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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)

#311

Post by spiderfarmer »

bythckr wrote: post #279
spiderfarmer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Most of my revenue (subscriptions and advertising) is recurring, so as long as there are no incidents I can just timebox everything I do.

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

#312

Post by spiderfarmer »

bscphil wrote: post #297
spiderfarmer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not criticizing your preferences at all, but I think it's really strange for you to describe them as loneliness. I would say you work alone , but you're not lonely, because you have a bunch of other social connections in your life that for some people are replaced by coworkers. If anything, your comment reflects a kind of strange default on HN where work consumes so much of your life that coworkers are your "frie…

I should have quoted that word. What I prefer is the fact that it's quiet, I don't get interrupted, I can set my own agenda and I never have to go to a meeting that messes up my progress. I like teammates and coworkers, I just don't need them to do what I like to do.

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

#313

Post by baroffoos »

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).

Automated testing; with any dynamic typed language you have to unit test every single thing possible and it becomes not so bad to work with.

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

#314

Post by Nursie »

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.

If you haven't got SV money behind you that's even more reason to focus on delivering something that works.

Your own project on your own time? Go for it. Clients should get the best fit, most reliable option, not the flavour of the moment.

(That all said, RoR is not a great choice these days as it is a niche skill)

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

#315

Post by strzibny »

dx034 wrote: post #308
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…

The only problem I see with rails is that it's hard to find devs these days (at least in Europe). Even if they could learn Rails for that project, many I've spoken to wouldn't want to take a job where Rails is required. I just witnessed a project switching from rails to React (for the frontend) because they just couldn't get enough good people willing to use Rails.

I heard this before, but when we tried to find a React dev for the front-end part we couldn't find any either. There are more JS devs for sure, but you also compete with literally everybody for talent.

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

#316

Post by BigJono »

caspar wrote: post #276
earthboundkid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, beca…

Completely agree. IMO the optimal efficiency is easily a team of either 2 or 3, with one FE and one BE, and optionally someone doing dev-ops-y stuff for both of them. After that point your 'output per man hours' can only really go down.

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

#317

Post by jbverschoor »

tobib wrote: post #143
jbverschoor wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a typo. They are two different sentences with slightly different meaning. Access as a noun or access as a verb.

Out of curiosity and please forgive me as I'm leaning ESL, but shouldn't it be either "Instant access to x podcasts" or "Instantly access x podcasts"?

Ah sorry I read over that lol

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

#318

Post by jstummbillig »

Ansible, AWS, SES, React and Cloudflare? Gusto, Notion and 10th of different services and integrations? That's boring now?

I was expecting something more along the lines of PHP + a single MySQL machine, plus all the accounting is done on a tablet made of actual stone.

This is not that.

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

#320

Post by pikzel »

jstummbillig wrote: post #318

Ansible, AWS, SES, React and Cloudflare? Gusto, Notion and 10th of different services and integrations? That's boring now? I was expecting something more along the lines of PHP + a single MySQL machine, plus all the accounting is done on a tablet made of actual stone. This is not that.

Agree. To learn all of this as a single developer is not an easy task either. These are real frontend, backend and devops languages, frameworks and tools. It takes time to learn.
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