101–110 of 141 posts
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Right, network effects are also moat.
But I thought you said nobody ever did large acquisitions for customers.... weird, I must be thinking of somebody else. Since it would make no sense for you to try to take both of those sides at once.
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Stimulus Reflex is probably what you want. https://github.com/hopsoft/stimulus_reflex Lightweight, real-time updates using the same Rails views already built.
Soo.. the response to OP's post regarding the burden of maintaining systems built with JS frameworks is.. yet another unknown JS framework that will cease to exist in 3 months from now on?
The Framework is Rails focused in that 1) Event handling is setup by Stimulus (a basecamp js framework), 2) Rendering is done server-side, transparently sent client side via ActionCable with dom-diffing automatically applied.
It's a way of achieving a real-time app while still maintaining performance and reusing your Rails server-side views.
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You don’t need jquery either, native JS works just fine for most simple interactions like startup apps. Time to say no to npm and packages like is_odd that somehow are depended on by thousands of packages. A sign of collective hysteria.
> native JS works just fine for most simple interactions like startup apps Oh god please don't. I worked with a startup whose "lead" (i.e. the person with the most seniority, not the smartest) insisted the whole front-end could be done with plain JS ("angular, jquery, etc... just useless bloat!!!" said the lead developer). What resulted was the biggest rats-nest soup of untraceable mess I've seen in a while. The only…
You don't need half of these services/tools. Especially when. You are building an MVP. Your first version should be very simple with very few layers.
I couldn't think of any of those that aren't needed except for Segment. You definitely want monitoring and metrics in place before you launch otherwise you won't be able to figure out issues with your product. And in the early days it's all about fast iterations.
This is exactly the trap the OP fell into.
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”So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc.” Oh come on. It takes maybe an afternoon of work to do everything you’ve described. Let’s say you’re utterly clueless about all aspects of sysadmin, and you need to learn how to do it from scratch: 2-3 days, tops. No matter how much you pad the schedule…
> or you’re just being lazy LOL. Good developers are the most lazy people on the planet. Laziness is a virtue, not a sin! If my developer told me our company could outsource all our sysadmin tasks to some third party I'd be a fool to not listen. If I was a developer and my boss called me lazy for trying to help the company move faster (which is far more important for a startup than saving a few bucks) because boss-pe…
This mantra that good engineers are universally lazy is absurd. I absolutely will find the easiest way to solve a problem... as long as that problem can tolerate that solution.
IaaS is a minefield and plainly saying IaaS >> barebones is absurd.
Engineering 'magic' is great until you realize you need something slightly different but you are locked into their framework, system, whatever. You then have to spend a bunch to engineer yourself out and end up with an inferior solution when you could've just done it 'simple' the first time.
An early engineer should have zero trouble pulling up an Ubuntu box, installing Nginx and Supervisor and pulling some default configs from StackOverflow. I have been re-using the same config for both for years now.
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Soo.. the response to OP's post regarding the burden of maintaining systems built with JS frameworks is.. yet another unknown JS framework that will cease to exist in 3 months from now on?
Not exactly. The Framework is Rails focused in that 1) Event handling is setup by Stimulus (a basecamp js framework), 2) Rendering is done server-side, transparently sent client side via ActionCable with dom-diffing automatically applied. It's a way of achieving a real-time app while still maintaining performance and reusing your Rails server-side views.
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> Or a barebones box from Vultr or Linode then log errors out to stdout So instead of talking with customers and growing your business you are busy wasting your time installing a web server, database server, configuring build tools, etc? Getting root access to a barebones linux install is conceptually "not complex". But that is only because it pushed all the actual complex stuff up the food chain and into your head.…
Yes, you'll spend some 2 days setting all services, testing, setting backups and alerts, testing again. Add another day if you want redundancy. And then, every 4 to 8 months you'll spend some 2 hours making sure everything is working right and up to date. If you get into another user-base class (like, from 100 to 1000, or from 1000 to 10000), you will spend all those 3 days again. Compare that with cloud services, wh…
If you go big and realize an IaaS solution is right, great, you are ready to go on to IaaS with no trouble
If you IaaS from the beginning, you've cornered yourself and have to build your way out.
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Deployment /can be/ a git push away, but that's only on the extreme end with things like heroku. You mentioned cloud. Cloud has cost sinks every so often (in terms of time). Cloud has much value but please dont' consider it a panacea. You can get a lot of value out of those 30 minutes installing a webserver; and it can save you a significant amount of cost. Not to mention when you want to actually scale you'll see th…
Businesses don't exist to save money. They exist to deliver value. Your goal in a startup shouldn't be all about saving money like some cheapskate penny pincher. Penny wise, pound foolish. Worrying about $100/mo in heroku bills instead of $10/mo "bobs budget webhost" bills is a waste of time. If your startup cannot afford $100/mo or even $1000/mo in infrastructure costs you probably should exist. Especially given sma…
A dollar saved is a dollar earned. AWS is a terrible choice unless you have a huge amount of free credit. Also, an income of $4000/mo puts you into the average American household income bracket. Why would you throw away 25% of that on infrastructure to save 2 hours on the front end?
Not every startup needs to be the next Instagram. There are tons of people out there happy with their small and medium sized SAAS companies which have allowed them to leave the rat race.
I love the discussion about all this. For a bit of context, I kept the article focused on the technical because that is the primary audience of my website. There is a criticism that I focused too much on the technical side in the article. That's entirely possible. My choice to focus on the technical is because my lessons basically boiled down to: 1. Don't focus on the technical (#1 YAGNI, #2 Ignore software upgrades,…