Top all-time · #5227
Aaron Francis
Personal blog · aaronfrancis.comprogrammingweb
Aaron Francis's personal blog at aaronfrancis.com covers programming and web. Since 2013, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 53 times, most often “An Argument for Logging Off”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- An Argument for Logging Off4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-12
- Do literally anything2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-23
- Read the Docs Like a Book2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-13
- What if you tried hard?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-10
- What if you tried hard?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-21
What Hacker News says?
I once had an entire podcast dedicated to sharing blog posts that had influenced my life. I recorded almost 50 episodes, it was a really rewarding experience. You can see the whole list at https://aaronfrancis.com/musicmakers
Comment linking /musicmakers
on “Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?”Submitted Do literally anything as a story · 127 points
HN discussionIf you want to play snake in Excel, you can do that too! https://aaronfrancis.com/2013/remaking-cellphone-snake-in-mi...
Comment linking /2013/remaking-cellphone-snake-in-microsoft-excel
on “Snake in a QR Code”Submitted Efficient Pagination Using Deferred Joins as a story · 70 points
HN discussionI'm not sure if it's as much a bottleneck in Postgres as it is in MySQL, but I've just written a tome[1] on more effective offset/limit pagination by using something called a deferred join. The main problem with offset / limit pagination is that the database is forced to fetch and discard more and more rows as you get deeper into the pages. The trick to getting offset / limit to be faster is to reduce the amount of…
Comment linking /2022/efficient-pagination-using-deferred-joins
on “PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks”Submitted Efficient Distance Querying in MySQL as a story · 61 points
HN discussionThere are ways to mitigate the (although not eliminate) the slowing down of offset/limit pagination in later pages. The technique is called a "deferred join" and it is most effective in MySQL. The basic idea is to paginate as little data as necessary, and then do a self-join to get the rest of the data for a single page. You can read more about it here: https://aaronfrancis.com/2022/efficient-pagination-using-def...…
Comment linking /2022/efficient-pagination-using-deferred-joins
on “We switched to cursor-based pagination”Submitted Show HN: I Moved into My Home Office/Shed as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI wrote up a whole post on how I use Evernote and IFTTT. My favorite is the monthly screenshots of my Last.FM listening history. http://aaronfrancis.com/blog/2013/2/26/how-i-use-evernote-an...
Comment linking /blog/2013/2/26/how-i-use-evernote-and-ifttt
on “IFTTT goes Mobile”Submitted Show HN: I'm Building a Shedquarters as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI have a pretty in depth write up of how I use IFTTT and Evernote to collect my digital breadcrumbs. I particularly like that every month I get a screenshot of my last.fm chart. It's amazing how much music can spark your memory. http://aaronfrancis.com/blog/2013/2/26/how-i-use-evernote-an...
Comment linking /blog/2013/2/26/how-i-use-evernote-and-ifttt
on “Ask HN: What's the most creative use of IFTTT you've seen?”Submitted An Argument for Logging Off as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThis is one of my favorite recently-discovered blogs. His posts are so in depth and the whole thing is beautiful and slick. I too prefer for my blog to be closed-source, for many of the same reasons. Mine is decidedly less sexy, it's just Laravel + Markdown, but I did write about it recently: https://aaronfrancis.com/2021/blogging-with-markdown-in-lara...
Comment linking /2021/blogging-with-markdown-in-laravel
on “Why My Blog Is Closed-Source”Submitted Count(*) vs. COUNT(id) in MySQL as a story · 6 points
HN discussionhttps://aaronfrancis.com
Comment linking /
on “I'll redesign any 3 websites in less than 3 hours: (Challenge?) HN”Submitted What if you tried hard? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've written a lot on Yii/Heroku if you care to look: http://aaronfrancis.com/?tag=Yii . I love Yii, it's certainly my go-to for PHP frameworks at this point. It's super powerful.
Comment linking /?tag=Yii
on “Yii 1.1.14 release candidate is available”Submitted You're always doing something wrong as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Because I Wanted To as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Make 5x faster outbound requests in Laravel (2024) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A cookieless, cache-friendly image proxy in Laravel as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Argument for Logging Off as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted File Based Routing in Inertia.js as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Adding a microservice to your monolith as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Reputation Is Portable as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted S-Tier Software with Taylor Otwell as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What if you tried hard? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Do literally anything as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Do Anything as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Read the Docs Like a Book as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
