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

broadcast.listennotes.com

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

#191

Post by peterwwillis »

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…

If serverless were easier, more people would be using it. But it's not simple or straightforward. You have to learn new systems and conventions, it has a bunch of weird considerations depending on the use case, and most people just use it when they don't want to figure out what instance to run some periodic, one-off job on.

It's a niche, just like all solutions that aren't a single Unix process on a single Unix box. Even CGI scripts are a niche. You pick the niche that you know.

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

#193

Post by trynewideas »

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/…

Interesting to hear that your WeWork building isn't an especially social space. I know you talk about why you picked a dedicated office in a coworking space over coffee shops etc., but why did you pick WeWork in particular?

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

#194

Post by jimbokun »

zrail wrote: post #71
non-entity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This would be a nifty exercise for a web programming class. Really internalize a lot about HTTP in a short amount of time.

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

#195

Post by imihai1988 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #123
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.

Security by obscurity?

Not a really good idea all by its own.

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

#196

Post by wenbin »

trynewideas wrote: post #193
wenbin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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/…

Interesting to hear that your WeWork building isn't an especially social space. I know you talk about why you picked a dedicated office in a coworking space over coffee shops etc., but why did you pick WeWork in particular?

because it's 2-minute walk distance from my apartment :) don't like spending too much time in commute

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

#197

Post by lacampbell »

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…

I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option.

I was all gung-ho about serverless for a while. I wanted to release a demo for my product and thought I'd cut through all the hassles of managing my own server.

I found it bewildering. It was a whole new skillset with new benefits, but also new considerations and headaches. When push came to shove and the clock to release my demo started ticking down, I just went back to a linux server.

I use the same linux distro at home and on the server, and there are about 3 technologies I need installed. On retrospect I think I made the right decision, but happy to have my mind changed.

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

#198

Post by czbond »

welder wrote: post #182
crispyporkbites wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

No - they won't. If you have a very simple front end stack, and application stack or infrastructure sure. But if I'm needing to traverse networks, or only directly get to a database - that's different than some silly nmap script kiddy scan.

Remember it is often easier to penetrate around the gates where everyone is looking (some app stack + OWASP top 10) to instead focus getting inside a network (your dev's laptop, vpn connection, social engineered access, malware to your CEO or sales team, Wi-Fi connection to intercept the VPN tunnels, etc). Or i'm looking for holes in Docker versions to root, Kubernetes flaws, virtual machine dependencies, how many microservices layers do I have to deal with, etc etc.

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

#199

Post by jedberg »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #103
tudorpavel wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post mentions using Google speech-to-text for transcription which seems to be even cheaper? I'm not sure where you got the $4/hr price, but indeed kudos to OP for building a business around reselling cloud services for profit.

I'm guessing the $4/hr price estimation is based on an average of the prices ListenNotes actually charges to transcribe a podcast, as shown on ListenNotes.com for various individual episodes.

Yep exactly. I randomly sampled some podcasts and looked at the cost vs how long they were.

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

#200

Post by spiderfarmer »

lacampbell wrote: post #189
spiderfarmer wrote: post #122

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'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?

I found that having 10-15 employees (and working for clients instead of yourself) took all the fun away from the work I enjoyed most so I started designing/developing/marketing my own projects as a hobby. It was already earning a living wage by the time I sold the company, and it was always my plan B. So when I got the chance to sell I did not hesitate.
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