danjac

A small family-run coffee shop can be profitable. It might pay for your kids' college and a comfortable retirement one day. But everyone (or everyone's investor) wants to be the equivalent of the next Starbucks.

Before Reddit, there were forums for every kind of interest. Reddit took care of the technical side of managing a forum, it was easier to stand up a subreddit for your fandom or hobby than purchasing a domain, setting up whatever PHP forum software, database and so on.

If all those things were easier - maybe dirt-cheap turnkey hosting for something federated like Lemmy or whatever - then perhaps the answer to "viable Reddit competitor" is no Reddit at all, but just each subreddit go off and do its own thing. Your stamp-collecting forum doesn't need Reddit scale, it just needs a donate button for a few bucks a month, and if it's connected to the Fediverse then people can use a single login or app to switch between all their forums like they do with subreddits with a single federated timeline/notifications to keep them posted.

> UK's Liberal Democratic Party sounds like the perfect place for people alarmed by a creepy, authoritarian state.

Which presumably explains why their leader Nick Clegg went off to work for the not at all creepy and authoritarian Facebook.

Why on earth would you need a "modern Javascript framework" for serving static pages? Or a database? Or god forbid, GraphQL?

If I see a company with only a list of 5 star reviews, I know something sketchy is going on and they're written by HR flunkies.

Most middle managers I know are in their thirties and forties. So Millennial or maybe Gen-X but definitely not "Boomer".

To quote the Princess Bride, "you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means".

I doubt there are that many Boomers left in tech management - almost all that age cohort are in retirement or semi-retired, they're enjoying their Saga cruises and golf courses (or if they're unlucky, their Walmart greeter jobs).

I suspect there are managers panicking about losing relevance in a post-office world, but those will be middle-managers, not CEOs. Much of the panic is from owners of commercial real estate and their flying monkeys in the media who are seeing empty office blocks and declining property values and rents.

As for Musk, who knows. He's in his own very weird bubble of long-terminism or cosmism or whatever it is he believes in. Maybe he thinks if everyone works from home it will lead to a drop in birth rates or decline in Western society or something.

If you are going to be all-in on forcing people into your office, maybe it might help your moral argument to pay the rent and hire some cleaners?

If this were just a fun side project, great, no problem, let's give people the benefit of the doubt.

However we have seen the harms of social media in all aspects from the self esteem of teenage girls to harassment to financial scams to stochastic terrorism. This isn't 2007 any more, anyone entering the social media arena in 2023 with all we know today has to be prepared for skepticism, scrutiny and criticism, whether they are closed source, open source, protocol based or fully commercial.

Hence why the new voting ID laws. Under which, to everyone's shock and surprise, Tory-leaning pensioners are exempt.

He's on Paul Graham's list for the reason that he is Paul Graham's protege.

Sam Altman himself failed with his original startup (Loopt), then got hired into YCombinator. He's basically made it through leveraging his connections (OpenAI was a later investment with a number of other established players).

So really the advice is, be born into the right family, or at least get into to the right university, join the Good Old Boys network, and fail upwards. The old "two dropouts in a garage" idea of a startup immortalized by Steves Jobs and Wozniak is very much a romanticized 20th century phenomenon. Nowadays it's more like the old East Coast financial world of clubs and school ties, albeit with a different uniform of jeans and hoodies.

I like Tailwind, but I like it precisely as a non-frontend person working on side projects: it lets me iterate quickly without a deep knowledge of CSS (while at the same time providing an introduction to modern CSS).

I can see how that would also be a benefit to a "SAAS starter pack" where you have a small team wearing many hats, probably people with a familiarity with CSS but not experts. The code base in these early stage startups and side projects is going to be small and you want to move quickly. Tailwind is great at that.

However if you have a frontend team of CSS experts to draw upon, the benefits of Tailwind are fewer and the downsides are greater - your CSS people will not enjoy having your classes named things like "px-2 py-1 rounded border bg-blue-800 text-white font-bold hover:bg-blue-500" rather than just "btn btn-primary". They can iterate fast anyway and they will probably leave more maintainable HTML and CSS/SCSS in the long run.

However I'd still be interested if any large teams (with correspondingly large code bases) have made Tailwind work for them.

Again, standing in the shoes of a beginner, you don't know what you don't know.

Heroku offered a path to easy, relatively secure deployment of a database-driven web application. If your aim is to just get something up and running - an MVP - it was probably fine, until it got too expensive. Maybe then you could buckle down and learn the "right" way, or maybe your business took off and you could just keep paying Heroku. If you're running a one-person SAAS, you might not have the time to spend on learning devops, when you have to fix bugs and add features and deal with customer support and sales. Sure, you'll hit that pain point when Heroku no longer works for you, but as detailed in the original post, that pain point may be years off.

Digital Ocean's Postgres service launched in 2019.

I mean sure, you can learn all the other bits and pieces and I have no doubt learning them is valuable, but for a novice who just wanted to get something out there - beyond a static website - Heroku was hard to beat. Sure, it got expensive fast, and that's when you should learn how to manage hosting on your own. But at that point you had more of an idea what you needed and why.

