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Comment by SaltyBackendGuy | Hacker News Reader

Same.

I completely overbuilt a recent side project and ended up scraping the whole thing because it wastes too much time to maintain it. As much as I love building new projects, having children at home reminds me that time is my only true resource and it's better spent with the kiddos (at least at this stage of my life).

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Asking because I feel this way a lot too -- is this the kind of thing that was avoidable (IE if you built it on Rails/Django + Heroku would that have cut down the maintenance), or was there intrinsic complexity to the project that made it unavoidable?

More and more, I want to build things that are in the former category if I build them at all outside of work.

Depends on what you're building. Rails/django/heroku are web app accelerators. If you are building a web app, then yea they make it super easy and take away a lot of having to think about complex systems, but if you're building anything else not really

Are you sure about that? You get a ton from a batteries included framework, but it doesn't prevent from successfully building a complex system, nor does it preclude you from having to reason through the powerful footguns.

The way I'd describe it is that /most/ codebases can fit into what you'd call a "web app" including most codebases that include complex systems -- there are, of course, significant exceptions.

In my particular case, I opened the CI/CD can of worms using Docker (which obviously has great use cases). My use case could have fit into a Rails/Django + Heroku model that would have saved me a bunch of time. I thought by investing in the infra early it would save me time later, however later will likely never come. So basically I spent more time debugging issues due to adding infrastructure complexity than developing the actual project.

TLDR; Wasn't a total loss as I did learn some, however I would have rather spend more time on developing the actual product (or in retrospect more time with my family).

This tech is great when someone working full time at your company sets up all the scaffolding and you just code your microservice with magic happening around it. Not so great when devs trying to spice up their resume start implementing these ideas to their own personal projects during their free time. I've spent so many hours fighting Basel, gRCP, API gateways, tracing etc etc, just because it's nice at work. But took too much time to replicate something own my own, and it is of course, fragile.

Yup, I've fallen into this premature optimization path before.

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