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How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

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Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#161

Post by robbmorganf »

protomyth wrote: post #6

In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant…

Agreed. Would love to hear more technical details. Particularly about the remote managed part, and how the user accesses it.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#162

Post by shkkmo »

yboris wrote: post #117
shkkmo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efforts work best when they are focused on helping with a problem that you have direct experience with. I think the long term large impact of pushing back against these ethically questionable things, even at the expense of your long term career earnings potential, would have a better result for society. If you can't push back on that stuff internally, consider publicizing the behaviors and starting a conversation aro…

Efforts work best when they are focused on cost-effective interventions, not things you have direct experience with. Just about 100% of the US population have no experience with malaria. Yet it costs about $2 to provide a insecticide-treated net that protects on average 2 people for 2-3 years from malaria (while they sleep -- a common time for malaria transmission). There is arguably nothing you can do with $2 of res…

I would point out that only funding projects that can easily measure and quantify results will rule out a lot of important projects. If you are going to donate, then you should do it responsibly. Using an independent non-profit to evaluate your potential recipients is a way to do that, and getting direct experience with the non-profit is another.

You seem to have missed my point: Doing evil things for money and then donating some of that money to charity is generally worse than not doing the evil things in the first place.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#163

Post by lifeisstillgood »

bekindandopen wrote: post #159
GordonS wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"? I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to make something like a Sandcrawler.

Many have tried but sadly there is a limited supply of skilled Jawa Programmers.

I tried to hire some to start such a project but I must have been looking in Alderaan places ...

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#164

Post by outworlder »

thunfischbrot wrote: post #155
GordonS wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take gre…

Not sure how good wear leveling is across brands of SD cards, but given the much larger SD cards available today, it may be a factor.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#165

Post by outworlder »

scottlamb wrote: post #62

Kudos to the author! I don't get this part: > In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think…

> If you want the developer to manage and monitor your installation, why not use a hosted version

It's a pretty common use-case for companies. They want their stuff on premises(for a variety of reasons), but don't want to deal with maintenance.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#166

Post by prepend »

nemiah wrote: post #135
prepend wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely could be easier. I searched for “open3A” via Google (not ddg, but if I got errors on ddg, I would try “!open3a”) and the first hit is a German site. I don’t speak German, but I saw the download link [0] and downloaded the first zip and viewed the license. I spent more time downloading the 4mb zip than clicking on stuff. It’s not the author’s job to make answering my questions easy. It is my job to not m…

My intention with this blog post was only to write down my story. No marketing intended :)

Thanks, I thought it was kind of refreshing how you weren’t linking to your site and liked to see content that didn’t just seem like seo or a sales pitch.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#167

Post by scottlamb »

outworlder wrote: post #165
scottlamb wrote: post #62

Kudos to the author! I don't get this part: > In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think…

> If you want the developer to manage and monitor your installation, why not use a hosted version It's a pretty common use-case for companies. They want their stuff on premises(for a variety of reasons), but don't want to deal with maintenance.

> for a variety of reasons

To rephrase my question: what are those reasons?

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#168

Post by callesgg »

GordonS wrote: post #107
bityard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is: 1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance. 2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

Yeah i have the same experience with about 100 pi’s. But I still added a mitigation making the log directory a overlayfs with tempfs underneath.

I think that reduced the number of writes to the sd card allot.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#169

Post by sdlion »

thunfischbrot wrote: post #155
GordonS wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take gre…

> Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss

Though in my experience as a technician installing 2.5" consumer grade / entry level Kingston/ADATA SSD to several clients, this is what generally will kill NAND flash devices, it's not an exclusive phenomenon to uSD cards.

I have a few running RPi's on premises for years. Ranging from v1 to now v4, certainly the only uSD 3 failures I have had has been with the early models and reliability went up with...... just a No-break power source. Just that.

It seems a lot of people think a sudden power loss it's what's only dangerous for electronics and NAND flash devices but for devices that are highly sensitive to browning down power rails (specially those first v1 raspis) any unstable power source is a rave party from which is hard to get out unscathed.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#170

Post by bigiain »

imhoguy wrote: post #120
tyingq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I poked around and found her product page for the Rpi device, and she does couple it with a 120GB SSD and two USB sticks for backup. https://www.open3a.de/page-open3ABox

Also as this is managed solution, I would offer encrypted offsite "cloud" storage. Any part of the box fails? Send over a new one the next day which will automatically pull all saved data once the login/password is typed on the setup page.

I'd probably lean the other way. I'd build that so that you could say

"Any part of the box fails? Send over a new one then next day then plug one of the USB sticks in and it'll automatically pull the encrypted saved data from itonce the login/password is entered."

If people are choosing a local box instead of her hosted offering, cloud backup might be a deterrent rather than a feature. For the ultra paranoid you could even sell them a spare which they can keep on-hand to swap in and get back invoicing immediately.

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