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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)

#201

Post by wink »

outworlder wrote: post #115
spookthesunset wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As team of one, you have to be very judicious with your time. You often have to have a philosophy of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Yeah they could burn a week or two switching over to lambda and whatnot but is it going to have a higher ROI than all the other things they could be working on? As me how I know. When I was a solo dev doing my own thing, I'd spend way too much time working on things that really would…

> As team of one, you have to be very judicious with your time. You often have to have a philosophy of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Yeah they could burn a week or two switching over to lambda and whatnot but is it going to have a higher ROI than all the other things they could be working on? Timeframe has to be considered. If it only takes a week, I'd strongly suggest biting the bullet. A week's budget can be q…

Think of it the other way round - if your workload is not realtime, but "within minutes/hours", as in processing feeds here - scaling the worker nodes with an ansible scripts needs to be done on maybe a weekly (if not monthly or less) basis and you get 4/3 instead of 3/3 - for a few minutes of work. This just does not seem to be the workload for autoscaling and adding complexity. I've ran a similar setup at a past job - we planned for whatever but in the end it was one person clicking a few buttons to provision a new instance once in a while.

Also some workloads are really bad for lambda, because you can (total napkin math) run 4 cores at 100% load for 24h a day to do your processing, all at the cost of "1 instance".

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

#202

Post by czbond »

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?

Sure - telling me whether you have an api..com doesn't matter. Anyone can scan and find that. But, if I know your database names (from a screenshot) and your hosting provider, I know that once I'm past a bastion host, or on your VPN connection - I don't have to wait to sniff or hope you connect to datasources. I now have an informed opinion on where to go.

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

#203

Post by baragiola »

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…

For how long? I kind of was at your place (no kids, just my girlfriend) for a few years and then I needed a change

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

#204

Post by spiderfarmer »

baragiola wrote: post #203
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…

For how long? I kind of was at your place (no kids, just my girlfriend) for a few years and then I needed a change

Started january 2016, so I’m almost 4 years in. I’m actually thinking about dropping some consultancy clients so I can focus even more on my own projects.

I get that it’s not for everyone but I grew up on a farm so I kind of got used to the quietness early on I guess.

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

#205

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

Well, I'm super impressed. I wish I could do half of what this guy can do.

But he needs to be careful not to overdo it. It's fun and exciting to get all this tech up and running. But at some point, it becomes a drudge. And burnout is right around the corner.

I would say that if he can farm out as much as possible and focus on marketing and sales which are the drivers for most company's continued success. In a sense, he has by using the cloud but what he's doing is way too much for one person.

I used to be a laid back kind of guy and would get irritated when I was hurried and clearly there was no impending death. But now I understand that the limit lies within us. At some point, we all give up. There are those that take a long time and there are those that give up relatively fast but giving up is part of the process. So we are in a hurry to get as much done before we decide to stop what has not been successful. By putting so much burden upon your self you make it so much more likely that you will give up before you find success.

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

#206

Post by rjurney »

I've found the tradeoff is in favor of using ECS, Kubernetes or something similar. The docs aren't too bad now. It is great to be able to build/deploy a docker image and not worry about how it gets out there, and what might go wrong with that system.

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

#207

Post by wuliwong »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #205

Well, I'm super impressed. I wish I could do half of what this guy can do. But he needs to be careful not to overdo it. It's fun and exciting to get all this tech up and running. But at some point, it becomes a drudge. And burnout is right around the corner. I would say that if he can farm out as much as possible and focus on marketing and sales which are the drivers for most company's continued success. In a sense,…

>he's doing is way too much for one person

You have no clue what is "too much" for the author of this post.

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

#208

Post by wuliwong »

Thanks for writing this article @webin. I'm about to launch a new startup myself and it is VERY boring tech. :p I'm running Rails with Sidekiq on Heroku, so I think I have you beat in the boring department. I do a lot of fancier stuff at work but I just don't need it for this product (at least not yet).

I am the only engineer but two non-technical friends (a designer and a lawyer[0]) make up the rest of the company.

[0] the original idea was the lawyer's. :)

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

#209

Post by mattmanser »

urda wrote: post #147
tnr23 wrote: post #134

Is this seriously considered as being a boring stack nowadays?

What SaaS do you run?

I run multiple SASSes for clients for myself and clients on far more "boring" stacks than this. One of them still has significant bits of VB.Net!

This post seems like a sea of trendy buzzwords to me. Maybe he thinks it's not trendy because it's not docker/serverless, but to me that stack is mainly a load of fads. React/Redux/Webpack are "standard", damn, 4 years ago you could have replaced that with a plethora of alternatives, as you probably will be able to in 4 years time.

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

#210

Post by chipotle_coyote »

jbverschoor wrote: post #130
mattmar96 wrote: post #56

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.

"Instantly access 771,769 podcasts" -> access as a verb, not a typo

"Instant access to 771,769 podcasts" -> access as a noun, not a typo

"Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts" -> access as a confusion, definitely a typo

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