The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by insulanian » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7:54 AM UTC

baroffoos wrote: post #313

khalilravanna wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about using a dynamically typed language like Python for all your backend code? Whenever I had a codebase that grew past several thousand LOC it became pretty unwieldy pretty quickly for me personally. I'm curious if there's a conscious tradeoff for people using Python/Django to start because it's really fast to get up and running with (for existing or new devs).

Automated testing; with any dynamic typed language you have to unit test every single thing possible and it becomes not so bad to work with.

> with any dynamic typed language you have to unit test every single thing possible...

> ... and it becomes not so bad to work with

O_o

How did you manage to put these two statements in a single sentence implying positivity :)

Why do people choose to explicitly write unit tests over and over again for basic things which could be caught by a compiler?

People are losing so much productivity (both short and long term) and being deceived into not having the type system "stand on their way" while they're typing out the initial prototype. This always bites back when you start first significant refactoring.

I will never understand the appeal of the dynamically typed language. Modern, statically typed languages with strong type systems, provide so much more productivity, reliability and confidence in the codebase that it is really irresponsible to ignore them nowadays.

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

#322

Post by aussieguy1234 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7:55 AM UTC

Here's my boring technology.

I've built Libr (https://librapp.com), a full social networking platform designed to fill the void Tumblr left behind.

The hosting is serverless for both the front end assets and back end no servers to maintain and infinitely scalable.

Libr has a front end progressive web app built with VueJS hosted on S3 with CloudFlare in front.

The back end API is hosted on Lambda. By using serverless framework things are portable. I could easily migrate to another serverless provider or even host my own.

Both the front and back end use the same programming language, TypeScript.

The database is Elasticsearch, just like WordPress.com (they don't use MySQL for most things).

Each month, I receive a nice little invoice from AWS for under $1 for the hosting. So far CloudFlare is free for me.

I built everything by myself, with no team. I have had input from Libr users on feature requests and UI improvements.

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

#323

Post by shrumm » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7:59 AM UTC

ravedave5 wrote: post #183

wenbin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author of this blog post here) The hardest part of building this business is to keep motivated for a relatively long period of time. I'm still early in this startup journey. This is only the 2nd year of me working full-time on Listen Notes. I think it would be helpful to surround yourself with like-minded people (online or offline) -- we are social animals. Indie Hackers is pretty good: https://www.indiehackers.com/…

Why did you choose to have ec2s with postgres rather than using RDS? I've found it saves me a ton of time dealing with upgrades worrying about backups etc to have RDS handle it.

If you know what you're doing (important qualifier), I'd imagine cost is a huge factor too. RDS is pretty often a significant % of your AWS bill - how valuable this is, entirely depends on how confident you are doing it yourself.

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

#324

Post by falsedan » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:00 AM UTC

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.

Because real engineers enjoy making hard things boring.

edit: to be clear, I'm not claiming to be a 'real' engineer. I love writing whimsical, complicated stuff if it makes things easier for users, and make sure I'm writing maintainable code my colleagues are comfortable with with code reviews and removing as many flourishes as possible.

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

#325

Post by ksec » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

croh wrote: post #291

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.

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.

The exact reason why most software engineers aren't really engineers.

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

#326

Post by drusepth » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:04 AM UTC

the_resistence wrote: post #282

drusepth wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company's Slack is just me and ~12 Slack bots all doing various things (reporting subscription changes, feedback, bug reports, error alerting, CI status, etc). It's amazing to look at and functions immaculately, but occasionally does have the grim reminder of just how alone it is being on your own. Especially when you think "this all works great, but would still work equally great with another human or two here."

Dude, I would love more insights on this. I have trouble finding assistants for the most rudimentary stuff and am constantly looking for IT solutions. Please, please, please. Maybe an HN post?

I started a Medium draft a while back just detailing what all bots I use and how I organize all the channels, but it honestly felt pretty boring/droning.

I'll see if I can clean it up and finish it though; if you have any particular questions you'd like to see included (selfish: so I can feel like it's less braggy and more interesting), I'd love to hear them. Contact info is on profile if you don't want to derail this thread. :)

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

#327

Post by arethuza » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:17 AM UTC

falsedan wrote: post #324

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.

Because real engineers enjoy making hard things boring. edit: to be clear, I'm not claiming to be a 'real' engineer. I love writing whimsical, complicated stuff if it makes things easier for users, and make sure I'm writing maintainable code my colleagues are comfortable with with code reviews and removing as many flourishes as possible.

I'm sure I read a definition of engineering once that was basically "meet the requirements doing as little new as possible".

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

#328

Post by stupidcar » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

chrischattin wrote: post #301

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…

Yes! So much this. Every startup I've worked with regretted choosing a trendy tech stack early on. Speed of development is BY FAR the most important thing and the SPA/Javascript framework de jour trend of the past few years is an antithetical to rapid iteration. As a consultant, I'll happily bill hours to untangle that mess, but it's very frustrating to see startups with lots of potential spinning their wheels with u…

Totally disagree re. SPA frameworks. Having mastered one of the popular ones, I've found I can now turn out fairly complex apps that I never could have contemplated building solo a few years ago.

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

#329

Post by pyrale » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:35 AM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #314

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.

If you haven't got SV money behind you that's even more reason to focus on delivering something that works. Your own project on your own time? Go for it. Clients should get the best fit, most reliable option, not the flavour of the moment. (That all said, RoR is not a great choice these days as it is a niche skill)

Clients are usually not hiring engineers. They have opinionns on management, on what should be done, on how you should work and in which conditions. They have opinions on you being remote or not, on how you should look like, on your mental health (cf. some pieces on whether people on the spectrum make better employees).

Most of these opinions are not grounded and you can not leverage the related tools to improve the work process.

How surprising is it that, given how few variables we are left with, these variables are heavily over-engineered?

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

#330

Post by rhizome31 » Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 8:38 AM UTC

goodroot wrote: post #12

Whoa -- is that a boring stack nowadays? There are many great cutting edge tools in use. Humble fella.

My thought exactly. I was expecting good ol'LAMP or something along these lines. I think here "boring" means "has been released for more than a couple of years".