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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)

#241

Post by seriocomic »

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 take (very minor) issue with your first line and the point "well written" (I do agree with well presented).

Since the author is reading/commenting here, and there was a large amount of space in the original article outlining tools/services he uses, can I humbly suggest they use a tool like "Grammarly" or similar to help with the word-choice(s)?

Some distracting use of plurals for terms - e.g. "traffics", "stuffs", etc - may have been avoided and other spelling and grammar aspects could have helped make this easier to read. That all being said - the 'essence' of the article is to be commended.

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

#242

Post by samkxu »

wenbin wrote: post #112
riku_iki wrote: post #78

> Kaiser Permanente for health insurance. Super important part. Any details about how much it costs for single person company? :-)

Sure. It's around $700/month for me + my wife. I wish I could've known more practical info about starting a company before I quit my day job, e.g., how much for insurance, what company credit card to use, how to pay tax, where to find lawyers... Online articles / advices are mostly focused on big picture or very abstract concepts or fortune cookie type words :(

Could you perhaps write articles on these? I'd be super interested as someone looking to know more about starting a solo company.

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

#243

Post by mattbillenstein »

Great post - I'm running almost the same exact thing - Flask instead of Django, Saltstack instead of Ansible, rq instead of celery - supervisord, postgres, redis, ubuntu, nginx, aws (actually multicloud, BigQuery for data).

It's very good stuff!

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

#244

Post by csdreamer7 »

> Basically, I have a wrapper script deploy.sh that is run on macOS:

I do the same thing on Linux.

build.sh, deploy.sh.

But, I also use a run.sh which runs tasks that I may not remember to run if I come back to software after a while on a certain machine.

Like 'git pull' or 'bundle install'. Then ./dev-setup.sh or whatever for starting up tasks.

I use multiple machines and having these two simple commands saves me so much frustration.

You sit down to began work. You just run ./run.sh and it will setup a dev instance for you. No sudden alerts that your gem is out of date... or worse... no warnings at all and hard to diagnose sudden bugs that steals half a day from you.

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

#245

Post by antcas »

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/…

Hey wenbin (and any others pursuing indie-hacking), I run a virtual meetup about once a month you might find fulfilling for meeting like minded people.

We just made a Twitter recently, but it has all the links: https://twitter.com/ih_worldwide

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

#246

Post by anaphor »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #244

> Basically, I have a wrapper script deploy.sh that is run on macOS: I do the same thing on Linux. build.sh, deploy.sh. But, I also use a run.sh which runs tasks that I may not remember to run if I come back to software after a while on a certain machine. Like 'git pull' or 'bundle install'. Then ./dev-setup.sh or whatever for starting up tasks. I use multiple machines and having these two simple commands saves me so…

I have a .vimrc like this in some of my projects

set makeprg=./build.sh

set autowrite

I've found trying to figure out complicated build tools to mostly be a waste of time unless you really need them. It also encourages you to not do things that would require very costly builds.

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

#248

Post by encoderer »

earthboundkid wrote: post #60
mtnGoat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it's amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position/person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners. I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, un…

And the thing is, generalists do better work. They do less work overall because there are fewer of them, but compare a typical enterprise 50 person team to the output of a team of 5 generalists, hands down the generalists will make a better product every time because there's no buck passing or shoulder shrugging about problems.

“Every time” until they are asked to build a product that requires a deep specialized skill set.

I am a generalist full stack developer who has built a SaaS business very similar to the way OP has. No team of me’s could’ve produced, say, TensorFlow.

Great teams and companies have generalists and specialists.

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

#249

Post by o-__-o »

endtime wrote: post #83
mtnGoat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it's amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position/person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners. I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, un…

Having been the CTO of a startup and then a SWE at a FAANG company for 8 years, I disagree. Being at a startup does indeed require a broad technical skillset, but being effective inside a large company requires a lot of skills (both technical and not) that early startup employees may not have or need. I've grown a lot from both environments.

Are you me? I am constantly being gutchecked that a startup mentality does not fly when you have several hundred million in the bank. That said, my enterprise and upper management butt kissing experience from the 00s don’t seem to matter either. I can stay heads down in code and I’m not in fear over being downsized. The hard part is teaching these young kids how to scope.

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

#250

Post by w8rbt »

imihai1988 wrote: post #195
quickthrower2 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security by obscurity?

Not a really good idea all by its own.

Absolutely, but a great idea when combined with other defensive tactics. Obscurity is why armies use camouflage.
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