At this point, I would add Docker (without Kubernetes) to the "boring" technologies that simplify your life. Having managed my own "server farm" of 20 machines on hetzner, with a very small startup, I found that abstracting away the underlying OS removed a lot of friction.
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
341–350 of 464 posts
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#342Sad to hear that PyCharm is considered old school these days.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! So much this. Every startup I've worked with regretted choosing a trendy tech stack early on. Speed of development is BY FAR the most important thing and the SPA/Javascript framework de jour trend of the past few years is an antithetical to rapid iteration. As a consultant, I'll happily bill hours to untangle that mess, but it's very frustrating to see startups with lots of potential spinning their wheels with u…
Totally disagree re. SPA frameworks. Having mastered one of the popular ones, I've found I can now turn out fairly complex apps that I never could have contemplated building solo a few years ago.
thats probably due to having more expirience, but you still have to do the crud yourself and all the other things that you otherwise would get for free.
i like next.js now but for simplicity's sake i think parrent is right.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#344PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Django/Python3, uWSGI, Celery, Celery Beat, Supervisord, Amazon S3, CloudFront, React, Ansible, Datadog, Rollbar, Slack, Vagrant, VirtualBox, PyCharm, iTerm2, Notion, G Suite, MailChimp, Amazon SES, Gusto, Upwork, Goodle Ads Manager, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Cloudfare, Zapier, Trello, Godaddy, Namecheap, Stripe, Google speech-to-text, Kaiser Permanente, Stripe Atlas, Clerky, Quickbooks, 1password, Brex.
Alright. Just make a "boring" website now, it's "easy".
If it's one thing i really dislike within both the scientific and the technological sphere it's this arrogance disguised as common knowledge. Because it's not. Articles like this is nothing but bragging. The author, whoever it is, clearly has a very long time working in the field acquiring this knowledge. Be humble.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#345Okay that guy is just showing off, but rightfully, this is damn impressive. Even if some of that is offloaded to contractors, he still needs to understand most of it.
That's a proper full stack developer with a business mindset as well. Hope I'll improve my backend / devops skill to that level at some point.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#346PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Django/Python3, uWSGI, Celery, Celery Beat, Supervisord, Amazon S3, CloudFront, React, Ansible, Datadog, Rollbar, Slack, Vagrant, VirtualBox, PyCharm, iTerm2, Notion, G Suite, MailChimp, Amazon SES, Gusto, Upwork, Goodle Ads Manager, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Cloudfare, Zapier, Trello, Godaddy, Namecheap, Stripe, Google speech-to-text, Kaiser Permanente, Stripe Atlas, Clerky,…
To be fair, half of the used services do not have anything to do with the website itself but with the whole business around it. Also, most of the tools do not require a PhD in computer science; neither Rollbar nor Cloudflare are actually hard to set up.
Still, you have a valid point. The setup described here is not boring at all and not easy, I expected a one-root-server-for-everything that runs some PHP and MySQL.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
I finally created an account because your comment resonated with me. I have created 95% of my platform by myself which itself was the manifestation of several business ideas. I started out buying servers and starting a dedicated, then vps, then shared hosting farm that requires all of the frontends you mention. I took a different approach, I went all out open-source and spent time creating glue and flashy bootstrap f…
There are people who create consumer products, and there are people who create the products that power those products. It's no different to when id Software sold licences of their engines to other game developers. Perhaps you can turn your infrastructure into a business of its own.
+1 for selling the golden shovels.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#348PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Django/Python3, uWSGI, Celery, Celery Beat, Supervisord, Amazon S3, CloudFront, React, Ansible, Datadog, Rollbar, Slack, Vagrant, VirtualBox, PyCharm, iTerm2, Notion, G Suite, MailChimp, Amazon SES, Gusto, Upwork, Goodle Ads Manager, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Cloudfare, Zapier, Trello, Godaddy, Namecheap, Stripe, Google speech-to-text, Kaiser Permanente, Stripe Atlas, Clerky,…
To be fair, half of the used services do not have anything to do with the website itself but with the whole business around it. Also, most of the tools do not require a PhD in computer science; neither Rollbar nor Cloudflare are actually hard to set up. Still, you have a valid point. The setup described here is not boring at all and not easy, I expected a one-root-server-for-everything that runs some PHP and MySQL.
anyone can build a house from scratch! just read the instruction manuals for brick-laying, carpentry, electricals and plumbing. After all, none of these require a PhD.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#349@wenbin - What would also be helpful is a P&L report on all of these expenses - as that will also tell us a great story.. and it would make a nice Part Deux ;-)
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Assuming your field is web development, what is not a niche skill? It seems the choice of backend frameworks is somewhat fragmented with no clear default winner.