Bright ideas and techniques for building with Convex.
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Ian Macartney

Ian works on Developer Experience at Convex. He has been a full stack freelancer at The New York Times and elsewhere, a backend engineer and technical lead at Dropbox, a mechanical engineer at MindTribe, and an iOS engineer before the term "iOS" even existed. He loves ideas and ergonomic tools.

All posts by Ian

Building a Full-Stack ChatGPT app
Let's build a full-stack chat app to talk to ChatGPT on its new API!
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Ian Macartney
3 months ago
Functional Relationships: Helpers
In this post, we’ll look at some helper functions to help write code to traverse relationships in a readable, predictable, and debuggable way.
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Ian Macartney
a month ago
Relationship Structures: Let's Talk About Schemas
In this post we’ll look at some patterns for structuring relationships in the Convex database.
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Ian Macartney
a month ago
Migrating Data With Mutations
Using mutations to migrate data in Convex.
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Ian Macartney
a month ago
Intro to Migrations
There are as many ways to migrate data as there are databases, but here’s some basic information to set the stage.
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Ian Macartney
a month ago
5 Dashboard Tricks
Did you know you can use the Convex Dashboard to run functions, enter seed data, filter & delete data, upload files, and more?
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Ian Macartney
2 months ago
Moderating ChatGPT Content: Full-Stack
In this post, we’ll look at how to use the moderation API to flag messages before sending them to Chat-GPT, and patterns for handling these errors in a full-stack React app.
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Ian Macartney
3 months ago
Adding Personality to ChatGPT-3
How to store multiple personalities Convex and provide them to the chatGPT API, enabling changing personalities mid-conversation. This is a follow-up to Building a full-stack ChatGPT app.
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Ian Macartney
3 months ago
Background Job Management
Implement asynchronous job patterns using a table to track progress. Fire-and-forget, cancelation, timeouts, and more.
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Ian Macartney
4 months ago
Anonymous Users via Sessions
Getting users to sign up for a new service before seeing any benefits is challenging. In this post, we looked at a couple of strategies for managing user information without requiring a login.
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Ian Macartney
4 months ago
Using Dall-E from Convex
Use Convex to fetch an image from OpenAI’s image generation service based on a user-provided prompt.
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Ian Macartney
4 months ago
Building a Multiplayer Game
Building multiplayer games requires a lot of synchronization logic and event systems. However, using Convex, we get a lot of this for free! Follow along here as we build a complex multiplayer game on Convex, leveraging its reactive-by-default queries, transactional mutations, backend storage, and scheduled functions.
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Ian Macartney
4 months ago
Sessions: Wrappers as "Middleware"
How to implement session storage with Convex, using some helper functions we wrote. While most of your data is associated with a user or another document, sometimes you have data that is specific to a user’s browser tab, or associated with a user who isn’t logged in. Some of this data is stored on the client, such as in the browser’s `sessionStorage` or `localStorage`, while other data is stored on the server.
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Ian Macartney
4 months ago
Zod Validation: Wrappers as “Middleware”
Function validation is important for a production app because you can’t always control which clients are talking to your server. See how to use zod to validate your Convex functions, using our withZod wrapper.
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Ian Macartney
4 months ago
Authentication: Wrappers as “Middleware”
Using wrapper functions like withUser can help you organize your code into middleware-like blocks that you can compose to keep your function logic concise.
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Ian Macartney
5 months ago
Implementing Presence with Convex
Some patterns for incorporating presence into a web app leveraging Convex, and sharing some tips & utilities I built along the way.
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Ian Macartney
5 months ago
Throttling Requests by Single-Flighting
For write-heavy applications, use single flighting to dynamically throttle requests. See how we implement this with React hooks for Convex.
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Ian Macartney
6 months ago
Launching Features Right on Time: Feature Gating
Today we’re going to talk about how to flip features on and off remotely using a clever use of the reactive nature of Convex queries.
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Ian Macartney
6 months ago