Ludovic Frank

Passionate web developer living in France, creator of projects like ViteUneTable, LFNY, LFQR, LFMDP LFUnminfy, LFColors, LFSocial, LFMaps and LFGitignore.

Always interested in trying out new things.

In addition to occasionally writing on this platform, I also maintain my own blog.
October 21, 2025

Why bother installing Mailcatcher? ๐Ÿคฏ

From the series โ€œI kinda like Railsโ€ โค๐Ÿ”ฅ I had to debug an email being sent in developmentโ€ฆ ๐Ÿ’ป๐Ÿ“จ So people say: โ€œJust use Mailcatcherโ€ฆ blah blah blahโ€ ๐Ÿ™„ LAZY / 20 ๐Ÿ˜ด The email just opens in a new browser tab. โœจ Why make it complicated when you can keep it simple? ๐Ÿ˜Œ Love it ๐Ÿ˜
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October 17, 2025

UIWebViews haven't been a problem since iOS 8.0... ๐Ÿ“ฑ

"But what's he going on about now, what's a UIWebView?" Let's go back to the iOS 6.0 era, when iOS was king... ๐Ÿ‘‘ To create apps, using web technologies was forbidden - you had to use Apple's proprietary technologies via Xcode, and code in Objective-C (Swift didn't exist yet). Among the tools provided by Apple was "UIWebView," which all...
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October 17, 2025

There's Dumbo doing experiments... ๐Ÿ˜

What? What's wrong with my hook? You don't like it? ๐Ÿ˜ Even though I spend time on Rails, playing around with the framework and its ecosystem, I haven't forgotten Symfony and the PHP world. ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ’ป And things are moving in this little world... โœจ Yes, yes I swear! ๐Ÿ™Œ And especially at the web server level, the big news of the moment is Franken...
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October 15, 2025

If there's one thing I'm not too much of a fan of at Apple ๐ŸŽ, it's their mice and keyboards...

So, I used to like the Magic Mouse, they mixed a mouse and a trackpad together. (Well now my mouse is an MX Master, but that's not the point ๐Ÿ–ฑ) But, when you use it, you have your hand crushed on the mouse, and over time it creates pain... ๐Ÿ˜ฃ What? What do you mean I spend too much time on my computer ๐Ÿ’ป, I don't know what you're talking...
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October 13, 2025

AWS has become a standard... ๐ŸŒ

Actually, I mainly want to talk about S3. ๐Ÿ“ฆ Let me explain... Out of my three current client projects, all three use S3 for file storage. ๐Ÿ’พ I even have one where the job was to transfer all the data from AWS S3 to Clever Cloud Cellar. ๐Ÿ”„ And guess what? It's exactly the same API... โœจ Well, Cellar has a few fewer features (especially reg...
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October 11, 2025

๐Ÿ˜€ Joss explains to you how to maintain a Sylius e-shop

Sylius has become a reference in the e-commerce world ๐Ÿš€. And it's not for nothing: it works really well, I know something about it! I've had a Sylius running for years ๐Ÿ˜. But it's like everything else, you need to take care of it for it to work well! ๐Ÿ’ช This week, on the blog, Josselin gives you the keys to properly maintain your Sylius...
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October 11, 2025

"Hello, we're Spotify, and actually we control the music industry" ๐ŸŽต

Lately, I was looking at my Spotify playlists... ๐Ÿ“ฑ And while scrolling, I thought to myself: "But actually, they have enormous power over the entire music industry". ๐Ÿ’ช Let me explain... Spotify's real value isn't being a streaming music player. Well, yes, at the beginning, with their hybrid model mixing P2P and servers and loading a so...
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October 6, 2025

From now on, the clients I work with will no longer be public information... ๐Ÿ”’๐Ÿค

That's why on my LinkedIn, you'll no longer see any companies listed in my experience section. ๐Ÿ’ผโŒ Why? ๐Ÿค” Because I value my freedom of expression ๐Ÿ’ฌ๐Ÿ—ฃ, and today the blog is read by quite a few people. ๐Ÿ“–๐Ÿ‘ฅ On social networks, it varies: on X, I interact a lot ๐Ÿฆ๐Ÿ’ญ, on LinkedIn less so ๐Ÿ“‰, the structure of the network means it works less well...
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October 6, 2025

๐Ÿ‘ Use OpenAI's Whisper on your Mac for "Speech to text"

WhatsApp voice messages: convenient for those who send them, annoying for those who receive them... ๐Ÿ˜… Let me tell you! ๐Ÿ“ฑ I have a pretty intense flow of information every day, whether it's emails, messages... etc. I've set up systems to sort through all of that, focus my attention on what matters and set aside what's not very important...
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October 1, 2025

