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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)

#211

Post by OJFord »

> Wait, how about Docker / Kubernetes / serverless? Nope. As you gain experience, you know when not to over-engineer. I actually did some early Docker work for my previous employer back in 2014, which was good for a mid-sized billion-dollar startup but may be overkill for a one-person tiny startup.

I really think the key thing here is familiarity. K8s is a bit different, but certainly in OP's position I (personally!) would be more comfortable with an image for each component. Perhaps a machine image rather than docker, if each component is going to be on its own machine as described, but something at least semi-reproducible for sure.

When I'm working on something alone, and particularly if on and off and not for several hours every day I need to be able to come back to it in a sort of self-documented state that doesn't leave me scared to touch anything lest it crumble.

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

#212

Post by eruci »

mzkply wrote: post #192
eruci wrote: post #33

I'm a one-person company too ( geocode.xyz ). My tech stack is even more boring than that. (Nginx, MariaDB, Perl on AWS Ec2 Linux instances. I don't have an office either.

Is your site down?

No. https://stats.uptimerobot.com/00vDQc3O7

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

#213

Post by sieabahlpark »

OJFord wrote: post #211

> Wait, how about Docker / Kubernetes / serverless? Nope. As you gain experience, you know when not to over-engineer. I actually did some early Docker work for my previous employer back in 2014, which was good for a mid-sized billion-dollar startup but may be overkill for a one-person tiny startup. I really think the key thing here is familiarity. K8s is a bit different, but certainly in OP's position I (personally!)…

There's nothing wrong with the concept of containerization and you can use it without much additional headache.

Of course it's not for everyone but outright saying it's a waste of time hasn't spent much time with the ecosystem to know how easy it's become latey.

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

#214

Post by wil421 »

welder wrote: post #179
wil421 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks Alan(?). I haven’t gone too far with Django. I can see what you’re saying about being seasoned. Flask clicked for me quickly but everything just made sense, ORM, Jinja, modules etc.

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

#215

Post by jldugger »

khalilravanna wrote: post #132
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…

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).

I don't think typing is the problem you make it out to be. You can specify types in Python, and mypy will type check for you. And nothing about Python means you'll have an unwieldy code base, I can only imagine you'd have the same problems in Java.

The real reason to switch would be performance. The interpreted nature of Python that makes things like Django and PyUnit possible also makes it kinda slow. Some places choose to parcel out a few key services in a faster language (C, Rust, Go) and use bindings to call out as needed.

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

#216

Post by enahs-sf »

wenbin wrote: post #196
trynewideas wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That coit tower view is pretty killer as well.

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

#217

Post by OJFord »

eloff wrote: post #43
aantix wrote: post #26

Picking your stack/architecture based on team size is something most engineers miss. Microservices, great for companies with many teams. Not so much when it's three people scrambling to create something meaningful. Monolith all the way.

It's funny because microservices are explicitly targeted at solving problems for development with many teams, and lots of single team companies cargo cult them. Did they miss the first paragraph when they were reading up on what microservices are?

Who says only multiple teams need microservices, and who put them in charge of what people find helpful?

If the 'app' has enough different 'bits' I'd favour a SOA no matter the team size.

Somebody now wants to say that isolation doesn't necessitate distinct services; they're probably right, but the alternative is great discipline - why not make it easy?

It's a form of defensive programming isn't it? - if widget factory shouldn't be using a function from auth helpers, make it impossible!

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

#220

Post by geggam »

OJFord wrote: post #211

> Wait, how about Docker / Kubernetes / serverless? Nope. As you gain experience, you know when not to over-engineer. I actually did some early Docker work for my previous employer back in 2014, which was good for a mid-sized billion-dollar startup but may be overkill for a one-person tiny startup. I really think the key thing here is familiarity. K8s is a bit different, but certainly in OP's position I (personally!)…

Using containers without k8s is much much simpler if you need a container.

Learning system packaging and how to rebuild src packages is much much simpler than managing a container ecosystem

Think about this... if it was so easy to manage containers why does redhat still ship its operating system in packages ?

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