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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)

#351

Post by deepsun »

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.

Have you tried paying more?

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

#352

Post by ackbar03 »

pikzel wrote: post #320
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.

I second that. This seems really full stack as you can get, but I'm not really a professional dev by training, so I don't know if most people are this hardcore. I built and host some web apps myself but everytime I have to switch from doing something front end to back or vice versa I find I need to refamiliarize myself with a bunch of stuff and have to stop myself from panicking

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

#353

Post by bjornsteffanson »

disiplus wrote: post #343
stupidcar wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For my past six or seven contracts I've been carrying around the same set of fetch util functions I wrote in ES6 a few years ago - it's less than 200 lines of code. If the API endpoints are ready to go, CRUD is the easy part. Which tools would you consider CRUD as something you get free?

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

#354

Post by empath75 »

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.

I do this stuff for a living and man is that a lot of stuff for one person to be responsible for. He could probably be a CTO at a lot of big companies making more than he’s making now probably.

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

#355

Post by lame88 »

corndoge wrote: post #290
kabacha wrote: post #288

Earlier 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.

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.

Quantum bridge: its in a superposition of open and closed and will collapse to one of those states when you try to cross. Also its made out of glass and runs on the block chain.

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

#356

Post by jeremija »

Volrath89 wrote: post #333
stupidcar wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Completely agree. My default stack is now react + an api in the backend. The way you can reuse components is a great time saver (even for simple apps). I also like redux-thunk to separate all my API calls from the components. Makes everything very lean and readable. I feel way more productive today than in the old jQuery, knockout messes

I've started to use TypeScript and React on the front end, with a JSON RPC middleware on an express server with helpers that automatically implement service interfaces for API calls, action creators and reducer handlers. And all of them are type-safe.

I've spent a lot of time building CRUD APIs and GraphQL interfaces, and this is the simplest solution that has saved me so much development time. JSON RPC gets so much hate, but it's made my life so much simpler.

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

#357

Post by whalesalad »

theonething wrote: post #285
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?

I will hunt down this comment and reply to you in your profile once it’s out!

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

#358

Post by qaq »

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…

I think Phoenix LiveView is offering a very compelling value here. You are basically writing a regular server side app that will perform on par with SPA for most use cases.

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

#359

Post by amai »

As soon as he has a bigger team of developers, some of his technology choices might cause trouble. Especially not having a build server will cause chaos very quickly, because nobody will know, who has deployed when and what. A good deployment pipeline with a good test battery using a boring build server like Jenkins can help a lot here.

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

#360

Post by whalesalad »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #287
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.

Got your email in my notes. Will shoot you a message once I have something out.
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