The truth... all of this terrifies me... ๐Ÿ˜ฐ

Let me explain... ๐Ÿ‘‡ In 2020, I decided to go 100% freelance, and I was confident. ๐Ÿ’ช I'm not made for permanent contracts, that's just how it is, some people are, I'm not. ๐Ÿคทโ™‚ But the hardest thing about being freelance is finding clients you actually want to work with... ๐ŸŽฏ Except that, since I was a teenager I've always had a blog, init...
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October 1, 2025

A modern way to do cross-platform? ๐Ÿ’ป

It's worth checking out! ๐Ÿ‘€ Tauri allows you to create your interface with Web technologies (JavaScript, vanilla, VueJS, React... etc). ๐ŸŒ And behind this interface? Rust code, it's this code that does the "heavy lifting". โš™ For example, in software that processes videos ๐ŸŽฌ, using a "low-level" language like Rust allows you to have perfor...
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September 28, 2025

Apple Intelligence has absolutely NO sense of humor... ๐Ÿ˜…

Let me tell you, as a proper tech geek who's passionate about technology ๐Ÿค“, we're the type to chat on X. In my feed, I see an interesting tweet talking about AI and all that ๐Ÿค–. And a buddy replies to this tweet, his joke is funny, as you can see in the image below ๐Ÿ‘‡. So, the big goofball that I am piles on, well yeah... ๐Ÿ™ƒ And I'll let ...
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September 26, 2025

I REALLY hate alert()... ๐Ÿ˜ค

This isn't new, back in 2012, when a website or application used this JavaScript API, it was a deal-breaker for me and I'd categorize that application as "poor quality" ๐Ÿ‘Ž. To counter this, for a long time, I would asynchronously load libraries like SweetAlert2. ViteUneTable for example, uses SweetAlert for confirmation requests โœ…. Alon...
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September 25, 2025

A bad idea...

Putting the current interface state (the reservation calendar) ๐Ÿ“… in the page's <a> anchors, I wanted to test this, knowing it was a bad idea... But hey, it allowed having a different state if the interface is opened in multiple tabs. ๐Ÿ”— I confirm, it was a very bad idea! ๐Ÿ˜… My state is way too complex to be managed like that. We're going...
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September 23, 2025

Developers will be your most annoying customers! ๐Ÿ˜…

Besides being a friend for 14 years now, I'm also a client of the software written by Josselin. Yes, I did say "client" - friendship is exactly that: supporting your friends in their projects, so by buying their services... ๐Ÿค Anyway, the post you're reading right now, I scheduled it with Plus-tard, his SaaS that allows you to schedule ...
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September 22, 2025

Take it all

Hey there, As always, thank you for being a subscriber to my newsletter ๐Ÿ˜. New week, new blog post ๐Ÿ˜. This time, weโ€™re talking about part of the frontend side of Symfony-UX / Rails. Yep, weโ€™re diving into Stimulus. First, Iโ€™ll share a link to the most well-known Stimulus controller, and then Iโ€™ll show you the source code of my own Stim...
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September 19, 2025

The latest version of Turbo reminded me that I was an idiot... ๐Ÿคฆโ€โ™‚๏ธ

Let me tell you the story! One of my applications (no, I won't tell you which one ๐Ÿ˜) uses Turbo and Stimulus... well yes, it's my default front-end stack now. And in this application I'm making major modifications, and during these modifications I think to myself "hey, what if I upgraded to the latest version of Turbo to access the new...
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September 16, 2025

There are some people, they're a bit crazy actually ๐Ÿคช

You receive a Word document with... ๐Ÿ“„ With what they want inside, cool, and regarding the price of the service: "Yeah, don't worry!" ๐Ÿ‘ Three weeks later: "So, have you started?" โฐ Well, no actually... I don't know what I'm going to earn, so well, sorry but... ๐Ÿคทโ™‚ Quote, invoice, all that ๐Ÿ“Š๐Ÿ’ฐ
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September 14, 2025

Yikes! I have to tell you about this... ๐Ÿ˜…

A company, not at all in the tech world, that I work with from time to time on certain projects, made me a request. The idea behind the request is: develop business software for a need. So far, no problem. ๐Ÿ‘ And they want me to sell them the source code... But since the company doesn't have a real CTO and has never worked with devs, fo...
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September 13, 2025

Self-hosted autocompletion for your forms...

