Top all-time · #3647
Paweł Urbanek
Personal blog · pawelurbanek.com · on HN as pawurbprogrammingweb
Paweł Urbanek's personal blog at pawelurbanek.com covers programming and web. Since 2018, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 133 times, most often “The In-depth Guide to ActiveRecord load_async in Rails 7”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-07-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Backend developer with over 10 years of experience. Specializing in Ruby on Rails, Rust, PostgreSQL, and backend performance.
Most-linked posts?
- The In-depth Guide to ActiveRecord load_async in Rails 74 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-03-01
- How I spend less time on YouTube4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-08
- Adding GDPR Compliance to My Rails App and Technical Blog2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-05-14
- Show HN: PG Extras – a set of tools for debugging PostgreSQL performance issues2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-29
- How to Setup Pi-Hole on a Local Computer Without Raspberry Pi2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-05
- How to Perform Concurrent HTTP Requests in Ruby and Rails2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-28
- Simple Way to Encrypt Data in Rails Without Gem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-09
- Migrate Your Heroku Postgres Database to AWS RDS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-06
- How to Subscribe to YouTube Channels Without an Account2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-02-16
- UUID Primary Key in Rails 6 with PostgreSQL and Active Record2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-11-26
What Hacker News says?
I've recently described my road to $10k profit from a bootstraped side project https://pawelurbanek.com/side-project-profit
Comment linking /side-project-profit
on “Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?”Submitted How I've built a profitable Slack bot as a side project in Rails as a story · 263 points
HN discussionI've written a similar post on how to remove AMP from your blog, without sacrificing SEO rating and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
Comment linking /amp-seo-rating-performance
on “How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer”Submitted PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks as a story · 249 points
HN discussionYou can remove Google AMP without hurting organic traffic and web performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
Comment linking /amp-seo-rating-performance
on “Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate”Submitted Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS as a story · 199 points
HN discussionAn orthogonal migration issue which I'm hitting right now: we need to migrate from heroku postgres to aws rds postgres, and I'm stressed about the risk and potential downtime in doing so. If there was a way to make a replica in rds based on heroku, promote the rds replica to be the primary, hard switch our apps over to rds, that'd be a lifesaver. I'm working through this blog post [1] now, but there is still a bit t…
Comment linking /heroku-migrate-postgres-rds
on “PostgreSQL 14”Submitted How I spend less time on YouTube as a story · 182 points
HN discussionMedium is poor choice of publishing platform anyway https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo
Comment linking /medium-blogging-platform-seo
on “Ending our Medium integration”Submitted Requests dropped when using Cloudflare’s free tier for a commercial project as a story · 177 points
HN discussionhttps://pawelurbanek.com ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Optimize Dokku Deployment Speed for Ruby on Rails Apps with Dockerfile as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI've written a piece about how to remove AMP support from your website without sacrificing organic traffic and performance https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
Comment linking /amp-seo-rating-performance
on “Fight back against Google AMP (2018)”Submitted How I've Made $50k Profit from a Side Project Slack Bot as a story · 14 points
HN discussionYeah but than you always generate an additional request, with HSTS cached, browser with fetch the https version without an additonal redirect. I wrote a post about it some time ago https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance
Comment linking /amp-seo-rating-performance
on “HTTP headers for the responsible developer”Submitted Show HN: PG Extras – a set of tools for debugging PostgreSQL performance issues as a story · 12 points
HN discussionhttps://pawelurbanek.com/gdpr-compliance-blog-rails My take on GDPR compliance from a solo developer perspective without a legal team to back him up.
Comment linking /gdpr-compliance-blog-rails
on “GDPR: Don't Panic”Submitted Using LLMs and MCP to Debug PostgreSQL Performance in Rails as a story · 8 points
HN discussion2FA for SSH sounds great but I can only imagine how cumbersome it must be for using on a daily basis. I've recently started permanently locking my SSH ports and only briefly whitelisting them for only my IP with a bash scripts whenever the access is needed https://pawelurbanek.com/ec2-ssh-dynamic-access
Comment linking /ec2-ssh-dynamic-access
on “SSH hacks – a little sanity for remote workers”Submitted Ruby on Rails Mistakes That Could Kill Your Production Servers as a story · 8 points
HN discussionDokku is a viable infrastructure solution for side projects, even if you don't have much dev ops exp https://pawelurbanek.com/rails-heroku-dokku-migration
Comment linking /rails-heroku-dokku-migration
on “Kubernetes Is a Surprisingly Affordable Platform for Personal Projects”Submitted My Recipe for Optimizing the Performance of Rails Applications as a story · 6 points
HN discussionMy no longer "side" project recently hit the milestone of $4k/month https://pawelurbanek.com/profitable-slack-bot-rails . Took me over 3 years to get to this point. It allowed me to quit my job and focus on growing it even further full-time.
Comment linking /profitable-slack-bot-rails
on “Show HN: After 2.5 years on my side project, it has hit £500/month revenue”Submitted Avoid the Most Dangerous Word in Software Development as a story · 6 points
HN discussionFor youtube specifically, I found this great snippet for ublock origin. It removes (almost) all recommendations in youtube, which makes it much easier to quit after just one video: www.youtube.com###secondary www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] #primary www.youtube.com##.ytp-show-tiles.ytp-endscreen-paginate.videowall-endscreen.ytp-player-content.html5-endscreen Source: https://pawelurbanek.com/youtube-…
Comment linking /youtube-addiction-selfcontrol
on “I'm an addict”Submitted Blogging Changed My Programming Career as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMedium is also terrible for SEO. Writing there is a waste of time and resources https://pawelurbanek.com/medium-blogging-platform-seo
Comment linking /medium-blogging-platform-seo
on “Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium”Submitted UUID Primary Key in Elixir Phoenix with PostgreSQL and Ecto as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI dont know much about macs, but googling this looks like it should work for you. https://pawelurbanek.com/pihole-local-computer , though I'd try to use the official compose instead of his version on github. https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole
Comment linking /pihole-local-computer
on “72% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles hardcode DNS settings”Submitted How to Improve ActiveRecord Query Performance with Subquery Caching as a story · 5 points
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