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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)

#291

Post by croh »

kabacha wrote: post #288
whalesalad wrote: post #273

Technology is usually just a means to an end. Unless IP is what you are selling, boring is great. I’ve seen SO many teams burn SO much energy on complicated stacks just to drink kool-aid. It’s mind bogglingly frustrating, especially as a contractor. At the end of the day it’s great for me: I get brought into shit shows to clean up the mess. But deep down, I want projects to succeed and clean/sound systems architectur…

Why is HN so against people who _enjoy_ engineering? Why should I run some run-of-the-mill stack that has enourgmous legacy cruft and just not "fun". Not every business wants to be sillicon-valley optimized money farm - some people want to do some enjoyable work.

Dear, for your sake only, I am pasting this definition straight from wikipedia -

Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build, and test machines, systems, structures and materials TO FULFILL OBJECTIVES AND REQUIREMENTS WHILE CONSIDERING THE LIMITATIONS IMPOSED BY PRACTICALITY, REGULATION, SAFETY, AND COST.

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

#292

Post by aprdm »

ydnaclementine wrote: post #54

Only question I can think of that I didn’t see an answer for is: is he running one postgres db, which is shared between the web and api services? Multiple services with only one db gets hairy fast with questions like: who owns the migrations? does the migration owning service have to restart the other service so the other service gets the new db column/table? etc Unless the web also uses the API service to get its da…

Likely the web app uses the API to get its data, it hints at it when he says he uses the same APIs the customers do from his frontend.

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

#294

Post by aprdm »

paxys wrote: post #284
peterwwillis wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author can just run an Ansible job and recreate it instantly. It's a stateless ec2 node. If they wanted to be super duper fancy they could make an autoscaling group to destroy and recreate it if it went down. No need for a replica. This probably isn't a lose-100K$-every-5-minutes-of-downtime business.

I am all for simplicity, but if that results in a service outage whenever you deploy new code, apply a security patch or reboot your VM, you need to rethink the architecture.

Why if a minute downtime on deployment doesn't impact revenue significantly ?

The frontend can even have some exponential cool down on requests when the backend is down and the users who are online in that one minute window will suffer just notice it being a bit slower.

He even mentioned his uptime in last years in the post.

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

#295

Post by adventured »

buboard wrote: post #265
ademup wrote: post #52

This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benef…

similarly , making half that and using dedicated servers. When you re a solo dev you dont really have time to risk learning unproven tech or tech that doesnt scale. And as a dev i like writing code that does new and interesting things, not learning tools and other people's APIs. The amount of services this guy has to manage is mind-boggling, and unfortunately i m simple and stupid. I guess i m a hermit dev but thankf…

I found the list under miscellaneous to be similarly mind-boggling. There are approximately 56 moving pieces to this "boring" one-person setup.

All the things they mentioned:

Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch cluster, Redis, RabbitMQ, Django / Python3, uWSGI, Nginx, Celery, Celery Beat, Supervisord, React + Redux + Webpack + ES, Amazon S3, Cloudfront, react media player, Ansible, Datadog, PagerDuty, Rollbar, Slack, PyCharm, MacBook Pro, Vagrant + VirtualBox, GitHub

WeWork, iTerm2, tmux, Notion, G Suite, MailChimp, Amazon SES, Gusto, Upwork, Google Ads Manager, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Cloudflare, Zapier, Trello, Medium, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Stripe, Google text-to-speech API, Stripe Atlas, Clerky, Quickbooks, 1password, Brex, Bonvoy Amex card, Capital One Spark

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

#296

Post by vinceguidry »

An insight I've had recently is that the most efficient way to implement architectural changes that are not additive is to rebuild. Otherwise you're trending inexorably towards the lava layer and accumulating tech debt that you cannot track.

A useful direction to unpack is to define architecture. You cannot re-architect a building after it has been built, you must only demolish or rebuild elsewhere. This is why all architecture changes must be additive in nature, otherwise you're pulling the foundation out from under the building.

Software should be modern pyramids.

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

#297

Post by bscphil »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #122
jcroll wrote: post #82

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…

This feels like bragging but I also run a one man company and the loneliness is what I enjoy most. Granted, I only work from 08:45 to 14:30 and some hours in the evening, because I bring my kids to school and I pick them up in the afternoon, but the hours when I’m alone, I am 100% productive. When the kids are at home I mostly do some kind of manual labor to get some sort of exercise. Right now I’m building a shed. L…

I'm not criticizing your preferences at all, but I think it's really strange for you to describe them as loneliness. I would say you work alone, but you're not lonely, because you have a bunch of other social connections in your life that for some people are replaced by coworkers. If anything, your comment reflects a kind of strange default on HN where work consumes so much of your life that coworkers are your "friends" and working alone is the same as being lonely.

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

#298

Post by chillfox »

avip wrote: post #30

First, that's a great stack and very well written/presented. One comment - he dismisses serverless as being overengineering . I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option. One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is less work than runn…

I think the far better consideration is picking the tech stack that requires learning the least amount of new skills.

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

#299

Post by chopete »

whalesalad wrote: post #273

Technology is usually just a means to an end. Unless IP is what you are selling, boring is great. I’ve seen SO many teams burn SO much energy on complicated stacks just to drink kool-aid. It’s mind bogglingly frustrating, especially as a contractor. At the end of the day it’s great for me: I get brought into shit shows to clean up the mess. But deep down, I want projects to succeed and clean/sound systems architectur…

>> It hurts to see people continue to make mistakes over and over,

Its because

https://vimeo.com/76499047

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

#300

Post by PeterStuer »

corndoge wrote: post #290
kabacha wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is HN so against people who _enjoy_ engineering? Why should I run some run-of-the-mill stack that has enourgmous legacy cruft and just not "fun". Not every business wants to be sillicon-valley optimized money farm - some people want to do some enjoyable work.

That's fine, but that's not engineering. Bridge designers do not try to build bridges out of materials discovered in the laboratory last month.

Research engineers do. GP said he is not aiming to build a profitable above all else company. Maximizing fun in a hobby seems legit.
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