HN user

fredwu

2,035 karma

http://fredwu.me/

Have built the first website back in 1997, and started working in the IT industry since in high school.

Worked in online publishing, marketing as well as web hosting before becoming a professional web developer and designer.

Have been an active member of the open source community since then. Contributed to many projects including Ruby on Rails and Slim. For a full list of my contribution, please head over to http://fredwu.me/ and scroll to the bottom of the page.

A developer who has strong focus on code craftsmanship, business values, UI, UX and most importantly, the user.

Web development is not only my job, my career, but is also the cornerstone that defines who I am. Passionate is my keyword!

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meet.hn/city/au-Melbourne

Socials: - github.com/fredwu - x.com/fredwu

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[ my public key: https://keybase.io/fredwu; my proof: https://keybase.io/fredwu/sigs/D4CtTh6YYns-_2ASh90CEGaKiZb94-Py4UjQb2sRLIw ]

Posts59
Comments99
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feedbun.com 11mo ago

Show HN: A browser extension that decodes food labels for healthy eating

fredwu
2pts0
old.reddit.com 11mo ago

Just launched my 3rd SaaS using Elixir/Phoenix, sharing some random thoughts

fredwu
4pts0
feedbun.com 11mo ago

Show HN: A browser extension that decodes food labels for healthy eating

fredwu
1pts0
www.bloomberg.com 2y ago

Former OpenAI Board Member Calls for Audits of Top AI Companies

fredwu
1pts0
rizz.farm 2y ago

Show HN: Rizz.farm, an AI-assisted lead generation tool for Reddit and beyond

fredwu
2pts1
www.theguardian.com 2y ago

Australian Telco Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigns after network outage

fredwu
41pts18
persumi.com 2y ago

Comparison of AI OCR Tools: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS

fredwu
1pts0
persumi.com 2y ago

How I Built a Mostly Feature-Complete MVP in 3 Months Whilst Working Full-Time

fredwu
5pts1
persumi.com 2y ago

How I Built a Mostly Feature-Complete MVP in 3 Months Whilst Working Full-Time

fredwu
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Show HN: A non-VC backed content creation and social media platform

fredwu
33pts56
fredwu.me 5y ago

Tips for Job Interviews as a Junior Software Developer

fredwu
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Tips for Writing a Good CV / Résumé

fredwu
1pts1
fredwu.me 6y ago

Tips for Becoming a Better Software Developer

fredwu
1pts0
fredwu.me 6y ago

Tips for Becoming a Better Software Developer

fredwu
7pts0
www.youtube.com 7y ago

[Talk] Adaptable Human – Taking the Company and Your Career to the Next Level

fredwu
1pts1
fredwu.me 7y ago

New Blog with New Design and Gatsby.js – Loving JavaScript Again

fredwu
3pts0
github.com 8y ago

Announcing Crawler v1.0.0 – easy web crawling / scraping powered by Elixir

fredwu
4pts0
fredwu.me 8y ago

Coding and Learning Should Never Stop, Open Sourcing Is Caring

fredwu
1pts0
github.com 8y ago

OPQ – A simple, in-memory queue with worker pooling and rate limiting in Elixir

fredwu
2pts0
fredwu.me 8y ago

Elixir and Doctest – Help Writing Better Programs, One Method at a Time

fredwu
4pts0
fredwu.me 10y ago

I Accidentally Some Machine Learning – My Story of a Month of Learning Elixir

fredwu
102pts44
github.com 10y ago

A Simple Bayes (a.k.a. Naive Bayes) Implementation in Elixir

fredwu
5pts0
github.com 10y ago

Stemmer – An English (Porter2) Stemming Implementation in Elixir

fredwu
54pts9
github.com 10y ago

Still learning Elixir, built a Naive Bayes machine learning library for fun :)

fredwu
3pts0
fredwu.me 10y ago

Developers, Being Treated Poorly? You Are Not Alone

fredwu
223pts251
fredwu.me 11y ago

A Poker Player and Developer’s Road to Agile Project Management

fredwu
1pts0
twitter.com 11y ago

How burnouts and depression effected my open source contribution in one screenshot

fredwu
1pts0
fredwu.me 11y ago

Leading Snowflakes – A Book on Software Team Leadership I wish I Read Sooner

fredwu
1pts0
www.confreaks.com 12y ago

Y Not – Adventures in Functional Programming (2012)

fredwu
254pts14
www.microsoft.com 12y ago

Satya Nadella – Microsoft's CEO

fredwu
1023pts564

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Took a long break earlier this year to recharge, but now I'm back at it again, mostly working on Feedbun, about to launch it as an early alpha. :)

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Took a long break earlier this year to recharge, but now I'm back at it again, mostly working on Feedbun, about to launch it as an early alpha. :)

I hangout on a few Slack groups (Elixir, Ruby, etc), got quite a few projects this way as the founders were looking for experienced consultants.

It also helps if you could show either/both:

* a portfolio / clients you've worked with

* open source / "street-cred"

When I was looking for projects I always attach my Github profile (https://github.com/fredwu) to show my open source contributions, and also the SaaS products I've built myself (https://wuit.com/), and if clients are looking for C-level / strategic-level help, I also attach my LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/), these help build up your reputation and stand out amongst many freelancers also looking for projects.

I just had a very quick glance at your site - there seems to be a lot of text, mostly focused on what you can offer. But what's missing is... who are you? What have you done?

