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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)

#261

Post by phy6 »

phy6 wrote: post #260
phalangion wrote: post #229

I'd love to know how you're running Django and React together. I've been trying to figure out how to make that combo work in a mono-repo, and I'm definitely missing something. Any advice?

I just watched 8 hours of Django videos yesterday, and 4 hours of that was a Django + React tutorial. It covers in great detail the CRU from a CRUD, but you'll need additional videos to cover deployment on elastic beanstalk or ec2+elb, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHhQRHE8IR8

Basically his tutorial was to put the react project inside the django project, and depending on which parts you're modifying and how your testing, he has a special static collection script that builds the react portion and copies the static files up into the Django parent project folders.

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

#262

Post by bedros »

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…

Did you do the entire stack yourself, I'm planning on using almost identical stack, but need some help, do you have some kind of blog on howto or recommend one

If you create a course on udemy/YouTube on how to setup a production full stack, there are many basic setup videos or tutorials, but none on production full stack with load balancing, replication, caching, etc

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

#263

Post by SPBS »

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 don't know if overprovisioning servers to counter traffic spikes is over engineering, the mental model is pretty simple. May not be as cost effective or infinitely scalable, but it's simpler to wrap your head around.

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

#264

Post by fovc »

xemdetia wrote: post #93
fovc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you're familiar with. If he already knows Ansible inside and out, why risk getting stuck with some undebuggable AWS failures? As a solo entrepreneur I can say time risk is a crucial thing to be mindful of. I'll take 10h +/-1h vs 5h +/- 15h any day.

Not to mention that he might not stick with AWS if he runs the numbers- he might hop ship to a different cloud provider if he gets a better deal. I don't think it's appropriate for such a fledgling enterprise to lock in to AWS-isms so they can keep the change provider cost as low as possible. Also, people seem to be dismissing the value of a rock-solid local end-to-end dev stack which with the latest iteration of tec…

Not sure I agree with the anti-lock in sentiment. It's a nice to have, but if what you know well is AWS or GCP or whatever, definitely lock yourself in.

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

#265

Post by buboard »

ademup wrote: post #52

This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benef…

similarly , making half that and using dedicated servers. When you re a solo dev you dont really have time to risk learning unproven tech or tech that doesnt scale. And as a dev i like writing code that does new and interesting things, not learning tools and other people's APIs. The amount of services this guy has to manage is mind-boggling, and unfortunately i m simple and stupid. I guess i m a hermit dev but thankfully i ll never need to work for others again.

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

#266

Post by hbcondo714 »

wenbin wrote: post #76
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…

Good point! For people who have tons of experience with serverless, serverless is probably a better choice than running servers for some use cases. As a small business owner, there are two types of cost that I need to consider: Time: the time I use to do A is the time I can't use to do B. Unfortunately I haven't used serverless so far in my professional career -- in this sense, I'm not full-stack enough :) It takes t…

> We need to track the API usage

Thank you for this excellent write-up. Monetizing APIs is always a great topic; did you consider or will you consider using a 3rd party API management service such as RapidAPI or Apigee to keep track and charge for API usage?

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

#267

Post by dangoor »

hacker-gene wrote: post #257

Well, on frontend he uses React/Redux/Webpack, which is more of trendy, latest/greatest. If he used Django templates + jQuery, that would have been staid/boring tech. Great post though, aspirational for those of us who wish to found their own startup one day.

I disagree. React has been out 6 years. It most definitely can prevent bugs which were common with the jQuery approach.

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

#268

Post by giarc »

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.

Also on that page..."No need credit card" should read "No credit card needed"

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

#269

Post by embit »

Very inspiring article. And thanks for sharing a detailed tech stack write up. Very inspiring for me as I am also a single person running a tech news aggregator website but probably even more boring setup on AWS (php MySQL Apache and some python ) embit.ca , running it alone but never lonely.

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

#270

Post by bedros »

meowface wrote: post #167
khalilravanna wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Python supports optional static typing annotations now. There are four popular typecheckers that I'm aware of (mypy [1], pyre [2], pyright [3], pytype [4]), which is a little confusing, but any of the four will catch a lot of type issues that typical statically typed language compilers would catch. It's not as robust as true static typing - there are sometimes false positives and false negatives - but I find it helpf…

Which one is your favorite?
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