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How I Built a Side Project

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Re: How I Built a Side Project

#61

Post by cpursley »

overcast wrote: post #20
mcone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

I don't regret a single penny I send to Heroku every month. It's just worth it for smaller to medium-sized projects when you don't have in-house dev-ops. Especially so for side projects when time is scarce.

I've attempted a number of times to bootstrap up my apps on DO, AWS, docker stuff, etc - all in anger. The Heroku tax is less than the time spent configuring, maintaining and monitoring my own servers.

In economic terms, this is called opportunity cost. That's time I could spent building features or playing guitar.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#62

Post by brandon272 »

I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#63

Post by hammock »

mattlutze wrote: post #41
onion2k wrote: post #37

I sent a short list of questions to 1222 recipients. Great! The open rate of the email was 45,8% That's excellent. ...and 27 people replied. Oh. Oh dear. ~ 96% of respondents told that they would - or already have - recommended the tool for a friend or colleague. 96% of the people who are enthusiastic enough about the service to respond to an email would recommend the service, but the 97.8% of people didn't respond i…

> but the 97.8% of people didn't respond is by far the more important number. I think the more helpful baseline is likely the folks that opened the email (we can't infer a lot from the ones that didn't -- email services may have simply junk-mailed the message for the other 54.2%). 27 / 560 is 4.8% which is still not awesome, but it's really not terrible. 1 in 20 people who saw OP question about the service were compe…

>27 / 560 is 4.8% which is still not awesome, but it's really not terrible.

That is called click-to-open ratio and you're right it is a good metric. However 4.8% is not a good number. Typical healthy marketing emails see CTOR around 20%

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#64

Post by mod »

wuliwong wrote: post #24
overcast wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

My experience as a one man operation is that you always have to make trade offs between building something yourself (especially if you actually need to learn a new skill-set to do it) and using someone else's solution. Honestly, in general this is essentially always the debate even at my regular job. For me, Heroku has always been the choice over AWS or Digital Ocean. I haven't had it block me from doing anything I'v…

I use both. I have a side project deployed to Heroku and it's fine there, but it costs me about $45/month. The same project would often have a better response time (when heroku sleeps the dyno) if it were hosted on DO, and both would require no maintenance (I haven't edited a line of code in ~2 years). It's a django/postgres setup, nothing special, and would run on the smallest DO instance.

I'm just too lazy to switch it over, honestly. I don't think it's a difference between "building it myself" and "using someone else's solution." It's about an hour of setup, maybe 2 if I encounter headaches. I probably ought to do it, given it'll earn me $35-40 per month forever.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#66

Post by skorecky »

AngeloR wrote: post #54
skorecky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many pet projects you can run for Free on Heroku. Their docs are pretty straight forward, not sure what your hiccups were but I've deployed quite a few sites to Heroku without much if any issues. The asset pipeline in rails use to cause some issues but I think that has all been resolved with the 12 factor gem. Also setting up a VPS is in no way easier than Heroku. You have to install nginx, ruby, mysql etc. Then you…

Instead of spending money on a vps for my last side project, I went the heroku route and it was even easier. I spent 7$ on a private github repo.. which synced to heroku. And a free CircleCI account that also synced up with everything. Then just pushing my branch meant, automated testing and with heroku pipelines, a PR meant automatic test env.

Yes, my days of sysadmin work just to have an app in production are over. Heroku pipelines are great too!

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#67

Post by ssewell »

overcast wrote: post #20
mcone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, but Heroku has a much lower barrier of entry for people who are just starting out. You don't have to worry about configuring and maintaining a Linux box. Some people are willing to pay a premium to avoid those headaches and get back to what they really want to be doing: application development.

$225 premium!? I mean come on. The article focuses a lot on the learning aspect of these exercises, and setting up your own services should really be a part of it. Especially for a one man operation. Typing apt-get install mongo / mysql / rethinkdb after the droplet is really all there is to it.

Not to mention DigitalOcean has excellent tutorials for beginners looking to set up quickly, like this one https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst...

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#68

Post by Namrog84 »

nezza-_- wrote: post #55
userium wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emails were sent via Mailchimp, the open rate was gotten from Mailchimp's reports (analytics).

Yep indeed it's faulty: https://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-...

I wouldn't say its faulty. They clearly said unique open rate is even more accurate now. The only thing that suffered was seeing multiple opens from same user. Which I feel is far less interesting

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#69

Post by skywhopper »

brandon272 wrote: post #62

I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.

And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance?

I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so that you can generate economies of scale, the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues for your $10/month Linode would quickly add up to the $3000/year the Heroku services cost. And that's all assuming that you already understand all the sysadmin-level details that, let's face it, most developers don't have the time to keep up with. And honestly a full-time sysadmin can't keep up with everything for every subsystem. There's just too much.

The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.

Re: How I Built a Side Project

#70

Post by fapjacks »

skywhopper wrote: post #69
brandon272 wrote: post #62

I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.

And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance? I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so th…

Yikes. Or break all that down and get it all for free elsewhere. For a mechanical engineer that doesn't know much about doing this on their own, I suppose it's not a raw deal. I think lots of people make this argument about all those other services "not being free" and while that's true, that seems more to me an excuse for not having learned how to do those things quickly. I can set all that stuff up in a very short amount of time. My cost for doing that is almost nothing. The barrier to entry for that kind of thing goes down extremely quickly, in fact, I'd say the cost is only "high" the first time you do it. Every time after that it costs much, much less.
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