Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

broadcast.listennotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 464 posts

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

#361

Post by cik »

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…

Mind expanding on the coworking bit? I always think about hitting up a coworking just to have some human contact when I'm working on a project. I've yet to actually do it however.

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

#362

Post by agustif »

localhost wrote: post #69

This looks like a great service; I just signed up for it and created my own listen later playlist. I spend 6-8h a week on my mountain bike and I use most of that time to listen to podcasts. The challenge with how I do it (using just an Apple Watch) is curating my feed. This is an excellent tool and a far better UI for curating a feed. I also like the different and varied sources of income that you have, from the tran…

You could use Airpods + Siri + Notes.app for that.

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

#363

Post by fimdomeio »

stupidcar wrote: post #328
chrischattin wrote: post #301

Earlier 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.

It's a bigger investment I would say, but once you build a very well defined api structure and frontend components, things start getting very fast to develop. Also you get the added benefit of completely separate front and backend logic which is very useful in a multi developer environment.

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

#364

Post by simion314 »

stupidcar wrote: post #328
chrischattin wrote: post #301

Earlier 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.

And then 3 years later after you moved on someone like me has to come along and cleanup the project.

The current project I work on is angular1 based witch is outdated and it also sucks if the dev was just learning it at the time, the backend is done with a PHP framework that is today outdated/deprecated, this is not an old project(probably started when angular was the hot new thing)

I am sure your react project in 5 years if you will try to build it from scratch you will find issues with the npm dependencies, lots of deprecation warnings in your modules in react. I am all for the best tool for the job , use SPAs where it makes sense,

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

#365

Post by kareemm »

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.

> The only problem I see with rails is that it's hard to find devs these days (at least in Europe).

If you need a contractor to help with a Rails project drop me a line (my email's in my profile). Been working with Rails since 2.x days. Not in Europe tho I'm GMT-4.

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

#366

Post by is_true »

jv22222 wrote: post #271
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.

I used to do this with a friend, for me thinking about his problems was refreshing. We worked in different domains, so it felt like a challenge not work related.

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

#367

Post by Bombthecat »

dx034 wrote: post #336
tomclive wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. This year, for the first time, I've been working with Rails. It wasn't my choice but I've really enjoyed it. A lot just makes sense and it's been so quick to get things from idea to code.

I don't think devs hesitate because Rails (or Ruby in general) isn't good, they hesitate because they hope to gain more relevant experience by working with JS frameworks. But again, that's just my experience, it may differ for other companies and/or regions.

Rails isn't enough enterprisey (in my opinion..) no firm ever considers rails.. (note, I love rails!)

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

#369

Post by em-bee »

the key for me is a backend-as-a-service platform that i can reuse over and over. i used to be mainly a backend developer, but for more than 5 years now i have barely touched the backend code because it was designed to be reusable.

i build SAP applications now because they make it easy to work with a reusable backend.

for the rest of my system, i use basic LXC containers. no docker, or other container management system.

deployment consists of setting up an instance of the backend, and generate the frontend as static files that can be hosted whereever.

saltstack to control it all. done.

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

#370

Post by em-bee »

simion314 wrote: post #364
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.

And then 3 years later after you moved on someone like me has to come along and cleanup the project. The current project I work on is angular1 based witch is outdated and it also sucks if the dev was just learning it at the time, the backend is done with a PHP framework that is today outdated/deprecated, this is not an old project(probably started when angular was the hot new thing) I am sure your react project in 5…

how is that any different from a custom rails server with dozens of gems that need to be upgraded. how do you build a site without any of these risks and make it last for a decade or more?
Post reply on HN