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

381–390 of 464 posts

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

#381

Post by johannes1234321 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #300
corndoge wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Research engineers do. GP said he is not aiming to build a profitable above all else company. Maximizing fun in a hobby seems legit.

For a hobby and for learning it is absolutely fine. The critique is on businesses running that way fmeither since some developers want to drink the cool-aid on the job or since the company wants to be "attractive" riding the hype train. (How else could they attract the best developers? ;) )

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

#382

Post by [deleted] »

croh wrote: post #291
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.

Dear, for your sake only, I am pasting this definition straight from wikipedia - Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build, and test machines, systems, structures and materials TO FULFILL OBJECTIVES AND REQUIREMENTS WHILE CONSIDERING THE LIMITATIONS IMPOSED BY PRACTICALITY, REGULATION, SAFETY, AND COST.

[deleted]

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

#383

Post by buboard »

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.

It s not fun at all 2 years later though

And it s debateable if learning other people’s apis is fun

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

#384

Post by simion314 »

em-bee wrote: post #370
simion314 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As the other mentioned there are other devlopment stasks that are stable, to give more examples but not for Web, you can get ther code for an old .Net,Java,Qt application, download the SDK used for that version and just build it. There are not 100+ things you need, the SDK contains the compilers, a huge standard library other build tools. If the project had other dependencies those are some standalone .dll or .jar files that you place in the application folder.

For web when I inherit an older project I need to spend a lot of time in finding the correct version of things, like for an older react project it was using an official jsx transpiler but today that package is deprecated you can't just npm install it, so I would have been forced to upgrade the entire build system to use the new thing , but at that moment I had to fix a small thing so I found a hack for the issue and postpone the fixing of that issue.

What I think Web needs is some standard framework, or a framework core maybe jsx or other template thing but something standard to be used in mst projects and for side projects we can toy with the shiny new frameworks and languages.

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

#385

Post by strken »

motogpjimbo wrote: post #380
em-bee wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By choosing a language with a large standard library and then relying on that library rather than on frameworks of the day as much as possible. For example, many vanilla PHP applications written 10 years ago will still run just fine today, whereas upgrading from one version of Laravel to the next version can be a major trauma.

From what I remember of php applications written around 2009, a lot of them had SQL injection and bizarre roll-your-own-security vulnerabilities. There were some pretty appalling things like the same (wrong) CSRF token validation code being copy-pasted into fifty different files, or passwords saved in plaintext, or customer credit card info sent over email, or every single site being mashed into joomla and drupal no matter whether it actually fit and then never updated.

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

#386

Post by buboard »

chillfox wrote: post #303
halfjoking wrote: post #256

That's not boring - it's a professional dev techstack. Boring tech would be a million dollar business running on Wordpress.

There is plenty of those, they just don't have anyone tech-savvy enough to be on hacker news.

Every big company has interesting engineering stories. But i think sure HN woulndt upvote tales from Automattic

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

#387

Post by buboard »

Scarblac wrote: post #119
ademup wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. HN is very much about the -business- of tech. Telling us how you made your mousetrap is all well and good... Having us ask how many mice it has captured is absolutely relevant. Germane even.

I disagree. This isn't Tech Business News or Startup News, it's Hacker News.

The subject has switched to business and management long ago

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

#388

Post by jackcodes »

ackbar03 wrote: post #352
pikzel wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It sort of depends, if you’ve worked in a couple of corporates where you have to know a handful of various tools at each it quickly adds up to having enough knowledge to quickly deploy even what hacker news considers ‘heavyweight tooling’. Most of these tools have QuickStart guides that do get you most of the way there for a basic use case. I’m running a similar solo project with an almost-but-not-quite similar spreads of technologies.

But as I said, it depends on your history and what you work quickly with.

In the article the author says they chose Ansible because docker felt too heavyweight and unnecessary. It’s true that docker has a lot of stuff you don’t need in there, but trust me when I say Ansible is no picnic. In fact I find it easier to take what I need with Docker and Kubernetes and get running way quicker than I would ‘naked’ Ubuntu machines that I need to semi-manual previsioning with shell scripts or Ruby scripts. I got up and running with Kubernetes on DigitalOcean in less than a day, and Dockerfiles using familiar technologies I’ve used before take less than an hour to iron out.

You’ll get people who say that Docker is overkill and unnecessary and far too complicated for a solo project, but then you’ll get others who believe it’s a small file with 20 lines of declarations, sat alongside a 30 line yaml file that can provision all of your infrastructure instantly across any cloud provider you choose.

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

#389

Post by em-bee »

motogpjimbo wrote: post #380
em-bee wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By choosing a language with a large standard library and then relying on that library rather than on frameworks of the day as much as possible. For example, many vanilla PHP applications written 10 years ago will still run just fine today, whereas upgrading from one version of Laravel to the next version can be a major trauma.

and yet, a lot of vanilla PHP is a mess of code whereas when i had to work on a laravel application i found it a pleasure to work with (even without having any prior PHP experience)

pick your poison i guess.

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

#390

Post by NohatCoder »

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 wonder what is wrong with single page apps? As I see it you can largely write the same code, you just have the additional option of modifying the page on the fly.
Post reply on HN