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What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

blog.ghost.org

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Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#141

Post by ehnto »

qrv3w wrote: post #97
neves wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very sad what the article says about GitHub. Which other changes would be nice to do?

I'm not sure - in my experience I find that issues from new GH users are usually suspect (e.g. see [1]). So it might be nice to have something like the "Limit to existing users" [2], except not limited to a 24-hour period. I wish GH users felt obligated to disclose they work for a company when creating issues that are for their company, but that's not something GH could (or should) enforce. [1]: https://github.com/sc…

Many large open source platforms address this particular issue with paid support plans. You might find that the company you ended up doing work for would be happy to have paid their way.

I also find some of the best improvement suggestions come from people using the software in heavy real world use, which tends to be businesses. They have very real pragmatic needs.

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#143

Post by bdowling »

invalidentry wrote: post #121
johnonolan wrote: post #24

Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.

Hello John. You may want to clear up some of the language you use around open source and copyright. The blog post says "the entire product is open source and has no copyright." All open source licenses are enforced via copyright, and the license on the github repos that I spot checked are explicitly copyrighted with what appears to be the MIT license. I think the intent of the post is clear, but it currently doesn't…

He also writes, “Anyone can do whatever they want with our code, for free.” The MIT license does allow one to do almost whatever one wants (e.g., sell a product based on a closed-source fork), so his statement may be consistent. Or it’s possible that he is actually disclaiming all copyright in the code. Or maybe he’s implying that he won’t go after license violators.

So, I guess I agree that his intent could be more clearly stated.

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#144

Post by Salamence »

stephen_g wrote: post #138
scrollaway wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks for Ghost, seriously. I was looking to port over our homegrown django blog app into a proper blogging engine and I immediately though of Medium because of HN conditioning, and had so many problems with it, all of them boiling down to lack of control: No way to embed stuff we wanted (we wanted to embed interactive graphs and tooltips), no way to disable some bullshit features (highlight popups), no way to…

Yeah, I was really surprised by the Postgres being dropped. I was using it and suddenly it was deprecated and removed... I use Postgres for other things, really don't like having to have a separate MySQL setup just for ghost...

From the article:

> Developers regularly show up on Github, rage at us for something like not supporting Postgres - and then we say "ok so are you going to write and maintain Postgres support for Ghost?" and they say "of course not, I don't have time for that!" - and then occasionally they'll go on Twitter and tell all their followers to give us hell. As if organising a mob and shouting louder is the best way to get a bunch of people writing free code to do what you want.

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#145

Post by Groxx »

hawkice wrote: post #140
johnonolan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do! It's nuanced, and every language decision has benefits and drawbacks. Making a bet on JavaScript/Node.js 5+ years ago was a big risk - a lot of people laughed at us or chastised the decision. A lot of those people are now also rewriting their apps in JavaScript. When it came to selecting Node, the biggest benefit was that it was notable. If we had said "HEY we're making another blogging platform in, wait for it…

Woah! That information about Docker is bananas. I've worked on projects with more than 200 VMs. Talk about things that don't show up on HN: scaling issues with popular technology where you never find a solution.

Until fairly recently with docker enterprise, from what I've been able to gather Docker's official stance on Enterprise™-use has been "don't use docker, use runc, and build / orchestrate / etc it with kubernetes or something" which basically means "rewrite whatever you intend to use". (afaik this all changed with https://blog.docker.com/2018/04/announcing-docker-enterprise... )

Which is fine. "can execute binaries in isolation" and "can schedule rollouts and efficient disk/networking structures across many thousands of instances" are vastly different problems. Even "can deploy to 100s" and "can deploy to 1000s" are quite different, without something targeting 1k+ I wouldn't expect it to handle beyond a couple hundred without compounding issues.

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#146

Post by vladdanilov »

johnonolan wrote: post #107
vladdanilov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're in the spotlight now, I want to bring back the discussion on image optimization [1]. Looking at your Features page [2], there are 953KB of images that can be compressed down to 453KB (-47.3%). I genuinely wonder what you can save with better image optimization. [1] https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/941572225890533376 [2] https://ghost.org/features/ [3] https://i.imgur.com/b5OO3Q6.png

So, on a post which discusses problematic behaviour on Github where entitled people try to bully us into working on what they want without writing any code themselves -- you (someone who has tried to bully us before on Github) -- decide that being in the spotlight is a perfect time for you to draw everyone's attention to your feature request once more. Because you think bullying us with HN social pressure will help y…

> So, on a post which discusses problematic behaviour on Github where entitled people try to bully us into working on what they want without writing any code themselves -- you (someone who has tried to bully us before on Github) -- decide that being in the spotlight is a perfect time for you to draw everyone's attention to your feature request once more. Because you think bullying us with HN social pressure will help your cause.

This whole sentence is false. I did not "bully" you anywhere (!), requested a feature from you, or pressured you to do anything. Quite the opposite, I showed an easy way to improve. Again, I could have been wrong on the effect. That's why the question. The "spotlight" reference was just a small joke. Sorry.

> And then, to back up your argument, you link to a page which is not running on Ghost - and actually does have optimised+responsive images.

I meant only the Ghost homepage in the link, and better optimization (proves [1]).

> All so you can spam your own image compression app.

I gave you the facts. Yet, you smeared me with false accusations. Is this even fair?

[1] https://github.com/vmdanilov/optimage/files/2011804/ghost.zi...

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#147

Post by icebraining »

profalseidol wrote: post #135
johnonolan wrote: post #24

Good morning HN! John from Ghost here - Thanks for all your support over the last 5 years. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that very first blog post hitting the #1 spot of HN and getting so much attention back in 2012. That was the very first time anyone ever heard about Ghost, and everything we've built since then has been thanks to that.

Why not Free Software license?

MIT is Free Software, just not copyleft.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Expat

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#148

Post by icebraining »

dev1n wrote: post #119
dxxvi wrote: post #17

It's very impressive that you need only $600k/year. How many people are there in your team (including everybody, not just developers)?

looks like 8 people total [1]. [1]: https://ghost.org/about/

Seems like they haven't updated that page, since https://blog.ghost.org/year-3/ mentions 9. Or maybe the ninth person wants to remain... a ghost (ba dum tsh!)

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#149

Post by cygned »

reilly3000 wrote: post #137
cygned wrote: post #106

I was on board from the beginning! What a great product. Too bad they dropped support for Postgres at some point, otherwise it would still be my platform of choice!

I’ve seen a couple comments about this issue, as well as it’s mention in the article. What about Postgres is appealing to the point that it is a deal breaker not to have? Is it familiarity or a specific aspect like scaling or ecosystem?

I prefer Postgres because of its (in my opinion: better) features and my familiarity with it. It wouldn't be a challenge to setup a MySQL/MariaDB database if I wasn't already running a largerish Postgres instance where I want to store my stuff. So the deal breaker here is me not wanting to have two DBMS running on the server.

Re: What we've learned from building Ghost after 5 years and $3M

#150

Post by icebraining »

justinclift wrote: post #122
detaro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it matter that the role for which they are hiring a developer to write docs is labelled "developer marketing" instead of "documentation engineer"?

The focus and priorities assigned to whoever does the work will be set by their manager. It's fairly easy to see that a Marketing manager will view the desired end result quite differently than an Engineering manager would. With a corresponding difference in the focus and priorities then set accordingly.

The whole company is nine people. I don't think managerial siloing is likely to have kicked in yet.
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