Jack Ellis
Jack Ellis is a technical writer, teacher and software engineer with over 15 years in the game. Throughout his career, he’s built software for media companies, governments, insurance companies and international law firms.
Jack has taught thousands of developers how to scale their web applications and databases, and regularly shares his experiences on the Fathom Blog and in the Laravel tips section.
Today, he is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, a Google Analytics Alternative focusing on GDPR compliance and simplicity.
Published blog posts
I made a mistake
Last month, I tweeted that I had rolled all our email report queries into one query, allowing us to deliver our email reports much faster. Amazing, right? Nope, let me share my mistakes.
technical
Reducing our AWS bill by $100,000
We reduced our AWS bill so that we could invest in more important areas.
technical
How we built our referral program
People keep asking us how we built our referral program. This is how we did it.
technical
Migrating a 2TB database in 7.5 minutes
The story of how we migrated 17 billion database rows.
technical
Building our Google Analytics Importer
How we imported billions of pageviews from Google Analytics
technical
SingleStore is now faster on Apple Silicon
SingleStore is now up to 90.99% faster on your local development environment.
laravel-tips
How to have multiple unique columns in SingleStore
SingleStore only allows one unique key per table. But what if we want more?
laravel-tips
We rebuilt our entire application
We had technical debt, a framework nobody knew and a bottleneck from hell.
technical
Denmark: 6 months in jail for using Google’s services
On 14th July, six months after we published a post about how Google Analytics was made illegal in the EU, we woke up to our privacy officer, Rie, telling the world that Google products are banned in Denmark from processing personal data of any kind.
news
Does Laravel Scale?
The internet is full of lies about whether Laravel can scale. Here's the truth.
technical
Your website analytics are breaking the law
On 13th January 2022, the Austrian Data Protection Authority ruled that Google Analytics is illegal.
news
2021 Year in review
We had our best year ever, but it wasn't all smooth sailing.
technical
The Journey to EU Isolation
The EU didn't think it was possible to comply with their new ruling, so we decided to prove them wrong and build it.
technical
Why we ditched DynamoDB
After being very publicly excited about DynamoDB for over a year, we’ve now completely ditched it.
technical
Making the world’s fastest analytics even faster
In this blog post, I’m going to tell you how I migrated close to one billion database rows with zero downtime, achieved a ~30% query speed increase, and took Fathom to the next level.
technical
Fathom retains IP addresses temporarily for security. How do you protect that data?
Here’s a question we recently got from a customer regarding Fathom being a privacy-first company and how that relates to the data we collect for our analytics
technical
Building the world’s fastest website analytics
For over a year, we’d been struggling to keep up with our analytics data growth. Fathom had been growing at the speed of light, with more and more people ditching Google Analytics, our data ingestion was going through the roof.
technical
2020 Year in Review
Here’s my first ever year in review. It’s a deep dive into how 2020 was for me and it wasn’t easy to write.
news
Someone attacked our company
At the start of November, someone decided that they would try to attack and destroy our company. Here’s how we stopped them.
news
How to build a privacy-first software business
Data breaches occur every single day and people are getting tired of companies that don’t take their privacy seriously.
news
Hosted vs self-hosted website analytics
When deciding which analytics software to use for your website, one of the questions to be considered is whether you want to use a managed service or use self hosted analytics.
technical
What happened when a customer got over 10m pageviews in a few hours?
What happened to our infrastructure when a customer got over 10 million page views in a few hours?
technical
What tech stack does Fathom Analytics use?
When developers use a product like Fathom Analytics, the first question that comes to mind is “What tech stack is this company using?”. I personally love reading through company tech blog posts where they talk about their stacks.
technical
Let’s talk about Friday and the Cloudflare outage
On Friday 17th July, the internet collapsed for 27 minutes due to a Cloudflare outage.
news
A 1 year review of Laravel Vapor
As one Laravel Vapor’s first customers, we wanted to walk you through a review of costs, scaling, reliability and more. Here’s what we’ve found after using Vapor for almost a year.
technical
I quit my job to work on Fathom Analytics full time
As 2020 came around, it was becoming clear to me that I couldn’t handle my full time job and run Fathom, so I had to leave.
news
Should I use Laravel Vapor?
You've heard of Vapor, you know that it's for serverless Laravel deployment, but what does it do?
laravel-tips
Improve Laravel Vapor response time with prewarming
We take a look at the true cost of prewarming and why you shouldn't be scared of it
laravel-tips
What is Serverless?
We've all heard the term serverless. But what is it and how does Vapor utilize it?
laravel-tips
We rebuilt Fathom Analytics + moved to Laravel Vapor
In this article, we’re going to talk in-depth about our experience with Heroku and why we decided to move to Laravel Vapor.
technical
Why we changed our pricing to focus on regular-sized businesses
The reasoning behind why we are nott interested in enterprise and are focusing on regular-sized businesses
news
GDPR compliant website analytics without cookies
How Fathom Analytics build a totally GDPR compliant website analytics without cookies.
technical
