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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)

#11

Post by cudgy »

npsimons wrote: post #10
cudgy wrote: post #7

Interesting 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?

Would you consider someone delegating tasks to a personal assistant on a billable hours basis a multi-person company? How about paying a freelancer once for the initial design of the website? Both these tactics are discussed in "Start Small, Stay Small" a book aimed at single developer software product "startups." It's pretty clear that if you want to shorten time to market, you leverage existing assets - when it's p…

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 for making a business that they own by themselves I assume. However, taking all the credit for themselves despite using contractors to build their company is disingenuous.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#13

Post by rwalling »

cudgy wrote: post #7

Interesting 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 depends. If the contractors are working ad-hoc or part-time, IMO it's reasonable to say there is one person working full-time on this company, therefore it's a one-person company.

I think of it this way: if I'm solo and I hire a CPA to do my taxes or a bookkeeper to balance the books, does that make me a two-person company? That doesn't feel like an accurate description from my perspective.

I ran my company as a single founder with nine contractors working from a few hours a month to maybe 15 hours a week. All little task-based projects like loading up new content from a repo or answer support emails. Technically, letter of the law, we were 10 people. But from a cost/profit perspective (which I would posit is the most important aspect) it was very much a one-person company.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#16

Post by yabones »

Obviously, 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".

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#18

Post by rootusrootus »

beamatronic wrote: post #14

One of the links in the article, www.celeryproject.org, doesn't seem to work at this time

That's interesting they don't seem to be running a functioning main web page, but their docs do work. https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/stable/

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#19

Post by sdevonoes »

I 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.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#20

Post by npsimons »

cudgy wrote: post #11
npsimons wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider someone delegating tasks to a personal assistant on a billable hours basis a multi-person company? How about paying a freelancer once for the initial design of the website? Both these tactics are discussed in "Start Small, Stay Small" a book aimed at single developer software product "startups." It's pretty clear that if you want to shorten time to market, you leverage existing assets - when it's p…

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."
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