Seems like a pretty typical stack
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
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Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#22The founder has some really informative and very detailed articles, e.g. this one about being rejected after his YC interview. https://www.listennotes.com/blog/my-y-combinator-interview-e...
It's interesting to read why he thinks he got rejected.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#23I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
exactly what i thought.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#24One of the links in the article, www.celeryproject.org, doesn't seem to work at this time
You can check out their docs here, not sure if they maintain their homepage. https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/stable/
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#25The founder has some really informative and very detailed articles, e.g. this one about being rejected after his YC interview. https://www.listennotes.com/blog/my-y-combinator-interview-e... It's interesting to read why he thinks he got rejected.
Great article, but I think he's far too hard on himself and reading too deep into his rejection (plenty of immigrants, non-native English speakers and people in their 30's from non-Ivy League schools succeed at building businesses). He's built a bootstrapped site that is probably going to be able to sustain himself for years.
But small businesses and big businesses are fundamentally different. I come from the restaurant space, and all my favourite restaurants are 'small' and likely can't exist in any place other than where they are. They can't scale. But they're much better qualitatively than restaurants that can scale. Some of the other products and things in my life that I enjoy also come from small artisans and could never scale. And that's OK.
He didn't build a massively scalable business but he did build a (seemingly) good one.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#26Interesting post to see how this solution is accomplished, but how is this a one-person company, if there are contractors? How are the contractors utilized and how much do they cost on average? Are the contractors needed or could this be done by a single engineer?
It sounds like he's using contractors for "surge" capacity. Normally, he's the only employee. But, if he has a major set of features to build/release, he'll contract out some of the work. Assuming they're all short-term jobs, I think it's fair to continue claiming it's a one-man company. But, if there's a steady flow of contractors that roughly adds up to a single FTE, the he's stretching the truth.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
A single engineer owner with multiple contractors is different from multiple employees under a single engineer owner in what way? It is dishonest to claim that one is “one-person” while another is not when they are organizationally the same. Reminds me of people that call themselves “retired early” when they are effectively entrepreneurs with their own businesses and side hustles. Kudos to the original poster though…
"Hey, look at this guy over here, claiming to be a 'one-person company', when he pays for a VPS instead of constructing a server from hardware, then self-hosting it himself. Pfft, I'll bet he doesn't even personally service the AC that is used to cool the building the server is in either! Probably pays an ISP too, instead of creating his own Internet from scratch."
I think comparing the use of contractors to the use of cloud services is pretty disingenuous in this context.
The reason that "one-person company" is emphasized in the title is because people will expect to find a list of technologies that make developing and maintaining all of the tech required to run a company do-able for a single person.
Advice about which cloud services to use is exactly what I would expect to find on such a list. Hiring external developers is exactly the opposite of what I would expect to see, and kind of undermines the premise.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#28I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
I'm currently reading logs via command line by ssh as you describe for a simple service and not satisfied with this. What would be a step up without a lot of extra infrastructure?
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#29I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
> PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts
That's a typical 2010-era stack.
We're almost in 2022, things have evolved.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#30Obviously, things have changed quite a bit in the three years since this was written. I'm curious what we now consider boring that was "exciting" then. First thing that comes to mind are the managed kubernetes services that weren't really "mature" back then. Are those boring? Some would say yes, I personally would say "not yet".
I wouldn't consider managed kubernetes services as boring. But I think nowadays more people accept that Kubernetes is an overpowered solution for most projects, especially side projects.