great read , say is your revenue is from ads only ?
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
401–410 of 464 posts
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The exact reason why most software engineers aren't really engineers.
Yes. This. There are only 700 software engineers in my province. I'm pretty sure not many are working on front end web development. Yet every front end job posting is "engineer". Just no. You don't get to call yourself a doctor because you are medically-inclined. Same applies to engineer.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#403Wonderful stuff! I've been trying to learn programming and able to code the CRUD apps for almost 6-7 years. I've tried to learn Rails (Ditched learning Rails because JS framework are all the rage). Tried learning Flask/Django because it was considered easy. Ditched it too cause internet people said it's slow. I tried learning Go, Phoenix and jumping between what's considered cool in last few years. And here I a…
Pick one framework – any is fine – and finish the (or a) minimal version of a basic simple app.
I'd suggest minimizing, or even ignoring, JavaScript. A really basic CRUD app doesn't need any.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#404Earlier 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)
RoR is absolutely not a niche skill-there a huge companies using it (GitHub, Shopify), tons of conferences on it (and a lot of Ruby conferences are heavily Rails), and my company personally has had no trouble recruiting devs. StackOverflow puts it at 8% absolutely popularity while Express is at 17%, so just little less than 50%, so it’s not niche just not in the top 3 backend web frameworks.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#405Technology 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 agree with your overall point, however I disagree with the "just pick Rails and don't do SPA" part. For startups or any small team, the right approach is whatever boring technologies the team is comfortable with. If that is Rails, great! I personally don't know it so that would be a horrible choice for me. Likewise SPAs are comfortable and easy for me (aka boring), but a bad choice for someone else who isn't comfortable with them.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There are a large number of non-professionals and beginners coding in PHP, they start from say an existing WP plugin ,open it in notepad and start editing until it works,
it happens in JS land too, find some js package made by a newb and run a linter on it, I see issues on code that is written by coders with a few years of experience where they do not use properly the array functions, do not use correctly the lamda, they copy paste same code in 3 or more places.
Do you think that all js,Ruby or Pthon dev would properly use SQL without an ORM? I dpn;t think so, I found recently bugs in a JS codebase where file upload would fail if the file had non US characters in it's name because some parameter was not url encoded, so all developers make mistakes and ORMs were not popular at that time to prevent this kind of mistakes for SQL.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all examples of pretty amateur mistakes. This reads more like an argument for keeping senior devs on the payroll than a warning about not using a framework.
It can be both. Senior devs and frameworks are two complimentary ways of managing chaos and organising your code.
A framework will not prevent things to become a mess, in the angular project I inherited in most places the rootScope is injected everywhere, I do not blame the developers either, the angular architecture is not great and when you have a lopt of new tasks for you to implement you don't always have the time to reimplement things, but sometimes the correct solution is not used , though you may want to claim that your favorite framework makes it harder to do the wrong thing.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#408Ansible, 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.
It’s doable for someone with several years full-stack experience. I had worked with all of those systems and more by the time I had 4-5 years experience.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree with you, but what sucks is that instead of 1 or 2 frameworks that are stable you get a large number of them that get deprecated, I was brought to work into 2 PHP projects, one was using yii1 and the second Silex , both frameworks were deprecated and some of the dependencies are deprecated too. I did not worked on Laravel, I hope when I will it won't be again on an unsupported old version.
Also it sucks when you search for help and you need to double check if the solution is for yii1 not 2, or angular1 not the others etc.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fi…
Try Vanilla.js.
It is missing a lot of stuff, like I want a modal popup, I need to search the web for a solution,
I want a DataGrid with sortable and re sizable columns, i need to search the web, find something that is compatible and also make sure the license is compatible
I want a basic Dropdown widget that can do basic things like ex have a flag+country name or have a list of fonts where each font is using it's family to be rendered. Also the scrollbars can't be themed for when elements overflow in all browsers so you are forced to find something that reimplements the scrollbars.
When I give example of Qt,Net or Java I include the full SDK , if you did not worked with this kind of SDKs maybe you worked with Android one, basically you have the language STL plus anything you need from file I/O, Networking, Widgets, to the serial ports,screen, and a lot of things, you don't have to package install a new thing for each feature.