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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)

#151
post #134

Is this seriously considered as being a boring stack nowadays?

was honestly expecting a stack along the line of yours - the one in the article is actually fairly complex and not-boring.

my exact sentiments lol

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

#152
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a typo. They are two different sentences with slightly different meaning. Access as a noun or access as a verb.

Out of curiosity and please forgive me as I'm leaning ESL, but shouldn't it be either "Instant access to x podcasts" or "Instantly access x podcasts"?

I agree. If "access" is a verb, the "to" is superfluous and awkward.

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

#153
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…

> lambda is less work than running django in uwsgi behind self-managed nginx

If you discount building an AWS-specific deployment process that includes "pip install" from an AWS linux machine image, zipping the project, and putting it in S3.

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

#154
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…

Some people enjoy being alone, others don't. You don't know in which group you are until you experience it. Unlike you, I wasn't running my own business, I was just working remotely for a company where the HQ was on a +12h timezone. I felt the exact same way, even if I was working from a coworking space.

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

#155

Just because I saw you (wenbin) in this thread I thought I'd be helpful: On https://www.listennotes.com/api/pricing/ There's a typo: "Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts" Instantly -> Instant Really enjoyed the post, thanks for sharing.

That's not a typo. They are two different sentences with slightly different meaning. Access as a noun or access as a verb.

[deleted]

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

#156

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).

Not OP, however it is fine. I worked in a similar stack as OP with a small team (however it used Ruby/Hanami instead of Python/Django, and of course the difference between both stacks). The code had ~100k LOC for the main service (we also had some other services that had dozen of thousands LOC) and it was completely fine to maintain. Most errors we had wouldn't be avoided by static typed since they're logic errors, not programming errors.

Sure I prefer static languages nowadays since I work in a much bigger company, however I think the benefits of static languages is overhyped.

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

#157
post #117
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…

(author of this blog post here) The hardest part of building this business is to keep motivated for a relatively long period of time. I'm still early in this startup journey. This is only the 2nd year of me working full-time on Listen Notes. I think it would be helpful to surround yourself with like-minded people (online or offline) -- we are social animals. Indie Hackers is pretty good: https://www.indiehackers.com/…

Hey, thanks for building LN. I was actually admiring the site design just yesterday while I scrolled through some episodes. "Dang, I hope I can build something like this one day."

You managed to pull me away from my previous preference, player.fm. Good job!

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

#158

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…

I am curious, do you use Django Rest Framework on top of Django for your API?

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

#159
post #2

Was interesting to read all the sort of "boring" back end pieces, then see that he went with half-server and half-client rendered React for the front end. Was expecting Angular or similar, given the pattern of the other picks.

React is "boring" now, too. (And good for it.)

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can do it. A good life/work balance is something I hope everyone will find. It took me 15 years to get to where I am today.
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