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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)

#171

Post by themacguffinman »

AimForTheBushes wrote: post #34

I really like the idea of monolithic repos but can see some downsides when there is more than one person working on a project. It would be cool if there was a simplified way to have an entire business operate under source control.

> It would be cool if there was a simplified way to have an entire business operate under source control.

A lot of projects can and do apply CI tooling to achieve this. Every commit to a branch triggers a set of declarative deployment pipelines, simple. IIRC buzzword is "GitOps" if you want to find out more.

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

#172

Post by pythonist »

The stack can be much boring, simple and easy to maintain. Golang helps a lot for that.

For example https://newreleases.io/

- Go with embedded databases for web services

- Vue.js for frontend

- Nginx just as there are other sites on the server

- Prometheus/Grafana for monitoring

- Gitea for code hosting and some automation

- Bind9 for DNS

- Debian

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

#173

Post by wolco »

dcsan wrote: post #140

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…

When you do it for yourself you choose a quick prototyping language like php because you want to create a product.

When you work for someone and they pay you to learn something hot why not take the opportunity as it will help with the resume.

As a small business no one pays you to learn.

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

#174

Post by mongol »

wenbin wrote: post #117
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…

(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/…

Was it hard to come up with the idea and believe in it enough to pursuit it to where you are today? I think self doubt must be a challenge, especially when you are alone and still far from a proven concept and nothing so show to customers. Was this idea the only one you evaluated before you chose it or did you also have other ideas, of which this one you liked best?

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

#175

Post by welder »

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…

What's your website? Mine's also on the same stack (https://wakatime.com). Would love to trade notes sometime.

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

#176

Post by mperham »

ravedave5 wrote: post #128
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.

Hey I thought I recognized that domain, yay sidekiq! Keep up the good work. By the way we're seeing issues with contrast security gem and sidekiq, but we're pushing on contrast not you.

Thank you! You are always welcome to open an issue if you want a second opinion.

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

#177

Post by wolco »

abiro wrote: post #136

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.

Don't throw your money away for that reason. Keeping upto date is easier than ever.

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

#178

Post by crispyporkbites »

czbond wrote: post #55

As a software SaaS CISO, who also pentests and determines partner risk - I take the approach of not sharing such in depth details. Articles like this are fantastic fingerprinting recon for those that look to compromise sites.

Pretty sure a blackhat with nmap and a few hours would be a lot more effective than trying to glean something from this blogpost.

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

#179

Post by welder »

wil421 wrote: post #29
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.

From a mid-level dev, you’ll learn and I doubt you’ll need to know everything in this article and understand it for your first job. Do you understand what the web, api, and DB servers are doing? If your interested in Python and want to start small I can recommend Flask. Flask is smaller and could be more user friendly than Django. Here’s a great tutorial. You’ll build a blog with Bootstrap, Python, Flask and SQLAlche…

Flask is easy, but it's actually better suited to seasoned programmers. Django's hand holding actually makes it a better framework for beginners.

https://wakatime.com/blog/14-pirates-use-flask-the-navy-uses...

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

#180

Post by thecodemonkey »

Oh wow. This is scaringly close to how we run geocod.io - right down to the ansible provisioning wrapper that I put together :)

  > ./provision
  provision usage:
  ./provision environment role [hostname]

  This script will provision the given role in the specified environment using Ansible
  If a hostname is specified, provisioning will be limited to that specific server
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