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Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

blog.railway.app

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Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#61

Post by fancyremarker »

theonething wrote: post #48
fancyremarker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for a PaaS to improve your security posture by implementing many of the security controls you'd otherwise be responsible for yourself. Every PaaS provider has a Shared Responsibility Model, like this one from AWS [0], and a good PaaS can eat up much of what would otherwise be your responsibility as an AWS customer: network architecture, secure configuration, IAM, system access (and auditing), intrusion…

Thank you. Aptible looks promising. I have a question about endpoints. It seems like you guys charge per endpoint. I don't quite understand this. So if I'm developing an api only application, every api endpoint I develop in my application will be charged? And for Aptible to keep track, would I have to register each endpoint I develop? If my application was just serving dynamic html pages, I wouldn't be charged per ur…

"Endpoints" on Aptible are load balancers. So you would pay for each load balancer your API needs (usually just 1), not every API endpoint. Thanks for the feedback on that — we will update the language to be clear that these are load balancers, not API endpoints.

We don't provide a solution for implementing SSO in your own application, but many of our customers do integrate with Auth0 without issue. For your own team's access _to Aptible_, we offer SSO through SAML integration with any provider (Google, Okta): https://deploy-docs.aptible.com/docs/sso

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#62

Post by jen20 »

danjac wrote: post #55
zitterbewegung wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing devil's advocate if you don't want to do the take home test then they just filtered you out and actually is serving their desires on who they want to hire.

A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation. The problem is the sheer number of steps required, of which the project is just one step. For example for a recent position I looked at: 1. Initial interview with some HR person: 1 hour 2. Interview with a tech person and review some code sample (spot security issues, bugs etc): 1.5 hours 3. Take home project (supposed to take 2 hours, but you'll want to mak…

> A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation.

This very much depends on what type of IP agreement you have with your current employer.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#63

Post by urbandw311er »

trevor-e wrote: post #30
urbandw311er wrote: post #20

Not sure this is something I’d be bragging about. What happens when you do eventually have a major outage and need to rapidly provide reassurance and tailored support to hundreds of people. Like when Atlassian deleted thousands of JIRA tickets by mistake and seemed completely unprepared to scale up their support.

Is that something you can reasonably prepare for as a company? Like just keep a bunch of extra support people on payroll in case there's a catastrophic event?

What a great question. Perhaps the answer is “not entirely” but draw up some best effort contingency plans (pool of contractors, insurance cover, etc). I still wouldn’t be highlighting how few support staff I have per customer like this in either case!

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#64

Post by ryanSrich »

tnb2407 wrote: post #60
ryanSrich wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Railway does look impressive. However, as someone in the market for a Heroku alternative - I’d say there really aren’t any Heroku competitors. At least nothing directly comparable. The thing that keeps me (and I’m sure other small business owners) tied to Heroku is just how much they take care of for you. I literally never ever want to think about my infrastructure beyond initial setup. Heroku, to my knowledge, is th…

hop.io maybe

Doesn’t look to have much security configurability. With Heroku I can pass a SOC 2 certification. This I’m not so sure.

As a hobby dev alternative to Heroku this might be fine. For a serious business I don’t see this as an alternative.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#65

Post by ryanSrich »

ankit70 wrote: post #45
ryanSrich wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Railway does look impressive. However, as someone in the market for a Heroku alternative - I’d say there really aren’t any Heroku competitors. At least nothing directly comparable. The thing that keeps me (and I’m sure other small business owners) tied to Heroku is just how much they take care of for you. I literally never ever want to think about my infrastructure beyond initial setup. Heroku, to my knowledge, is th…

Render.com?

