I killed Fusion

Hey y’all,

This week has been a strange mix of endings and beginnings. I let go of a project I poured months into, hopped on a plane to a conference for a language I’ve never used, and found time to publish new videos I’m genuinely excited about.

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Thoughts from the week

If you haven't listened to this week’s Mostly Technical, you might have missed the fact that I killed Fusion.

Fusion was a library that I spent a few months building to bring Laravel closer together with Vue and React. I said before I launched it that I hope people loved it or hated it, but weren't lukewarm. Lots of people hated it! Which is fine. But also, no one loved it. So that's that!

It was a good try. It was fun, it was technically interesting, but I don't have it in me to fight uphill for the next few years to make it a thing. I always knew it'd be a long road, but it's not a road I wanna walk alone. I don't care that much to try to change the whole industry.

Lately, I'm becoming more and more focused on just building things and less on the underlying tech. It's a little embarrassing to publicly try something and then give it up, but hey, that's the game. The price of admission is the possibility of failure, and I'm ok with that! It stings, but I'm ok with it!

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Tweets from the week

We don’t see communities get acquired very often, which makes this stand out to me quite a bit. All of Small Bets' revenue comes from one-time purchases, so it’s not even like Gumroad is buying a recurring revenue stream.

I think Gumroad has correctly realized that their moat is eroding, and they needed something else to set them apart. I’m not sure how they’ll integrate everything, but very few SaaS companies serving creators have anything close to the kind of loyal community that Small Bets has built.

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If you don’t know this guy, he’s made a name for himself with studio tours and teardowns. He’s become a go-to source for both technical expertise and good taste.

This is a great example of finding founder/audience fit first, then building products that serve that existing audience. Obviously, Steve and I are trying to do the same thing!

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This guy is one of the most thoughtful, sharpest people on X.com—the everything app. He does a lot of long-form writing, and I’d highly recommend reading all of it.

This piece in particular is really good. Definitely worth your time.

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I love starting new projects and I think that generally serves me well, but as we saw with Fusion, sometimes a new project isn’t the right move.

I feel this tweet in my bones, especially outside of work: the newness of depth with longtime friends, with my wife of ten years, and so on. But inside of work, I’m much more prone to chase the newness of new, instead of leaning into the newness of depth.

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A wild visual exploration into the internals of SQLite. So cool!

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You can just do things.

I’ve got half an article in my head about how sometimes, the key to making friends is simply planning things. This tweet is perfect fodder for that idea. Good for these guys for making it happen.

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“In a world of memes, be an essay” is such a cool phrase. This is one of those quote tweet threads, so if you click through, you’ll find a bunch more great examples. This is very spiritually aligned with how I want to live: playing the long game, building a reputation over time, not just chasing likes for hot takes.

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This week at Try Hard Studios

This week I’m in Miami for React Miami…for some reason! I’ve never written a line of React in my life, but the conference has been a lot of fun. I’ve seen a bunch of internet friends in real life and that’s a delight. Honestly, that’s kind of the whole point of conferences for me these days.

Before I left, I published a few new YouTube videos. I’m trying to move toward publishing more often, and I’ve found that when I just make videos I’m excited about, it's very easy to publish.

🎬 YouTube

I built Cloudflare Images in PHP

I built a very basic version of Cloudflare's image proxy that we use on our various sites, like highperformancesqlite.com. It's a single controller in our Laravel application! Check it out on YouTube here!

Designing the data model for our course platform

This is a long form video describing how I built out the complex data model for our course and e-commerce platform. I promise, the 1 hour video goes by fast…watch it here!

Building a serverless database replica with Carl Sverre

In the latest Database School podcast episode, Carl Sverre and I discuss why syncing everything is a bad idea and how his new project, Graft, makes edge-native, partially replicated databases possible. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on your favorite podcast player.

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That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know.

Talk soon,
Aaron

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