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

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

#131

Post by Drdrdrq »

wenbin wrote: post #76
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 t…

Just wanted to add another reason not to use serverless, or at least AWS. For small projects I would rather experience downtime than big invoice. I had a project running on AWS, but it turns out you can't limit the budget, the best you can do is make alerts when costs exceed some limits. I have now moved the project to old-skool server and sleep much better since.

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

#132

Post by khalilravanna »

karambir wrote: post #126

I thought I was reading my own blog post :) We use very similar tech stack at my current company: - Ansible for provisioning - Python/Django for website/api - VueJS for frontend(where needed, some pages are simple Django templates) - Celery for background work - uWSGI and Nginx as servers with AWS Load balancer - Elasticsearch for search - Redis for caching - Postgres with Postgis as main datastore - Datadog for moni…

How do you feel about using a dynamically typed language like Python for all your backend code? Whenever I had a codebase that grew past several thousand LOC it became pretty unwieldy pretty quickly for me personally. I'm curious if there's a conscious tradeoff for people using Python/Django to start because it's really fast to get up and running with (for existing or new devs).

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

#133

Post by andretti1977 »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #122
jcroll wrote: post #82

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…

This feels like bragging but I also run a one man company and the loneliness is what I enjoy most. Granted, I only work from 08:45 to 14:30 and some hours in the evening, because I bring my kids to school and I pick them up in the afternoon, but the hours when I’m alone, I am 100% productive. When the kids are at home I mostly do some kind of manual labor to get some sort of exercise. Right now I’m building a shed. L…

You have described exactly the kind if work/life balance i desire! I do enjoy a lot working alone since i've got family with little children too. I won't add any value with my comment, i just wanted to thank you since it feels just a little bit easier to know somebody else is having what i want: one day i may have it too.

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

#136

Post by abiro »

Security concerns are always conspicuously lacking from this type of posts and discussions. If you’re a solo dev looking to start a project, please don’t take OP’s stack as a positive example. Use managed services whenever possible, they will at least keep you patched and simplify intrusion detection when configured correctly.

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

#137

Post by wenbin »

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.

Mike! Big fan of yours!

For the very few people who don't know mike or sidekiq, read this: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...

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

#139

Post by alexbecker »

I run a similar, maybe even more boring stack for my less-than-one-person company [PyDist](https://pydist.com):

- PostgreSQL database

- Nginx proxy in front of Django apps for UI and API servers (I use gunicorn instead of uWSGI though)

- Cron jobs which invoke django-admin commands to keep the PyPI mirror in sync

Perhaps the only place I'm any fancier than OP is that my deploy script is in Python, not shell, since any time I try to write a shell script with even slightly nontrivial logic it falls over and catches fire :)

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

#140

Post by dcsan »

It seems wenbin is also the lead developer on ndkale, https://github.com/Nextdoor/ndkale/graphs/contributors so he would certainly be capable of using a more esoteric stack.

I wonder when developers are working for themselves / very early stage, if one automatically becomes more conservative? If someone else is paying for your time, it's nice to experiment and grow personally. When it's your own buck, the focus is on pragmatic shipping and getting revenue coming in.

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