danjac

Keep your resume up to date and start applying for new positions. Even if none of them are what you are looking for, it's good to sharpen your interview practice.

The Bay Area has never really reconciled being a protective property market (the old money NIMBYs) and being a high-growth business hub. One of the two had to give, and another tech market crash plus remote work becoming the norm (despite wailing and gnashing of teeth from some CEOs and VCs) will probably see SF reverting to the former.

Status pages are the Iraqi Information Minister of websites.

Moreover artist communities flourish in urban spaces with cheap rent, like New York in the 1970s, Paris in the 1920s, Berlin in the 1990s and so on. Without that you just end up with Dubai or Monaco with shittier weather.

To a point. I don't need to care whether you wrote your novel on Word or a manual typewriter, by the time it gets to my Kindle or a printed paperback that doesn't matter.

On the other hand, if your web app takes forever to load because of a huge React payload or poor server performance, I do care.

In a typical startup you are going to be strapped for cash and time. You need to optimize and compromise. In general, if you don't know how do something, then figure out if you need to learn it, or whether you can get by with a "good enough" solution, because there will be a queue of other things you need to do that might be more business-critical.

So if you already know Kubernetes, then great, use it. Leverage your existing skills. If you don't, then just use Heroku or fly.io or whatever, or go with AWS if that's your competence. Maybe revisit in a year or two and maybe then you'll have funding to hire a devops person or time to spend a week or two learning to do it yourself. Right now you want to get your SAAS MVP in front of customers and focus on the inevitable product churn of building something people want to pay for. The same advice goes for anything else in your stack. Do you know it well enough? Do you need it right now? Or is there a "good enough" alternative you can use instead?

I've seen enough "hairball" Django projects in my time. That's not to knock either Flask or Django (or FastAPI for that matter), they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but there is little defence against a developer determined to avoid best practices and reading the documentation even for a framework as mature and well-documented as Django.

How is that different from real world history?

Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.

Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse.

Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.

If you have a society with stagnant wages and the only route to a decent retirement and some generational wealth is rising home prices, then you will do everything to protect that investment. Even if that results in, long term, making your city an overall worse place to live.

In other words it's hard to blame individuals for making rational decisions in their own self-interest in a fundamentally broken system.

It's not really the Stone Age but rather the "Wood and Bone Age". The stone settlements, monuments, tools etc just survived better.

Git is a reminder why even the best minds in software development sometimes really should talk to UX/UI people.

Moving to the US at this point would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic just after it hit the iceberg.

But sure, why not?

OK, but how much time are you spending on managing these yourself? If it's non-zero then the cost between $5 and $120 for a company is trivial. For a personal side project, sure, but if we are talking about paying customers' data then even things like automated backup and recovery need to be taken into account.

I would argue that if your spend is $5 a month your data is probably not very valuable to yourself or your customers. Which is totally OK for some projects, but $120 is not very much for that peace of mind and time-saving if your data is important to your company.

The problem I keep seeing in startups is that a lot of startup tech founders and employees don't see a startup as an embryonic business that will grow over the long term into a money-making venture requiring calculated risks and priorities, but rather as a personal playground to do all the fun things they were not allowed to do at their old BigCorp.

Use cool framework or language X? Use Kubernetes? Microservices? Lambdas? No-SQL? Two fingers to BigCorp, I'm CTO/tech employee #1 at a new startup and I get to do whatever I want. If and when it goes down in flames, I now have these skills on my resume I can leverage into a better opportunity.

Ideally your first tech employee/CTO should be a seasoned hand who has been burned before, who keeps an open mind to new approaches but knows when and how to adopt it. But it's quite rare to have seasoned developers in such startups, they're not attracted by the risk and chaos of these environments as they have better options and startups generally can't afford them.

I used to use it for side projects (not sure if you would count that as "production") but now go with Dokku on top of Hetzner or Digital Ocean. It's similar in experience to Heroku (at least the CLI) but much cheaper, and as it's my own VM if I hit a limitation in Dokku I can access the VM itself or just throw away Dokku entirely and use something else instead. The major limitation is that it doesn't really do multi-server setups well, but for the wheelhouse of low-traffic simple applications it's great.

There's a difference between deliberate technical debt and accidental debt. More often what I have seen is accidental debt - not a deliberate choice between tradeoffs but accumulation of poor quality code and architecture due to inexperience, poor time planning, and constant changes in business direction that are common to new companies.

