Very inspiring. As a coding newbie / wannabe entrepreneur, I will need some time to understand what each part of your technology does though. I will start using Listen Notes later today. Keep up the good work!
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
441–450 of 464 posts
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
For sure, but the comment was about million dollar business which depending upon geography would be classified as either micro or small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterpr...
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sounds neat, what project are you working on?
I'm currently working on various projects at work that I cannot discuss here, but in parallel I've been working on an express / TypeORM / React (SPA & SSR) framework that I hope to release one day as an open source project.
The main focus is to:
- easily share React components that use Redux state and actions between projects
- rapidly develop new server-side services and immediately use them in React components (by removing code duplication when it comes to creating action creators and action types)
- have type safety
- provide basic server-side and client-side components for basic user actions such as login, user profile, etc
- make it easy to write tests
And at some point in the future, I hope to make it generic enough so the libraries mentioned above can be swapped for other libraries, but that might be too much work :)
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#444Technology 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.
Nothing "wrong" with them per se, but in terms of system complexity, you're basically doubling it by having application state and logic on both the backend and frontend. When I work on a big SPA, I feel like I'm working on two applications and have to worry about syncing state and logic together.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#445I love these stories. I'm a one-person company too: contribsys.com. My production server stack is Apache + some Ruby CGI scripts, to serve static files and handle billing webhooks. I spend less than an hour per week on devops maintenance. KISS is the #1 principle when scaling a solo operation.
That should have been the real "boring" stack we're talking about here instead of the 20+ technologies mentioned in the OP.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#446Here's my boring technology. I've built Libr ( https://librapp.com ), a full social networking platform designed to fill the void Tumblr left behind. The hosting is serverless for both the front end assets and back end no servers to maintain and infinitely scalable. Libr has a front end progressive web app built with VueJS hosted on S3 with CloudFlare in front. The back end API is hosted on Lambda. By using serverles…
Is you site down? I am unable to access it right now.
It's up. Unless S3/CloudFlare go down, it shouldn't go down
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Clients are usually not hiring engineers. They have opinionns on management, on what should be done, on how you should work and in which conditions. They have opinions on you being remote or not, on how you should look like, on your mental health (cf. some pieces on whether people on the spectrum make better employees). Most of these opinions are not grounded and you can not leverage the related tools to improve the…
I guess.
Those restrictions you describe are classic hallmarks of a toxic workplace IMHO, and somewhere I would leave as soon as I had the chance. I guess I'm lucky to have that choice.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#448Technology 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…
However, the post indicates React + Redux for the front-end. Perhaps it's my bias as a back-end curmudgeon, but those strike me as _unboring_ choices in the front end, particularly if you're not targeting SPAs. My point being: one person's "boring" could be another person's anything from "clunky and archaic" to "faddy" to "efficient and sensible." Not even Rails, built upon Ruby's idiosyncratic blood magick, is an en…
So, boredom is in the eye of the beholder?
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#449Having experience in both realms, it seems kind of interesting that Docker is considered overengineering while React + Redux + Webpack + ES is considered natural and simple. I guess 50% of "overengineering" is really just "I'm not familiar or comfortable with ths".
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds neat, what project are you working on?
I'm currently working on various projects at work that I cannot discuss here, but in parallel I've been working on an express / TypeORM / React (SPA & SSR) framework that I hope to release one day as an open source project. The main focus is to: - easily share React components that use Redux state and actions between projects - rapidly develop new server-side services and immediately use them in React components (by…
Sounds like a lot of work, how do you know that it is a net time saver?