simply connect your account, and check whether you want your update post to be shared on X or not.
Released new update today on @updatifyio
A small change, but I hope it will help my customers to remind their users about their not so popular features
And I reminded my users to use email notifications
I improved onboarding on @updatifyio ๐
Instead of few complex steps I left only one and extracted it to "after sign up flow"
Many users were confused how to get started.
Just this single step should help them get started quicker(but we'll see)
Yesterday and todays morning I worked on improved feature to support multiple repos for @updatifyio as per @martindonadieu request
So far works good, hope this will be useful to those whose apps are multi repo, to help speed up release notes writing.
Need to fix few UI issues after importing and hope to rollout after my 9-5 today
Just had a nice demo with @martindonadieu, thanks for showing up and sharing your input
Will implement features you asked for and hope you can use @updatifyio for your open source products
Yesterday @levelsio advised me to post articles here instead of 3rd party blogging platform, so here we go:
Hey everyone! In this post I wanted to share some of thoughts from my learning process. I'm developing apps for about 15 years, with main lang - ruby and ruby on rails framework. Over my career I worked with pretty much everything - embedded development, mobile, desktop, web.
I know about elixir since 2017 or so when I first saw Chris McCord vid on YouTube about Phoenix. Always wanted to try but never had a chance. Last year I decided to build a product for my own needs and thought what if I use Elixir/Phoenix for that.
To start - I decided to use boilerplate. I won't be sharing the name, but overall I wasn't really happy about it. I had to rewrite about 70% of code because it simply didnt work for my needs, even though my app isnt that special and doesnt have anything non standard. Its simply code wasn't really extendable or reusable, so for my next product I will probably just start with empty PHX app.
It took a bit of time to get used to Elixir functional approach. I could not understand Quote/Unqoute concept until very recently, but that didnt stop me from implementing most of my app with out it. Ecto concept was always not the most pleasant. While I understand why it was made that way, I had cheatsheets always with me simply because I could not memorize function names and arguments, esp when you can use macro syntax for things like select, etc.
LiveView is miles ahead of Rails's turbo. At some point I was even overusing it for simple UI interactions such as opening dropdown, etc. Later I refactored code to use Alpine.js for everything UI related and I'm happy about that. Hooks are really nice addition too, but I only used it once in my case. Just LV and Alpine.js was enough for me. I live in Europe, but I host app on DO in NYC region and have no latency issues with LV. I even tested it through few VPN connections to add some latency and it was working better than most modern react based apps. And overall I was happy with ease of use. I don't really understand complexity made with layouts(root, live, app) so took a bit to get used to it.
ObanJob was nice surprise for me. Finally I didnt need to run another instance of app for background jobs(hello sidekiq) and it required 0 extra infra or maintenance. Maybe for big queues it would made sense, but I have few jobs running every few mins, so it works well.
I had issues with deployment. There are few ways to deploy apps and I went with dockerizing compilation. Dockerfile was pretty simple multistage build, but when running I had OOM errors on my 4gb instance. After hours of googling and debugging I found this `ERL_MAX_PORTS=1024` which solved all my memory issues. It was just a message on elixir forum without much explanation.
Testing tools are a big rough. Rails has many useful gems to help with it like factory bot, etc. ElIxir/Phoenix seem like a bit behind in this terms(but I might just didnt find good tools or good approach).
What I really like - elixir's case statement. Handling different call results not much easier because of pattern match. So things like {:ok, result} -> ... {:error, message} -> helps to handle errors much easier. And overall pattern matching feature is super useful and helped me to write really good code comparing to same in ruby. It's also nice Phoenix has generated authentication code. Unlike from devise - it has minimal implementation, but it's really quick to add anything you need. In my case I added google/github authentication in just few hours.
Some of recent updates made regular controller/template/views a bit weird for me. For some reason now templates, views and controllers under same `controller` folder making it really hard to manage it, would be nice to have separate folder for templates/views outside of controllers.
The app I build - @updatifyio is a release notes tool where you can embed widget to your web app. I also used LV to power the widget. I have some JS code to create modal, but then it just creates iframe inside with LV powered app. One of the features - blog which you can host on subdomain - took a bit of time to get sorted with subdomains. I came up with few plugs that helped me to serve requested blog on subdomain, and it was one of first things I covered with tests because I still feel like it could be done better. For some 3rd party services there isnt a package, so I had to write my own harness, but its not that hard and mostly can be done in matter of hour.
I also had few back and forth with image uploads. Originally I stored them in app, but eventually decided to move to CDN, because it was simply cheaper($5 for DO Spaces). Took a bit to understand ho presign_ function works and thats first time I used hooks. I still don't really like how its implemented and I feel like it could be done easier
Overall I'm really happy with my elixir/phoenix experience. I already pitched this tool for another paid project I'm about to start. The biggest complexity was to convince client there's enough developers on market to support it. For my own projects I plan to use it more. I'm not sure how well it will work just of API type of projects, since LV is a big part of framework and one of reasons people like it.
I tried LiveViewNative few months ago. Saw Dockyard CEO post on twitter and gave it a try. Its in very early stages of development, but it can definitely has its own audience and niche. Its not be used for apps where you might be offline, but I feel like e-commerce type of apps could benefit from it
#MyElixirStatus
A small QOL improvement on @updatifyio - a way to open release notes widget programmatically.
My 2.5 customers complained about issues they had with react based apps, so the fix was obvious.
Had my first @updatifyio update ever
Used it to share this update on my landing page via its own embedded widget
Added GitHub integration, editor image uploads and a bunch of other improvements
Looking for beta testers(it can help you reduce churn rate)
My morning started 4 hours ago
Finished GitHub integration for @updatifyio (not live yet, will be in ~1h)
Now you can import your GitHub release notes, making it even quicker than just writing it yourself.
How's your Monday?
Adding GitHub integration to @updatifyio so you could easier pull release notes from existing releases on GitHub(and eventually other VCS)
@martindonadieu We just chat about that, but hopefully in a day or two this will be done