Let's say you have never deployed anything to production before, and you've worked through a tutorial in Rails or Django or whatever and just built your first web app, and it's 2018, what are your options?

There's the zoo of AWS. Maybe there's something there you can use - Lightsail came out I think in 2016 - but good luck trying to find it out of all the plethora of weirdly named services. Again, total beginner here, and AWS can be daunting even to experienced developers.

You can go with Linode or Digital Ocean. You would need to set up a VM with all the dependencies and make it secure. Oh and you'll need a database - should that sit on another VM? What about backup and restore? What about deployment? Sure, you can use Ansible, but that's yet another learning curve.

Render launched in 2019. Fly.io came out 2020. As far as I remember, there wasn't a competitor that offered the sheer convenience for the hobbyist beginner on the level of Heroku.

If you just need to send a set of emails once a week, the lowly cron job is fine. You don't need celerybeat.

RQ or Huey are otherwise fine for anything more complicated. I've rarely run into a situation where Celery is better, but teams just use it because it's the "default".

We've been there before: I remember the proliferation of Flash sites back in the day. Our local legal firm had their entire site written in Flash, for what was basically brochureware plus a contact form. Presumably some lawyer's nephew wanted to practice their Flash skills, or they were taken for a ride by a contractor.

I used booking.com to plan a short holiday earlier this year. It messed up the card payment failure with zero feedback, so I wasn't sure whether any payment had gone through or not.

Long story short, I just booked the flights on the airline website and the hotel room through the hotel website. Price difference was maybe 20 EUR give or take, with very little extra inconvenience. And I had the assurance that if there were any problems, I could just contact the airline or hotel directly without having to deal with booking.com.

While picking any stack you want may sound wonderful to the individual developer, it's less so for the company as a whole that has to maintain different languages and frameworks, when that developer moves on and now they have to find or hire someone else to keep that service running.

People talk about resume-driven development, which is definitely a factor, but there's also fear-driven development - you have a hunch the architecture could be a lot simpler and cheaper, but you don't want to make any criticism in case the others in your team think you are technically ignorant, inexperienced, out of touch etc.

While generative AI may be useful, to what extent is it useful to Facebook right now? I mean as a new business model, as opposed to helping them do better software development or moderation?

Most of the Python developers I followed are on Mastodon. "Techies" has lots of sub-cultures, so it could be C# or React developers are stuck on Twitter, for example, so if you are in those groups it might seem nobody has left.

There were complaints among the Roman elite about the "decadent" silk dresses worn by women, e.g. Seneca the Younger:

"I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. ... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body."

This right here is why I never, ever use cloud services for my side projects, and only use them on the client's or employer's dime. I always use Digital Ocean, Hetzner, or some other provider where I pay a fixed amount per month.

Which is a shame as it makes it harder to learn things like AWS and Google Cloud (or for that matter, Vercel) in my spare time, and perhaps they might even work out cheaper for low-traffic hobby projects, but ultimately the risk is too great.

That was my thinking. This seems over-engineered for a simple jobs board. I would be surprised if the traffic even warrants the CDN setup.

My advice is to set up things as best you can right from the start, to make upgrading a relatively painless process.

For example:

- Good test coverage (particularly for critical points of your application) including CI pipeline

- Use dependabot or similar to make sure you get alerts for any critical updates (like security patches)

- Practice good dependency "hygiene" - only add a dependency when you really need it, and do vetting to ensure it's well-supported, has been updated recently, etc.

- Regularly audit and remove dependencies - when a library author declares they are sunsetting their project, plan on a replacement (even if that is, worst case, a fork). Remove dependencies which are no longer used in your code.

- Separate out your development/testing/production dependencies

- Use a good dependency manager: for example in Python, use Poetry or pip-tools or similar, rather than manually updating requirements.txt files yourself

- Update early and often: other than dependabot make it a maintenance task to check for updates at least once a week. Use managers, scripts etc to make this as easy and painless as possible.

Obviously if you are inheriting a legacy project you have to deal with the cards you are dealt, but these are a good target to move towards even with an old codebase.

Rails can just serve JSON or GraphQL from an API to an SPA frontend, or you can do full server-rendered, or Hotwire to do HTML fragment updates, or any combination thereof. IIRC Github used something like Hotwire but home-grown. I've not done Rails development for a while so not sure what the state of things is for web sockets, but I would think that's not a problem for the framework.

Point is, there's nothing about Rails in particular that would prevent fixing these issues, that's probably the result of development and business priorities, legacy code, etc. that would be an issue with any tech stack.

I remember working on projects that did this in the early days of Django, particularly when there were badly needed features that took too long to land in the stable release.

Nowadays most projects I've seen use the latest stable release or at least the latest LTS - maybe some legacy projects lagging behind.

A full-featured CMS includes editing workflow I think: so an intern writing a press release has to have the article checked by an editor and maybe the legal department before publication, with corrections or comments included. At a pinch you could use Google Docs but that comes with more friction - hard to preview the content on the site etc and it's not so easily enforced as a locked-down CMS workflow.