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The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

broadcast.listennotes.com

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Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#41

Post by avip »

zippergz wrote: post #36
avip wrote: post #30

First, that's a great stack and very well written/presented. One comment - he dismisses serverless as being overengineering . I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option. One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is less work than runn…

Yes, and no. If you already have a lot of experience building apps that run on servers, there's a learning curve to switching to serverless. Is it huge? Not really. But there are certainly pitfalls and best practices to learn about. The costs can be harder to predict, especially when starting out. And the tooling is different (and much less mature). So now you have a bunch of stuff to learn about or consider, or you…

I think, and I'm replying to both above comments, that there's a non-trivial cost reduction + DevOps reduction potential here.

Of course, the overarching rule is always "if it works, don't touch it".

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#42

Post by whitepoplar »

wenbin wrote: post #18
cagenut wrote: post #9

key missing info though: does it make money? I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.

I'm wenbin, the author of this blog post & I built Listen Notes. Thanks for bringing up this question :) Yes, Listen Notes is making some money - not a lot, but enough to cover all the cost and bring in a bit profit as of today. The basic idea is that Listen Notes should be free to 99% of users, while making some money from 1% of super users. We run ads (obviously) on the website and we provide API: https://www.liste…

Cool! When you say "making some money," is that over-and-above paying yourself a salary?

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#43

Post by eloff »

aantix wrote: post #26

Picking your stack/architecture based on team size is something most engineers miss. Microservices, great for companies with many teams. Not so much when it's three people scrambling to create something meaningful. Monolith all the way.

It's funny because microservices are explicitly targeted at solving problems for development with many teams, and lots of single team companies cargo cult them. Did they miss the first paragraph when they were reading up on what microservices are?

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#44

Post by mtnGoat »

aprdm wrote: post #10

That's awesome and it is a tech stack that I try to mirror and am confident running myself as well! It's incredible the amount of knowledge required for a single person tho when you think about it eh? It's the full frontend (which I would have more trouble with) + databases + caches + search engine + metrics + deployment + source control + sysadmin all baked in a single person who is also trying to make it a business…

as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it's amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position/person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners.

I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, understand caching, etc and setup an app... turns out, that is apparently not even remotely expected at most companies. I guess the bigger the company the more narrow the skillset required.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#45

Post by RX14 »

avip wrote: post #30

First, that's a great stack and very well written/presented. One comment - he dismisses serverless as being overengineering . I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option. One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is less work than runn…

Someone who has been doing this for years before serverless existed can set up and manage this infrastructure trivially, using almost no time compared to developing the application and the business. It also provides you with security: you know the pitfalls and the problems with hosting these, serverless is another new technology which can go wrong.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#46

Post by peterburkimsher »

eruci wrote: post #33

I'm a one-person company too ( geocode.xyz ). My tech stack is even more boring than that. (Nginx, MariaDB, Perl on AWS Ec2 Linux instances. I don't have an office either.

This is completely off-topic, but thank you for running geocode.xyz! I'm a very satisfied user :)

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#48

Post by numbers »

wenbin wrote: post #38
poidos wrote: post #16

As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don't think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.

Hello poidos, (I'm the author of this blog post) I couldn't do all these things when I was in school :) I worked in companies for a few years and learned some engineering practices. Then I had basic skills to prototype my own side projects. Then after working on many silly side projects, I started Listen Notes. And initially, Listen Notes was running on 3 tiny DigitalOcean servers ($5/month each?). I logged in each s…

Exactly what I'd like to tell younger devs and students. You build smaller projects on the side for a bit to familiarize yourself with things until you're ready to start something or something comes along by way of the side projects!

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#49

Post by mperham »

I love these stories. I'm a one-person company too: contribsys.com.

My production server stack is Apache + some Ruby CGI scripts, to serve static files and handle billing webhooks. I spend less than an hour per week on devops maintenance.

KISS is the #1 principle when scaling a solo operation.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#50

Post by ttul »

cagenut wrote: post #9

key missing info though: does it make money? I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.

And does it make enough money to cover the time when it wasn't making money? As in: was the time spent bootstrapping worthwhile? The concept of a one-person company is extremely appealing in its simplicity and apparent lack of risk; however, the devil is in the details.
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