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

- Location: Melbourne, Australia

- Remote: Yes, preferred

- Willing to relocate: No

- Technologies: Elixir, Ruby, JavaScript, LLMs

- CV: https://persumi.com/u/fredwu/cv

- Email: ifredwu at gmail dot com

My name’s Fred Wu, I’m an experienced Elixir and Ruby developer who has worked on multiple commercial projects as well as having contributed to many dozens of open source projects including Rails.

I’ve been using Elixir for ~10 years, ruby for ~15 years (used to actively contribute to Rails itself), lead and built multiple commercial B2B & B2C SaaS projects. I’ve always been very hands on, and have worked with multiple tech stacks in the past, including JS/React, PHP, Golang and Clojure.

- My blog and talks: https://fredwu.me/

- My Github profile: https://github.com/fredwu

- My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wufred/

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

More info about hiring me: https://persumi.com/u/fredwu/hire-fred

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

I've been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Elixir Gotchas 2 years ago

Are these even gotchas if they are all very well documented in the official documentation already? I was expecting to see some unusual or undocumented behaviours...

I've been an early user of Github Copilot - I'm so used to it by now that if I didn't have it I'd feel the productivity drop for sure.

Otherwise I've been doing lots of experiments on using LLMs for my SaaS products (a blog platform, and a Reddit lead gen platform), my client projects and my day job (health care related products).

I've tried all the leading LLMs, so far my personal favourite is Claude Haiku due to its low latency and low cost. Using the reflection pattern, you can push the LLM pretty far. I've also just started looking into the multi-agent agentic workflow now... Paired with Elixir and OTP, it can get quite powerful. :)

Calling this an LLM and claiming:

With enough training data and a good chat interface, this can be used instead of well-known decoder-only models like GPT, Mistral, etc.

Seems to be very misleading...

* Github Copilot for assisting me writing code more efficiently.

* 34" ultra-wide screen for productivity.

* Firefox with a bunch of addons, including tab containers, for browsing the web with sanity.

* Youtube for following my favourite channels to de-stress and/or be informed.

* Pocketcast (on Android) for all my podcasts.

* Quest 2 and treadmill for keeping me fit.

- "Major performance improvements over 3.2"

- "Significantly improved memory usage over 3.2"

Seems pretty good to me.

I don't think blog platforms "suck", but I do think there are QoL enhancements that can be made to them the experience better for both the writers and the readers.

I built https://persumi.com for exactly this reason - to replace my own blog with a bit of QoL flare. Things like AI summaries, the optional social aspects (like/follow, etc), and TTS to turn text articles into audio / podcasts, etc, etc.

Someone following the news closer please fact-check me, but AFAIK, the chain of events:

- The Optus network (the second largest telco network in Australia) went down

- Optus executives initially couldn't coordinate anything because they were... all on Optus

- The network outage lasted ~14 hours

- The network outage effected triple-zero, the country's emergency number, because Optus was rebooting towers and causing phones to still connect to them so they can't fallback to another carrier to dial 000

- After the network is finally back up, Optus blamed "a 3rd party" that caused the outage

- The "3rd party" was then turned out to be Singtel - Optus' parent company

- Singtel issued a statement to basically say Optus was wrong

- Optus then issued another statement saying the outage was caused by them using default configuration files on some of their Cisco routers

- The Australian senate summoned the Optus CEO for a hearing

- Here we are, the CEO resigned

EDIT:

To add more context, just over a year ago (in Sept 2022), Optus, under the same CEO's leadership, had a massive data breach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Optus_data_breach

https://persumi.com/

I spent 3-4 months working on it whilst having a day job. It's a writing/reading/listening platform, kinda like a mix of Medium/Substack/Wordpress/Twitter/Reddit...

I wrote about the tech stack and how I built it here: https://persumi.com/c/persumi/u/fredwu/p/how-i-built-a-mostl...

Still got a long way to go, especially to tweak the user onboarding side of things to explain much better on the concepts.

Would love some feedback!

Hi nonameiguess, good questions!

Are these sign up links solely for writers?

No not really, anyone could (and should) sign up because I do believe that everyone is unique and has their "personas" to show for, whether it's their natural talent, or skills, knowledge, anecdotes, etc.

Has anyone actually signed up yet?

I've only just soft launched it, mostly to gather feedback before I start doing the marketing side of things, so no not really, yet.

I can't find any links to read or listen to anything. How do consumers use this?

My hope is that once I improved the product based on the feedback, it'll start attracting people who simply want to blog and don't want to (or don't have the skills to) set up their own blog. This way the content will be gradually built up.

Does it require a login?

Absolutely not. This is actually one of my pet peeves for certain existing platforms. I hate login walls, I believe good content should be publicly visible to everyone.

Do you have to subscribe to read?

Nope, it's entirely optional.

Are all users treated the same with the assumption that anyone signing up wants to both publish and consume?

In short yes. The plan is to offer value-added functionalities such as the AI voice, as premium features so the platform can have a sustainable way of existing.

the entire concept of "content creation" has become epistemically bankrupt and harmful to the world

You know what, I agree with your observation. And this is actually the primary driver behind creating Persumi. For that reason, I never positioned Persumi to be a competitor to the status quo social media platforms. I think the whole "content creation" space needs a bit of shake up.

the content creators themselves have bad incentives

I agree with this part of the statement.

regardless of how the platform funds itself

But not necessarily this part. If a platform isn't pressured into selling more ads, or introducing more user-hostle features, and instead focused more on the users and content, the vibe would be quite different, and I would hope that then it will attract content creators who either would naturally gravitate towards such platform, or would adjust their behaviours/content accordingly to serve their audience.

At this stage nobody knows how to solve this problem (otherwise it would've been solved already), but hey I'm still naive enough to give it a shot. :P