I think the division was between the educated and non-educated (i.e. early school leavers). As the school leaving age has risen over the past few decades, that happened to track with age. In other words, Brexit voters were what you could diplomatically call "low information voters" (I'd call them "thick racist dipshits" but that's probably why I'm not a politician).

Another factor is that the core Brexit (and Conservative) voters are retired home-owners, who are less directly connected to the productive side of the economy. The media they consume keeps them in that fantasy bubble. Take the Daily Express for example, which has reality-defying headlines that would put the North Korean Ministry of Information to shame.

So other than some clues (rising prices that can be blamed on global conditions, longer queues at airports that can be blamed on staff shortages and so on) they probably believe Brexit is going just fine.

I wonder if wfm in the UK has significantly impacted newspaper readership from the drop in commuters (particularly the Metro, which is targeted at casual commuter readers) that proprietors and editors - and their flying monkeys in the government, including the Prime Minister - are writing thundering columns in their papers denouncing work from home as some kind of apocalyptic threat to the economy in general.

To be fair, Chas n Dave, while they had mainstream success, were born to play in pubs and could get even the most ardent non-Cockneys to join in a singalong.

Hetzner at least is a pretty good competitor to Linode and Digital Ocean.

The worst cases are startups adopting microservices. I get where they are a solution to a large company with multiple teams hitting the pain of monolithic development, but a team of half a dozen adopting microservices is a big red flag.

I think you probably need to be embedded in the industry for a while so you have both a good handle on how the industry works and the connections to get a foot in the door with any new solution.

The problem with "tech debt" is that in the heads of non-developers it is equated with financial debt. When you take on financial debt for a business it's a long-term investment (a buy-to-rent mortgage on a property, or a business loan to buy a factory plant for example). So OK, we're a startup that needs to find the right market, so we'll take on X amount of tech debt to get there, and then when we are in a better place we'll pay down the tech debt in installments of X amount per month.

Mostly what I've seen of "tech debt" has not been this kind of deliberate decision making of tradeoffs. It's more like:

1. Non-tech founders want to start a tech company.

2. Seeing the high salaries of developers they opt to hire their college roommate or relative.

3. Friend/relative is horribly inexperienced and builds a pile of crap.

4. Said pile of crap nevertheless gets market traction.

5. Customers complain of endless bugs & sales want long list of features.

6. Friend/relative is promoted to CTO. Time to hire experienced devs!

7. Experienced devs say "this is a pile of crap, throw it away and start over".

8. Founders tell devs no, you have to fix bugs and add features. Hop to it.

9. Developers have no leeway or political capital to fix the underlying problems, do what they can, and eventually leave.

So it's more akin to an 18 year old with a gambling habit who has just discovered payday loans.

Seems web3 is doing everyone a favour and imploding itself right now.

The problem is not so much whether shows are killed to early or too late, but when you blindly follow metrics to determine either way.

There are plenty shows pre-streaming that got killed prematurely (Firefly) and plenty that dragged on way past their prime (Simpsons) because of exec idiocy or internal politics or whatever that had little to do with whether the quality of the shows was good or whether they had found an audience or just needed time to grow.

I think Netflix tried to avoid that by using data-driven analysis to determine whether to keep or kill a show, but it turns out you probably need some human in the decision chain with an experienced gut. Another problem is that you don't necessarily know whether a show is going to be popular upfront, so the writers try to have a self-contained story arc within a season. If it gets renewed you end up having to awkwardly start a new arc with characters that were pretty much "done" in terms of development. This is pretty obvious with Jessica Jones and Stranger Things, both of which were arguably much weaker in their second seasons.

No, but you answer with specific analysis rather than generalizing clickbait.

99% of the time the right answer is "use the best tool for the job at hand that matches your team and budget" but that won't generate the clicks.

It's crypto we're talking about here. It's not just a few covert skinny dippers but a whole nudist colony.

It's related to all the negative press recently around Heroku (security concerns + Salesforce neglect). People had a lot of goodwill towards the Paas, and a lot of that is missing what a PaaS does for you in the current environment of AWS or k8s complexity around devops, so they are looking for a replacement, and fly.io looks like one of the more innovative, or at least well-marketed, in this space.