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Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

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Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#51

Post by chiefalchemist »

amelius wrote: post #33
gargron wrote: post #6

I don't think it's at all surprising that there is no relation between tech stack and business success. End-users don't care if you use a single PHP file or a Go binary, they never get to see that anyway. So I don't really see "it was all a single PHP file" as a gotcha. The whole thing could've been coded in Assembly, the difference is in the effort required for development, ease of maintenance/scaling up and how wel…

Also, this is not really a "tech" story. Everybody is building websites these days. What counts is what business you build with them.

Yes and no. The tech doesn't matter but that is The Point. That is, your tech won't save bad product. Using the latest cool kids framework or buzzwordy tool won't save bad product.

Yes, the business you're in matters. No, it doesn't matter how you build them - as long as it's quickly. If you outgrow you're overly simplistic stack, that is a _great_ problem to have.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#52

Post by robjan »

bravura wrote: post #41
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as SQLite doesn't catastrophically break under load it's fine for production, but only as long as it has a single client; traditional database engines can deal with multiple applications connecting to them. I'm using sqlite for a production application as well, but its load will be in the range of - at best - thousands per day. The only complexity will be that there has to be a secondary 'fallback' server; th…

If I have a simple Flask or Django app, backed by sqlite, how do I make sure I only have one client? If I use a prerolled Apache or Nginx frontend (which may or may not be set up with multiple threads or whatever), and have very very low traffic, how do I make sure I'm not corrupting it with multiple writes?

SQLLite will lock the db while you are writing to it to prevent this happening

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#54

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

heipei wrote: post #8

Well-deserved in my opinion. His no-nonsense and unpretentious way of building products, often out in the open, should be a source of motivation for others who can come up with a dozen reasons why they shouldn't attempt to do X. His blog-posts and Tweets are not hustle-porn but just straight-up "works for me, I honestly don't care what you say". A quote that I recently read applies to him very much: "Pessimists sound…

Yeah a lot of people get stuck in the loop of worrying whether they're using the right framework or programming patterns or whether their blog will scale to 1 million daily hits. They rarely ship anything.

If you never put your work out there, you'll never be successful, so the key is to stop messing around and just build. If it's shit, it's shit, no one can see the code, if you want to rewrite it then ship it and do it after.

The quicker it's out there, the better it is for you, and it's also incredibly motivating to get feedback ASAP without guessing what people might want from your product.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#55

Post by monatron »

brainless wrote: post #46
pieterhg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey :) you should see my brain and discover what I'm plagued by! I struggle with moderate anxiety and depression on and off too and esp this year has been quite hard. Work is quite therapeutical for me because it keeps me creative, active and have goals. It keeps me on the rails really. Daily creative stuff to work on. My dad does the same as he's always renovating the house, doing woodworking, or studying film histo…

Pieter, I do not know how to thank you enough for this. Last few weeks have been a disaster, cluelessness creeping in and I hit the bottom again. Thankfully I have YC Build Sprint so I forced myself somehow to ignore everything that is not working in my life and focus on what is working. Yes depression and anxiety are common in these circles. My work motivates me, I am 37 years old and this is my life, has always giv…

Good luck, Sumit!

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#56

Post by nstart »

I am super inspired by Pieter. At the same time, I'm also not a believer of a one size fits all approach. A lot of Pieter's work these days is built around remote working communities. His first ideas when he was doing 12 months, 12 startups were very singular in focus. Nothing wrong with that at all. At the same time, Pieter's approach has not been used across a broad range of products in terms of product complexity.

I'm basically curious which larger products have been made with this kind of relatively ultra-light technological approach and have still succeeded.

I'm particularly curious if there are products that started out as a super simple application and then grew in complexity while maintaining this kind of approach. At what point did it break? Are there examples where it did not break?

Edit - by growing in complexity I mean feature/product complexity while maintaining technical "simplicity".

Or am I thinking about this backwards? If you are a single developer, you use your basic tools, and launch products that are light on complexity where the focus is to ensure it earns money and that's it.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#57

Post by arel »

thesizeofa wrote: post #34
christophilus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly follow HN, a successful tech forum that is written in a single lisp file and runs on a single server. It’s not surprising to find successful projects run with a simple stack. The opposite is more surprising.

The fact that I keep reading posts on HN about how successful HN is makes me wonder how soon will this forum die off, infested by cultist "contrarians", wanna be philosophers and alt right fantasists, in favour of reddit - where most of the times I read either the exact same comments as here on identical posts, or better quality comments with far more evidence and without the usual non sense downvoting of dissent. Bu…

The cargo culting and contrarian smugness on HN can be very annoying.

Not very representative of the entire real world of development.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#58

Post by bilbopotter »

pc86 wrote: post #53

If you don't know who Pieter Levels is, the title makes it sound like this person makes $600k doing remote coding work on jobs found on Nomad List and Remote OK. In actuality, he is an MBA who runs these two businesses.

Also he's up to about 900k now the video referred to is old.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#59

Post by RHSeeger »

Pete-Codes wrote: post #19
sdoering wrote: post #13

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

hey, I posted the article. Good to know! I'm sure I had read it somewhere on their site. Maybe it was just from other developers that I got the impression it wasn't meant from production. Thanks

SQLite is staggeringly productions ready. I think the trick is to think of it less like a traditional database and more like a file format with an SQL front end.

From the website [1]

> SQLite is used by literally millions of applications with literally billions and billions of deployments.

It's also worth noting (at least, imo) that it's automated test suite is fantastic. I seems to recall it has considerably more test code than actual library code.

[1] https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#60

Post by jannes »

alfonsodev wrote: post #49
mytherin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite runs in airplanes [1]. I would say that is all that needs to be said on whether or not SQLite is production-ready :) In fact, I would argue SQLite is the most well-tested and production ready database system out there. [1] https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

I've found that Apple uses sqlite too, for Safari history and if I recall correctly macOS Notes app too.

Apple built Core Data on top of sqlite. There are probably a lot more Apple apps using it than just Safari and Notes.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coredata/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Data

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