Building for the 99% Developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#31

Post by muglug » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

Article mentions a tweet which narrows in on a prime culprit: https://twitter.com/copyconstruct/status/1456129831821709315

> a lot of what most “developer influencers” say is fairly aspirational. Their own companies don’t necessarily do things as smoothly as they preach to others.

There's a pride element there: developers don't want to admit that they work in less-than-stellar conditions.

Some developer talks also double as recruiting events, and you're going to turn people off when you mention that the test suite takes a day to run and requires the use of a fax machine.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#32

Post by logankeenan » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:12 AM UTC

bgroat wrote: post #24

LAC-Tech wrote: post #16

IME most small software companies could be run off SQLite, a $5 linux VPS, vanilla JS, and a single line deploy script. (Pieter Levels seems like the master at this) I'd never bother suggesting it though: - no one likes being told they're small when they think they're big - it's bad for devs careers (Resume-Driven Development) - as TFA points out - it's not what FAANG are doing so I'd lack legitimacy

I'm literally running 5 sites and $40k MRR on a $5 linode

That’s awesome! Do you mind sharing about your tech stack or how you deploy?

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#33

Post by dgfitz » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

alberth wrote: post #22

bob1029 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just think of it as 1 global static SQLiteConnection instance. There's really not a whole lot to it. Like 4 lines in a class file to set this up.

How do you implement this using a stateless stack (eg PHP)?

I’d build a (stateful) shim micro service that the stateless code interacts with, no idea if that is the “most correctest” solution though

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#34

Post by oleg_antonyan » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

pcstl wrote: post #21

dham wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately a lot of companies right now. Although the smart ones have already done the switch and are now trying to switch off. I've seen a lot of suspect technologies in my career but GraphQL is definitely the worst

Out of sincere curiosity: Why do you think GraphQL is so bad? I've been using GraphQL for a little while now and I've had nothing but good experiences (although my use case might not be the most common) so I'm interested in knowing what makes you think so poorly of it.

Not the one you asked, but I'm also stuck with supporting graphql in relatively small project. Zoomers invented SOAP. It's a perfect example of adopting what FAANGS do just for the sake of it. It's probably great when you have dozens of consumers with very different needs and usage patterns. But for the single frontend it adds way too much complexity on the server-side. Debugging, testing, writing tons of boilerate code, not to mention POST requests for getting data - everything becomes more complicated with 0 benefits

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#35

Post by bgroat » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:17 AM UTC

logankeenan wrote: post #32

bgroat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm literally running 5 sites and $40k MRR on a $5 linode

That’s awesome! Do you mind sharing about your tech stack or how you deploy?

I have a linode vps and easyengine

When I want to create a new site I ssh in and type:

sudo ee site create yourdomain.com --wp --letsencrypt

And I have a deployed wordpress site and ssl certificate.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#36

Post by jasfi » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:21 AM UTC

I've been working on an SDK for Flutter that is simpler, easier to code, and is closer to HTML/JS. You write your code on the back-end, although you could use the same SDK on the front-end. Nim is the initial back-end SDK: https://nexusdev.tools/

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#37

Post by urthor » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:21 AM UTC

LAC-Tech wrote: post #16

IME most small software companies could be run off SQLite, a $5 linux VPS, vanilla JS, and a single line deploy script. (Pieter Levels seems like the master at this) I'd never bother suggesting it though: - no one likes being told they're small when they think they're big - it's bad for devs careers (Resume-Driven Development) - as TFA points out - it's not what FAANG are doing so I'd lack legitimacy

Strongly disagree about it being (successful) resume driven development mostly.

Most developer's resumes would be vastly enhanced by delivering a lean, technically successful product to end users, or 5.

A lot of developers think playing with cool technology makes them better developers for some reason.

Which isn't true.

What makes them better developers is knowing what that technology does, and choosing the appropriate solution.

And building consensus, managing personalities and driving execution. By being a reliable, high quality human being.

Which is very different to knowing how to operate the API for that solution.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#38

Post by urthor » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:26 AM UTC

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #8

You'd be surprised at how fast you can create something with an SQL database, a well used backend framework (eg. Rails) and a well used frontend framework. The things big tech companies do are usually to avoid scaling problems. In particular scaling on the engineering side. The above can scale to billions on the user side if needed but 10k engineers constantly updating and messing with a traditional SQL schema doesn'…

It's also that, in the past, the capacity of our monoliths to scale was far lower.

There's many apps that need say, a 100GB database in 2022. Those apps also needed 100GB database in 2007, when horizontal scaling was the hottest thing around.

Nowadays however, Moore's law has steadily overtaken an order of magnitude of use cases from 2007.

Maybe 1/10th of the 2007 use cases still need that kind of enormous, big tech scaling.

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#39

Post by d--b » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

I am not sure what the point of the article really is.

I mean it’s not wrong, we all live in that real world (my job is literally migrating off stuff) and recognize everything the author says.

It’s just that I don’t see those myths being myths in the first place.

In fact, thinking that the 1% is any different is perhaps the biggest myth in the article.

Sure they have distributed crap to handle and uptime commitments to go by, but I don’t expect the life of these people to be much different

Re: Building for the 99% Developers

#40

Post by MattGaiser » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 4:29 AM UTC

urthor wrote: post #37

LAC-Tech wrote: post #16

IME most small software companies could be run off SQLite, a $5 linux VPS, vanilla JS, and a single line deploy script. (Pieter Levels seems like the master at this) I'd never bother suggesting it though: - no one likes being told they're small when they think they're big - it's bad for devs careers (Resume-Driven Development) - as TFA points out - it's not what FAANG are doing so I'd lack legitimacy

Strongly disagree about it being (successful) resume driven development mostly. Most developer's resumes would be vastly enhanced by delivering a lean, technically successful product to end users, or 5. A lot of developers think playing with cool technology makes them better developers for some reason. Which isn't true. What makes them better developers is knowing what that technology does , and choosing the appropri…

Yeah, that is not what recruiters seem to care about. Nor what is tested in interviews.