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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)

#271

Post by jv22222 »

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…

The part that I find the loneliest is making all the core technical and business decisions by myself. I really miss being able to bounce ideas of a partner.

Sure, you can do it with friends etc. But at some point you just become menace asking them to think about your stuff so much.

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

#272

Post by wenbin »

hbcondo714 wrote: post #266
wenbin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. I used rapidapi initially (v1) and built my own api gateway to replace it (v2) earlier this year.

The api was launched in Dec 2017 right here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15825900

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

#273

Post by whalesalad »

Technology is usually just a means to an end. Unless IP is what you are selling, boring is great. I’ve seen SO many teams burn SO much energy on complicated stacks just to drink kool-aid. It’s mind bogglingly frustrating, especially as a contractor. At the end of the day it’s great for me: I get brought into shit shows to clean up the mess. But deep down, I want projects to succeed and clean/sound systems architecture is how you do that. Doesn’t matter if it’s PHP, Python or Java.

It hurts to see people continue to make mistakes over and over, so I’m working on a new website and series of engineering posts to help share my approach to a lot of these problems.

Any product I start building usually begins in Rails. React is great. Vue is great. It’s not necessary, good ol’ request/response is just fine. You don’t need a service mesh. You don’t need Kafka. You add that stuff later when it’s required... if it’s required. Rails can’t be beat for startups. I wouldn’t waste any time on a single page app, it’s a completely pointless endeavor unless you have proven traction, users, revenue etc... and can afford to do it correctly.

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

#274

Post by wenbin »

samkxu wrote: post #242
wenbin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, will do.

Earlier this year I gave a talk to some college students, which has some more practice info about starting a small internet company:

https://broadcast.listennotes.com/good-enough-engineering-to...

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

#276

Post by caspar »

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.

IMO, the reduced output of a team of specialists vs a team of generalists has less to do with generalists doing better work, and more to do with it being impractical to hire specialists at lower levels of scale - and higher levels of scale are less efficient.

A 3 person engineering team doesn't want to hire a specialist DB admin who knows Postgres back to front but can't code. A company of 1000+ engineers might, because they might have problems that require that expertise.

But any engineer working in a company of 1000+ engineers is also subject to friction resulting from resource allocation inefficiencies, communication overhead, regulatory compliance, etc: the reduced output from those factors has little to do with the specialist engineers doing worse work, and more to do with them working at the size of company that can afford to hire specialists.

(You could make the case that buck passing is an example of resource allocation inefficiencies, as it is often accidentally or purposely enabled by company management, but nonetheless, that's not a generalist vs specialist tradeoff.)

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

#277

Post by amanzi »

I wouldn't call that boring, there's still a lot of new technology being used in that stack. I'd also recommend some minor improvements to the workflow (e.g. don't do development work on the master branch) that are easy to achieve and provide big benefits. Also - no mention of backups or DR-planning -- I'd be interested to know what's being used in this area?

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

#278

Post by bythckr »

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…

"I ran a small company", what happened? Why did you stop or did it get stopped? What was the reason?

One man show / sole proprietorship is great, but its bad for family life. It's 24x7. Atleast thats how I saw my dad, dining room was the company meeting room and we all are unpaid company "helps",assisting our Dad support the family. This is the main thing that holds me back from being an entrepreneur (sole proprietorship 2.0).

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

#279

Post by bythckr »

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…

What is your current company about? How are you able to restrict your working hours?

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

#280

Post by 0b1010011010 »

ademup wrote: post #77
dtien wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing what the managed HIPPA setup is? What vendor do you go with for that? I've always wondered about how easy it would be to setup a SAAS that adheres to HIPPA.

VMRacks (now hipaavault.com). I'm not affiliated, just a completely satisfied customer. As to setting up the business, I would also recommend a HIPAA auditing/hand-holding company. I use Compliancy Group ( https://compliancy-group.com ).

Just finished my undergrad in cis, and have been grasping at the many services in the industry. How did you find yourself in freelance within clients needing HIPAA compliant?
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