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Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

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Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#82
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, this is not really a "tech" story. Everybody is building websites these days. What counts is what business you build with them.

Yes and no. The tech doesn't matter but that is The Point. That is, your tech won't save bad product. Using the latest cool kids framework or buzzwordy tool won't save bad product. Yes, the business you're in matters. No, it doesn't matter how you build them - as long as it's quickly. If you outgrow you're overly simplistic stack, that is a _great_ problem to have.

Arguably Pieter might be at this point already and he doesn’t care. With the right tech and more people he could scale some of his businesses further but he deliberately doesn’t want that as its diminished returns for him, personally.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#83

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

As long as SQLite doesn't catastrophically break under load it's fine for production, but only as long as it has a single client; traditional database engines can deal with multiple applications connecting to them. I'm using sqlite for a production application as well, but its load will be in the range of - at best - thousands per day. The only complexity will be that there has to be a secondary 'fallback' server; th…

Thousands per day, let's be generous and say 9,000 queries per day. In 24h and 3,600s/h that is ~0.1 req/s. Are you saying that SQLite cannot deal with 1 request every ~10 seconds? Or were you referring to 900,000 queries when you said "thousands"?

FWIW the typican front-page article in HN sees around 10-30k visits in a single day.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#84
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as SQLite doesn't catastrophically break under load it's fine for production, but only as long as it has a single client; traditional database engines can deal with multiple applications connecting to them. I'm using sqlite for a production application as well, but its load will be in the range of - at best - thousands per day. The only complexity will be that there has to be a secondary 'fallback' server; th…

If I have a simple Flask or Django app, backed by sqlite, how do I make sure I only have one client? If I use a prerolled Apache or Nginx frontend (which may or may not be set up with multiple threads or whatever), and have very very low traffic, how do I make sure I'm not corrupting it with multiple writes?

It's probably fine to leave Apache or Nginx with multiple threads (probably even a good idea) but you need to make sure that uwsgi or whatever Python server you're using on the backend only has one process.

If you can somehow architect things so a single process is doing writes (but leave multiple processes doing reads) that's likely even better.

However I would suggest doing a lot of testing. It's possible multiple write processes isn't the end of the world below some threshold.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#85
Having done exactly opposite to what Pieter has done as a solopreneur for many years -

i.e.

• Best Engineering practices set by industry leaders.

• Using state of the art tools, libraries, architectures etc.

• Being paranoid about Technical Debt.

I would say Pieter's strategy is a better if you're a serial-solopreneur. I had a CS degree, so its even hard to think of such a route and I considered my startup to be a long haul but there are valuable lessons to take from no-code/non-CS community; after all they solve problems for their consumers and make money from it.

But, I wish every solopreneur knew and suggests one advise in every interview they give 'Buy a fat health insurance, largest you can afford, take care of your health as when you go down your startup goes down and no amount of automation can save it' and that's what happened with my startup.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And save money + time. The most important part is people paying you money. Modern startup culture is full of inefficiencies + silly trappings (nice offices, drive to hire people, make things more complex, take more money from investors to stave off figuring out taking money from customers)

100%. Shameless Plug - In fact, I'm currently building an "inefficient," "micro" web framework specifically so I can build more stuff, more quickly [1]. An entire app can be build in a single js file (with only one dependency... and it's 150 or so dependencies and sub dependencies). 1: https://github.com/jeremyaboyd/simplemvcjs

Interesting but the way you phrased it, doesn’t sell it particularly well - it seems to simply hide the underlying dependency complexity a few layers below. It’s still a node.js app with all the pros and cons of npm etc.

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQLite runs in airplanes [1]. I would say that is all that needs to be said on whether or not SQLite is production-ready :) In fact, I would argue SQLite is the most well-tested and production ready database system out there. [1] https://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

I've found that Apple uses sqlite too, for Safari history and if I recall correctly macOS Notes app too.

iMessage too

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#88

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

HN: "A single server with SQLite is perfect for typical production workloads, it's so robust"

Also HN: "Database X can fail in Jepsen tests during partitions, it's unusable"

I see HA as a mandatory part of what makes a system production ready...

Re: Pieter Levels Makes $600k a Year from Nomad List and Remote OK

#89

> sqLite - This is described as being unsuitable for > production by it's makers. I would doubt that is what the creators of SQlite intend one to take away from their documentation: "SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database. Generally speaking…

Yep.

I recently had Jon Calhoun on as a guest in my Running in Production podcast the other week where he talked about using SQLite to power his video course platform (it's focused on Go development).

He has 15,000+ active users and talks about how SQLlite hasn't been a performance issue. His whole stack is on a $5 / month DO server.

Here's a direct link to the SQLite part: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/42-creating-a-video-...

I also have another episode coming out next week where SQLite is being used in a custom hardware appliance running on a Raspberry Pi-like device that is shipped to villages in the African Congo to give villagers affordable access to email. I wonder if the creator of SQLite had that use case in mind!

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