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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)

#181
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"?

That's correct.

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

#182
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.

That's right, any pentester worth anything will know the stack used in a few seconds by looking at cookies or even sometimes just by the login page's url. For ex: different frameworks have different session and csrftoken naming, Rails and Django have recognizable url conventions, and there's always default error pages that usually give away the framework used.

Sharing is caring, be secure not paranoid :)

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

#183
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/…

Why did you choose to have ec2s with postgres rather than using RDS? I've found it saves me a ton of time dealing with upgrades worrying about backups etc to have RDS handle it.

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

#185
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…

Years ago Joel Spolsky on his site "Joel on Software" had a "Business of Software" forum where a lot of very small ISVs hung out and discussed items of mutual interest. Anyone know where those kinds of folks hang out now to discuss things?

There’s https://barnacl.es/

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

#186
A super interesting and refreshing read, especially since I am not very knowledgeable about web technology and most of the talk these days is about the latest fancy framework or database.

I am curious though, since I am using Google Cloud (App Engine in particular) for most of my company's modest backend needs: Would Google AE be able to handle all these backend requirements as well (but obviously without all the configuration and setup required)? Or asked another way: When is the point when you should move away from something easy and low-hassle such as GAE to something more advanced that requires a bit more manual configuration like setting up your own AWS servers?

Not trying to be critical, just honestly trying to learn from folks that know better than I.

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

#187

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…

What's your experience with gunicorn instead of uWSGI? I'm using haproxy + nginx + uWSGI but I'm wondering if gunicorn scales network more than uWSGI. My bottleneck isn't CPU, it's the amount of open connections uWSGI can handle at once.

Here's a trimmed down version of my web configs: https://wakatime.com/blog/23-how-to-scale-ssl-with-haproxy-a...

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

#188
post #84

Are there no load balancer replicas? It looks like a single point of failure for the entire service ( and it runs Redis and RabbitMQ - yikes).

The author can just run an Ansible job and recreate it instantly. It's a stateless ec2 node. If they wanted to be super duper fancy they could make an autoscaling group to destroy and recreate it if it went down. No need for a replica. This probably isn't a lose-100K$-every-5-minutes-of-downtime business.

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

#189
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're living my dream. I've been working on a side project all year but struggle to find the energy and build momentum while working a full time job.

Did you quit work to start this, or did you manage to work around your day job?

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago Joel Spolsky on his site "Joel on Software" had a "Business of Software" forum where a lot of very small ISVs hung out and discussed items of mutual interest. Anyone know where those kinds of folks hang out now to discuss things?

https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm

I second this. It’s a small group of people but with very focused interests and experience. Really good group.
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