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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)

#281

Post by the_resistence »

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/…

At the 4 year in make building a professional services firm in Shanghai, old school work, but looking constantly for online B2C and B2B opportunities, I love IH for the community aspect. Although I find one has to be careful with balancing the amount of work allocated to seeing what others are doing and the hard but inevitably more important grinding out of one's own business aspirations. Great conversation!

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

#282

Post by the_resistence »

drusepth wrote: post #240
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…

My company's Slack is just me and ~12 Slack bots all doing various things (reporting subscription changes, feedback, bug reports, error alerting, CI status, etc). It's amazing to look at and functions immaculately, but occasionally does have the grim reminder of just how alone it is being on your own. Especially when you think "this all works great, but would still work equally great with another human or two here."

Dude, I would love more insights on this. I have trouble finding assistants for the most rudimentary stuff and am constantly looking for IT solutions. Please, please, please. Maybe an HN post?

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

#283

Post by ericlavigne »

rsp1984 wrote: post #186

A super interesting and refreshing read, especially since I am not very knowledgeable about web technology and most of the talk these days is about the latest fancy framework or database. I am curious though, since I am using Google Cloud (App Engine in particular) for most of my company's modest backend needs: Would Google AE be able to handle all these backend requirements as well (but obviously without all the con…

The main idea of this article is to use what you already know and just get it done, rather than experimenting with new tools. The author already knew how to use most of these tools from a previous job. He stuck with the technology that he already knew, so that he could focus more on business aspects rather than new technology.

In that spirit, you should use the App Engine that you already know for as long as it seems to be working well for you. When you run into a problem that can't be solved in App Engine, that is the time to ask for advice on how to solve your problem.

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

#284

Post by paxys »

peterwwillis wrote: post #188
paxys wrote: post #84

Are there no load balancer replicas? It looks like a single point of failure for the entire service ( and it runs Redis and RabbitMQ - yikes).

The author can just run an Ansible job and recreate it instantly. It's a stateless ec2 node. If they wanted to be super duper fancy they could make an autoscaling group to destroy and recreate it if it went down. No need for a replica. This probably isn't a lose-100K$-every-5-minutes-of-downtime business.

I am all for simplicity, but if that results in a service outage whenever you deploy new code, apply a security patch or reboot your VM, you need to rethink the architecture.

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

#285

Post by theonething »

whalesalad wrote: post #273

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 architectur…

My first thought was "I wish the startup I'm working for would read this". My second, "eh, wouldn't change anything."

> so I’m working on a new website and series of engineering posts to help share my approach to a lot of these problems.

Do you have a mailing list or something to get on to get updated on this?

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

#287

Post by mattbillenstein »

whalesalad wrote: post #273

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 architectur…

If you do write something up, I'd like to read it - solid analysis re systems architecture et al.

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

#288

Post by kabacha »

whalesalad wrote: post #273

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 architectur…

Why is HN so against people who _enjoy_ engineering? Why should I run some run-of-the-mill stack that has enourgmous legacy cruft and just not "fun". Not every business wants to be sillicon-valley optimized money farm - some people want to do some enjoyable work.

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

#290

Post by corndoge »

kabacha wrote: post #288
whalesalad wrote: post #273

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 architectur…

Why is HN so against people who _enjoy_ engineering? Why should I run some run-of-the-mill stack that has enourgmous legacy cruft and just not "fun". Not every business wants to be sillicon-valley optimized money farm - some people want to do some enjoyable work.

That's fine, but that's not engineering. Bridge designers do not try to build bridges out of materials discovered in the laboratory last month.
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