Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

broadcast.listennotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 464 posts

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

#71

Post by zrail »

non-entity wrote: post #63
mperham wrote: post #49

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.

> some Ruby CGI scripts Didn't ruby remove its CGI libraries from their standard library somewhat recently. I believe there were mostly helper libs, but I am curious how that works.

CGI is just running a program in response to a request. Things about the request are put into environment variables and POST/PUT bodies are on stdin. Your program writes HTTP headers, two newlines, and the response body.

You don't need libraries. If you have reasonably low traffic CGI can get you really far.

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

#72

Post by chucksmash »

NKCSS wrote: post #19
huangc10 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and confidently say he's doing fine. As he mentioned, he rented an expensive one person WeWork office in SF (when he doesn't even have to).

Why would that indicate he is making money?

I think the assumption is that ListenNotes is his only source of income and that he isn't burning personal savings or the capital he has invested on non-mandatory expenses.

Granted those assumptions, you've got to get pretty far up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to hit "rent a WeWork"

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

#74

Post by wenbin »

vowelless wrote: post #24

Wenbin, amazing article. One question: what all do you use contractors for? How has your experience been in managing them? Thanks

Some examples that I used help from contractors:

1. Built some reusable ReactJs components. 2. Design / illustrations 3. Proofread website copy / blog posts 4. Built experimental app like this one https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/just-listen-simple-podcast-a...

(probably there were other random things... I got to look at the billing history on my upwork :)

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

#75

Post by cuu508 »

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…

> Building an api with api-gateway + lambda (...) is guaranteed to be more cost-effective for unpredicted load.

Depends on the use case. I run a cron monitoring service on a similar nginx/uwsgi/django/postgres stack [1]. My service needs to handle lots of really small and simple HTTP requests, and almost every request needs to do a (small and quick) database write. I did napkin math – at the current usage levels, Lambda per-request fees alone would use up significant chunk of my current hosting budget.

[1] https://blog.healthchecks.io/2019/08/a-look-at-healthchecks-...

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

#76

Post by wenbin »

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…

Good point! For people who have tons of experience with serverless, serverless is probably a better choice than running servers for some use cases.

As a small business owner, there are two types of cost that I need to consider:

Time: the time I use to do A is the time I can't use to do B. Unfortunately I haven't used serverless so far in my professional career -- in this sense, I'm not full-stack enough :) It takes time for me to learn it, understand it, operate it, and experience various outage scenarios to gain the true learnings. It's more costly for me (probably not for others) to use serverless than the things that I already understand. I'd rather spend more time on other non-engineering things nowadays -- believe it or not, I spend 1/3 of my working hours replying emails :)

Money: the money I spend on A is the money I can't spend on B. I decided not to use api-gateway + lambda & hosted db servers, primarily because of $$$. I actually did the pricing calculation a few times last year. In addition, api-gateway + lambda also require some time for me to learn, which I should use to talk to users, marketing, building new product feature, thinking (yep, thinking also uses some time budget :)...

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

#77

Post by ademup »

dtien wrote: post #62
ademup wrote: post #52

This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benef…

Do you mind sharing what the managed HIPPA setup is? What vendor do you go with for that? I've always wondered about how easy it would be to setup a SAAS that adheres to HIPPA.

VMRacks (now hipaavault.com). I'm not affiliated, just a completely satisfied customer. As to setting up the business, I would also recommend a HIPAA auditing/hand-holding company. I use Compliancy Group (https://compliancy-group.com).

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

#79

Post by draw_down »

Lots of stuff can stick a web form in front of Elastic/Postgres or similar. Certainly nothing wrong with that.

Also doesn't mean that something quite so simple will work in every case. Not everyone is wasting their employer's money to build their resume.

Post reply on HN