I have to look into Render again at some point. I do remember when it first came out it had a lot of features missing. Most notably a redis solution.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#66

Post by [deleted] »

ndneighbor wrote: post #3
trynewideas wrote: post #2

> As a team of one, we were able to support 250k users, and now that we've crossed that bridge, our goal is to support two million users with our 2-person team for a 1M-to-1 ratio. Is it weird then that they have an open req for a support engineer: https://railway.app/careers/support-engineer

heyo Angelo (author) here- This is actually the original blogpost that we used to make our first hire! > You will be working with our existing Support Engineer, Angelo - to build out processes, formalize policies, and build out integrations between systems to make it so that we can track and record issues. I accidentally left that one open... but the Ashby interface is so confusing I don't know where to toggle the vi…

[deleted]

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#67

Post by abhikp »

ndneighbor wrote: post #3
trynewideas wrote: post #2

> As a team of one, we were able to support 250k users, and now that we've crossed that bridge, our goal is to support two million users with our 2-person team for a 1M-to-1 ratio. Is it weird then that they have an open req for a support engineer: https://railway.app/careers/support-engineer

heyo Angelo (author) here- This is actually the original blogpost that we used to make our first hire! > You will be working with our existing Support Engineer, Angelo - to build out processes, formalize policies, and build out integrations between systems to make it so that we can track and record issues. I accidentally left that one open... but the Ashby interface is so confusing I don't know where to toggle the vi…

Hey! Ashby co-founder here, you can either close the job (if you’re no longer hiring) or unpublished the job posting, more here (https://www.notion.so/How-do-I-set-up-jobs-089229a8631f4b9fb...). Feel free to reach out to support@ashbyhq.com and we can chat there (if you haven’t already)

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#68

Post by gbatchelor78 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #23
nitsuaeekcm wrote: post #16

What an impressive company. A good reminder that, even in a market with umpteen competitors, success comes down to execution. Hope they keep up the good work.

Railway does look impressive. However, as someone in the market for a Heroku alternative - I’d say there really aren’t any Heroku competitors. At least nothing directly comparable. The thing that keeps me (and I’m sure other small business owners) tied to Heroku is just how much they take care of for you. I literally never ever want to think about my infrastructure beyond initial setup. Heroku, to my knowledge, is th…

www.platform.sh is a good alternative to Heroku.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#69

Post by PragmaticPulp »

throwaway5Am1k wrote: post #33
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listing multiple possible openings for a limited headcount is common, but not necessarily nefarious. A company may be open to a junior, mid, or senior developer but have different expectations, compensation, and requirements for each of those titles. Posting different job listings allows you to cast a wider net without having to dilute the job descriptions too much. > do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job…

This is such a hack response. >not necessarily nefarious It might not be nefarious, but if companies are putting out "feelers", and I'm investing ~30 hours per company, and half the companies I'm applying to are like this, then there's a huge waste of time (mine and theirs). I've started calling out this bullshit: "is there a job here, or is this a position to gauge the market?" >10 hours of interviewing is barely mo…

> This is such a hack response.

Please be civil.

Posting multiple job listings targeting different salary ranges isn’t a “hack response”. It’s literally how you hire properly without a crystal ball to predict exactly who will apply.

Again, no company is going to drag candidates through interviews for jobs that don’t exist. I don’t understand why anything thinks that’s the case. Interviewing is work for the interviewers, too.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#70

Post by PragmaticPulp »

jen20 wrote: post #62
danjac wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation. The problem is the sheer number of steps required, of which the project is just one step. For example for a recent position I looked at: 1. Initial interview with some HR person: 1 hour 2. Interview with a tech person and review some code sample (spot security issues, bugs etc): 1.5 hours 3. Take home project (supposed to take 2 hours, but you'll want to mak…

> A reasonably-scoped take-home project is fine in isolation. This very much depends on what type of IP agreement you have with your current employer.

Take home projects are not work from the company’s backlog. They’re tests and all candidates receive the same test.

It doesn’t make sense for a company to open up their code base and infrastructure to random candidates and ask them to work on it. That’s an IP and leak nightmare.

OTOH, if you are taking a paid contract job to work with a company on real work as a trial, you could definitely be violating contractual agreements with an employer. This type of interviewing is extremely rare, though. Few full time job holders would consider it, so it would be largely limited to unemployed people who have the time to do it.

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