Weekly Wisdom: Insights and Discoveries from My Reading Journey

Occasionally, I'll share insights and learnings from my reading journey. This is the first installment—a digest of valuable discoveries, both recent and past.

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1. Sending Prompts to Multiple AI Models Simultaneously

Last week, while commuting home from work, I had an idea that I quickly noted down:

One UI to interact with multiple AI models and evaluate the best response.

Problem:

Currently, users manually copy and paste the same prompt into multiple AI platforms to compare results. What if there were a single UI that could send a prompt to multiple AIs at once? What if, instead of the user going to the AI, the AI came to the user?

As it turns out, this idea has already been implemented. Chatbot Arena, developed by UC Berkeley researchers and supported by various organizations, allows users to compare AI models based on user votes.

It offers almost all the features I envisioned—and even more:

• Compare chat responses and send follow-up prompts.

• Compare image generation, with the option to download images for free.

• Compare code generation, with downloadable outputs.

• View an AI leaderboard across different categories.

If you try it, don’t forget to vote for the best model as a way of giving back!

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2. Changing a Self-Hosted App to a Multi Tenant Hosted App – Postgres Schemas in Rails

This blog post explores how to implement multi-tenancy in a Rails application using PostgreSQL schemas and the ros/apartment gem. The author presents an unconventional but interesting approach: keeping some tables in the global schema while storing tenant-specific tables in individual schemas.

The gem handles most of the database-related complexities, including:

• Creating a new schema for each tenant and running migrations.

• Deleting old tenant schemas when they are no longer needed.

I haven’t had a chance to experiment with this yet, but it’s definitely worth considering when the opportunity arises. Compared to the conventional tenant_id column approach for multi-tenancy, this could be a more elegant solution.

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3. An Old but Gold Talk: Choose Boring Technology

It seems like today’s movies don’t quite match the quality of older classics. Maybe I’m getting old, or maybe, given how many films have been made over time, the best ones are already in the past. The same logic applies to conference talks—many older ones remain relevant and valuable today.

This weekend, I revisited a talk I highly recommend: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley (formerly at Stripe).

Dan discusses different approaches to choosing a tech stack when building a product. His core argument: well-established frameworks with broad community support and team familiarity are far superior to new, unproven technologies that haven’t been battle-tested in real-world applications.

The talk is filled with insightful metaphors, real-world examples, and pragmatic advice. I won’t spoil it—go check it out yourself:

• Video (paywall): O'Reilly Learning

• Slides and notes: Boring Technology Club

• Summary article: mcfunley.com

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That’s it for this week. Hope you found these insights helpful!