442 karma · joined August 9, 2013
Currently, I'm working to get up to 50 karma on StackOverflow so I can comment on posts! :)
And yes, I enormously miss the basic functionality I had in the webdev ecosystem. Developing on Lambda was very difficult by comparison.
In short: it's tough; you're never off. Our errors either surface by way of user emails or monitoring (shoutout to BugSnag), and to this day I still have anxiety going places without my laptop for fear of a critical error coming up and not being able to fix it. I can recall running out of conference talks, being at shopping mall with my wife, and SO many other incidents where I'd hop onto the floor of a hallway, pull out my laptop, and frantically try to figure out what's wrong (and fix it).
On the support side, we have a small number of large clients. In this regard, there's no such thing as completely disconnecting. I have a shortlist where if I get an email from _____, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, I'm responding within an hour. Outsourcing to "watch the shop" is quite difficult; I find that some businesses can do this more easily than others. For something highly niche, it's more challenging.
On the tech side, I use managed services wherever possible. Heroku is wonderful (IMO), BugSnag is fantastic, we recently switched to Postmark which helped with deliverability of emails.
I've loved building this business. Control over my time each day is a reasonable trade for having to occasionally (rarely now) drop everything. At the same time, I miss big tech and the community of being at a larger company.
Hope that helps :)
This includes immediate callbacks by phone, knowledgeable support on disputes, etc. Each time the support person has been more knowledgeable than I’d expect at a company this size. For more context, in case it matters, we process roughly 200k of through stripe annually.
10/10 service for me.
I run a cloud SaaS company (3 employees). If I had the skillset that it sounds like you do, I might be inclined to hose on bare metal. But I don't. I don't know what a 1U dual socket server is.
It would take me some time to build these skills, and to match the agility that the cloud offers. I don't think it's worth my time, and probably not the author's time, either.
Enormous gains. The article should really have more data to describe this pullback.
The fun starts around the 5-minute mark.
For example, how it affects previous versions? Can the copyright owner switch licenses at anytime?
If there’s a resource in this I’d love to read more, too.
I don’t have to remind this community of the laundry list of tech giants started by immigrants. However, if anyone outside the US is reading this we’d love to have you in Canada. Come here, please.
Now THAT is irony.
I've been using Rails for years, I haven't yet experienced much pain by way of language/library versioning (etc). Python is a different story...
I worked for Microsoft this year. Had an amazing experience, learned a ton, built a great network, had benefits and was well compensated. I did this all while taking almost 0 risk. The idea that working for a tech giant is "maintaining the status quo," but working for a startup is "making something new," is perhaps not accurate.
Working at a startup can be great. Working at a tech giant can be great. Just don't make your decision based on one guy who turned down a personal offer from Peter Thiel (and was later employee #10).
In contrast, Apple's A13 chip's contribution to extend battery power is incredibly impressive to me.
When you build an event like this, I think you put your best foot forward. Google did, it just wasn't terribly impressive IMO.
- Nothing on video.
- No details on the processor (or most hardware specs).
- Nothing on the forward-facing camera.
- Nothing on battery life.
Moreover, and this is purely a marketing-spin thing, the event had no energy. There were some super cool demos, and they were received with pure silence from the crowd. It was very weird.