Hey there! ๐Ÿ˜ As always, thanks for following my newsletter ๐Ÿ˜€. So recently, I needed to implement a system for address auto-completion forms. But you know... with Google API and others, it's "free" but in fact, it's not really free. ๐Ÿ˜› So I checked what's possible to do. For French addresses, there's some great stuff available! ๐Ÿ‡ซ๐Ÿ‡ท And th...
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September 11, 2025

The relaxing side of doing things for free... โœจ

I write a lot on the blog... ๐Ÿ˜Š I've always loved writing, I've always had a blog since I was 14 (RIP my old blog by the way... ๐Ÿ˜…) But the thing I love most about it is that when I write on the blog, I share things, meaning I write what I want to write, not what will get clicks (I couldn't care less ๐Ÿคทโ™‚) And it's like a gift ๐ŸŽ: either pe...
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September 11, 2025

๐Ÿš€ Cut 512kb of JavaScript from your Rails app's initial load?

Hey. there ๐Ÿ˜ƒ ! Soooooo.... Yes, it's possible in just 5 minutes โฑ If you're using Trix (Rails' WYSIWYG editor), you're probably loading half a megabyte of JS... even when your users don't need it! ๐Ÿ˜ฑ The problem: Action Text loads Trix on FIRST page load, The impact: On weak 4G? It's a disaster ๐Ÿ“ฑ๐Ÿ’” My dead-simple solution: โœ… Disable prel...
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September 10, 2025

Ruby on Rails

The last time I was this enthusiastic was in 2012, when I discovered Symfony... ๐Ÿš€ I had planned for the first software to be released before talking about it publicly. But I can't help it, I'm having way too much fun, I'm way too absorbed by the marvel that is Ruby on Rails... ๐Ÿ’Ž EVERY SINGLE TIME I discover how to do something, like 10...
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September 9, 2025

๐Ÿšจ PERFORMANCE ALERT: MySQL 8.0+ made me lose 8 seconds of my life... and that's just the beginning!

Imagine: Your brand new MacBook Pro M3 Pro struggling on a simple migration of 12 tables. ๐Ÿ˜ฑ That's EXACTLY what happened to me last week. And the worst part? It wasn't the first time MySQL 8.0+ disappointed me. ๐Ÿ” The story begins this summer... On my LFGitignore project (a little Django side project), the performance was so catastrophi...
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September 8, 2025

Can AI Really Redesign Your Website? Joss Tried It

Hey there ๐Ÿ˜, Today on the blog, Joss wrote about his summer experiment using AI to completely redesign his SaaS platform, Plus Tard. Spoiler: it's not as simple as asking ChatGPT to "make it pretty." The Challenge With paying customers arriving and feedback rolling in, Plus Tard needed both a landing page refresh and an internal app re...
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September 6, 2025

Annihilating complexity right down to the email address... ๐Ÿ“ง

Since going freelance, I created an email address: "contact@developpeur-freelance.io", looks professional, on a custom domain and all that... ๐Ÿ’ผ But young Ludo from 2020, there were a few things he didn't know back then. In 1-to-1 discussions, on WhatsApp for example, people would sometimes ask me "what's your email so I can forward thi...
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September 2, 2025

Blog post : Turbo and Turnstile

Hey there ๐Ÿ™‚, I hope you're doing well and that your back-to-school/work season is going well ๐Ÿ˜. On my end, for the first article of the year, we're going back a bit into the hotwired ecosystem (Symfony-UX). And yes, I wrote an article about Turbo and Turnstile (Cloudflare's anti-bot solution). (there's also a French version) I hope the...
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August 28, 2025

AI sucks with design.

Hey there ๐Ÿ˜, Like many of you, AI is a part of my life now. I use it a lot to help me do things... Right now I'm working on a new landing page for ViteUneTable. It's Bootstrap 5, nothing crazy... To speed things up, I'm working with Claude ๐Ÿ™‚. With Tailwind, I'm able to get quite good results, but with Bootstrap, it's a complete disaste...
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August 26, 2025

LFNY, LFQR and LFMDP are now translated into English

Hey there ๐Ÿ˜, In December 2024, I wrote three free SaaS apps for tiny companies. I wrote them, but I didn't think anyone would use them. 6 months later, there are around 100 users on each app who use them frequently. So I decided to translate them into English. Here are the apps: โ€ข LFNY: Create custom short links โ€ข LFQR: Create QR codes...
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August 23, 2025

Actually, their app is hybridโ€ฆ ๐Ÿ˜ฎ

I love 37signals, Iโ€™ve been talking about them for years! To me, theyโ€™re a model companyโ€ฆ In 2021, with just 34 employees, they generated $35 million in revenue (I donโ€™t have reliable data on net profit). Also: 37signals uses a super lightweight structure, favoring two-person teams (one programmer and one designer) for each project cyc...
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