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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

#171

Post by mdnormy »

vladdanilov wrote: post #146
johnonolan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nitpicking, but can we put some warning if the link will automatically download something? ZIP in this case.

HN seems to cut the link text.

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

#172

Post by edwinnathaniel »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #159
Salamence wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Might be worth their while to consider using an ORM of some sort that supports PGSQL then? I know some don't like ORM's but for projects that are hosted in a diverse amount of setups / environments they make sense to me.

Other platforms have good DB abstractions (ADO.net, JDBC) though so it doesn't have to be ORM.

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

#173

Post by indigodaddy »

johnonolan wrote: post #126
vanilla-almond wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on the 5th anniversary! A question: Do you think your choice of technology stack (JavaScript, node.js) played a part in your success? I've read many times from product creators that developers wildly overestimate the importance of choosing a language or technology stack when in fact it has little bearing on whether a product will succeed. Do you have any thoughts on this topic?

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…

Awesome! I love the combination of HAProxy and LXC containers. It's so great. And even better using Ubuntu's LXD(/LXC), with DNS service/auto discovery built-in. Eg, just reference myghost1.lxd in the haproxy backend config for the LXC target host.

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

#174

Post by Whitestrake »

Rotareti wrote: post #162
Whitestrake wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you get a reputation as a rude developer, whether or not that's fair or warranted.

You could create an issue template that explains the rules. If people still file support issues, you close those with a friendly reminder text (copy/paste) in which you explain the reasons why this is not the place for support. If people still think this is rude, they have personality issues which shouldn't be of your concern.

Aye, and you'd be well within your rights to do so, but I am doubtful that this approach will preempt the majority of people assuming rudeness on your part.

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

#175

Post by antigirl »

I signed up for ghost when it was at its kickstarter phase. I was very excited by the promise. A year later there were still long winded discussions taking place on their github issues on how they should tackle responsive images. There were alot of JS hacks around to overcome their missing features. I lost interest over time

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

#176

Post by giancarlostoro »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #172
giancarlostoro wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be worth their while to consider using an ORM of some sort that supports PGSQL then? I know some don't like ORM's but for projects that are hosted in a diverse amount of setups / environments they make sense to me.

Other platforms have good DB abstractions (ADO.net, JDBC) though so it doesn't have to be ORM.

Whichever approach is fine, the end result is that less effort is made to directly support PGSQL in the long run, and you'd get to support any database back-end as a result. I only mention ORM's cause some have decent tooling (EntityFramework (Core), Diesel.rs, etc) which can be useful for generating schemas out of object models. Also in some cases ORMs are using DB abstraction libraries like for example Entity Framework is built on top of ADO .NET.

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

#177

Post by philjr »

johnonolan wrote: post #42
misterbowfinger wrote: post #31

> How do you pay people if they live in different countries? What about contracts? — The things people ask about most often all have straightforward answers. Really? I just read a comment from the CEO of HashiCorp who has a very different take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17022563 Unless all remote employees of Ghost are just contractors...

Yes they are exactly that. Same with Automattic, Zapier, Buffer - and most of the other big remote companies. In fact, we all use the same set of contracts. They tend to get passed around founders. All 3 of those other companies are USA based, so for anyone in the US they do standard employment contracts - and anyone outside = self employed contractor on a retainer. We're based in Singapore and don't have any staff i…

>>> Mr HashiCorp has gone way too far down the rabbit hole, by the sounds of it. It makes sense to set up a subsidiary when you have a larger group of staff in a single location.

Or when you want to do things like give them stock or healthcare or pensions

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

#178

Post by indigodaddy »

johnonolan wrote: post #54
SkyPuncher wrote: post #46

We use hosted Ghost for our blog. For the most part, it's been great. My biggest complaint is that Ghost doesn't yet have a built in SSL/TLS option (e.g. Let's Encrypt). Their recommendation is to use Cloudflare. It's fine for hobbyist or personal blogs, but as a corporation it's basically prevented us from using SSL. We're in a regulated industry and need to do appropriate vetting of vendors. Onboarding a blog platf…

We do have all of those things :) For self-hosters, Ghost-CLI has deep Let's Encrypt integration. The tool will automatically guide you through provisioning an SSL certificate during the install process. On Ghost(Pro) we have full end to end SSL support (you're right we used to only support CF's UniverSSL but that is no longer the case) - so anyone who uses a custom domain with Ghost(Pro) will automatically have an S…

Another option would be to just put haproxy in front of Ghost, and have haproxy handle the SSL termination.

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

#180

Post by justinclift »

johnonolan wrote: post #164
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, user docs are customer-facing, but the problem is that if they're under the control of marketing, then documentation priorities will be set as if they are marketing materials. And, possibly worse, a writer who works in marketing will by and large be treated by engineers like, well, somebody who works in marketing. (Without getting into sordid details, I'm speaking from personal experience of having been a tech w…

That's cool, but we literally don't have a marketing department. So whoever gets hired will report directly to me, no matter what their title is. The primary function of the role is to do writing, not engineering - and the success of the role will be measured in terms of marketing, not engineering - so to me the title we went with makes the most sense. I can definitely understand the discussion here though :)

> the success of the role will be measured in terms of marketing

Err... trying to grok that, and failing. Are you ok to flesh out what you mean? :)

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