nathan_f77

I've been reading through many of the other pages on the SQLite website. I didn't realize that SQLite is developed by a company (Hwaci) and funded by selling support, licenses, and testing services. I had always assumed it was an open source project backed by a non-profit, similar to the Apache Software Foundation.

This is another very interesting example of an open-source business. I would be interested to learn more about how the Hwaci company operates (revenue, number of employees, etc.). I find this very interesting:

> We are a 100% engineering company. There is no sales staff. Our goal is to provide outstanding service and honest advice without spin or sales-talk.

They list some "$8K-50K/year" and "$85k" price tags directly on their "Pro Support" webpage. These would usually be behind a "Schedule a Call" or "Get Quote" button. I've been thinking about doing something similar with my own on-premise licenses and support contracts. I'm not very good at sales and I don't really want to hire a sales team, so I'd be interested to know how this worked out for them.

I also liked this sentence, which is very similar to Basecamp's philosophy (and both companies were started around the same time - 1999 vs 2000):

> Hwaci intends to continue operating in its current form, and at roughly its current size until at least the year 2050.

It's interesting to think that SQLite could have raised money and grown into a billion-dollar public company with thousands of employees.

I'm going to listen to this Changelog interview with Richard Hipp now [2], and also this talk on YouTube [3].

[1] https://sqlite.org/prosupport.html

[2] https://changelog.com/201/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jib2AmRb_rk

I agree with this 100%. I recently tried to update an old iOS app written in Swift. I would have to install an older version of Xcode to upgrade Swift from version 2 to 3, and then use the latest Xcode upgrade from 3 to 4. Then I'd have to update every single dependency and figure out any breaking changes. I wanted to see if I could hire someone to help me with this, but they just gave up after looking at it, and recommended rewriting the whole project from scratch. (It's a hobby project so I don't have the budget for a rewrite.)

This is generally how dependencies work across all languages and frameworks, and I think the status quo is extremely inefficient. When a library maintainer releases updates with breaking changes, we waste thousands of developer-hours on upgrades and fixing all these changes.

I've been thinking about a new kind of package manager and repository that strictly enforces a certain level of test coverage, and also forces library maintainers to codify the upgrade process. For example, if you decide that you want to rename a `get` method in `v0.1.0` to `fetch` in `v1.0.0`, then your `v1.0.0` release MUST include an automated code-mod script that automatically runs when a developer updates the library version. This wouldn't work so well for dynamically typed languages, but this rename example should work flawlessly in a statically-typed language.

The code-mod script should also include lots of test cases, and be tested on lots of other real-world libraries. Similar to how Rust developers detect regressions in the Rust compiler by building a large number of crates.

There's probably a lot of reasons why this wouldn't work in the real world, but one can dream! There was a lot of controversies when Elm made this kind of decision about their package ecosystem and removed native modules [2]. Deno is working on a high quality Standard Library [4] with no external dependencies, and where all code is reviewed by the Deno core team (and presumably with a high level of test coverage.)

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/crater

[2] https://dev.to/kspeakman/elm-019-broke-us--khn

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17842400

[4] https://deno.land/std

I was just thinking about the Dabbawala industry a few hours ago. I'm mainly wondering how to reduce all the plastic waste from food delivery. See some thoughts and notes here: https://www.evernote.com/l/ACoza00i6aRGT48ylqD7ylr5fkziGJbQC...

I think the main problem to solve here is that the drivers and kitchen staff barely earn a living wage. Personally, I would be very happy to pay much more for a service that uses reusable containers and pays everyone involved a living wage, plus a decent profit margin for the restaurant owner. So I think this might need to be a very niche service for relatively wealthy people.

Unfortunately, I think history shows that there isn't way to convince the average consumer and restaurant owner to take part in a system like this. It might work in Australia or New Zealand, where they already have a reasonable minimum wage. But these countries generally have a very low population density, and also a very different attitude towards food delivery. (Most people cook most meals at home, so it's not something you order 2-3 times a day.)

No, Convox doesn't automatically make any application compliant. Convox makes it far easier to achieve HIPAA/PCI compliance by easily setting up compliant server infrastructure:

https://docsv2.convox.com/reference/hipaa-compliance

Note that dedicated instances are no longer required for HIPAA compliance [1]. Also note that the private Convox console is completely optional. You can achieve all of this with the free and open source convox/rack project: https://github.com/convox/rack

As I mentioned in my original comment, you still need to do a lot of work to set up company policies and make sure your application complies with all regulations.

You should also be aware that I'm comparing Convox with some other popular options for HIPAA-compliant hosting:

* Aptible: https://www.aptible.com (Starts at $999 per month)

* Datica: https://datica.com (I think it starts around $2,000 per month, but not 100% sure)

These companies do provide some additional security and auditing features, but I think there's no reason to spend thousands of dollars per month when Convox can get you 95% of the way in your own AWS account. PLUS: If you have any free AWS credits from a startup program, you might not need to pay any hosting bills for years.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-hipaa-program-upda...

No, not just for HIPAA/PCI compliance, that's just one of the many benefits. Here's some more reasons why I love Convox, Kubernetes/ECS, Docker:

* Effortlessly achieve 100% uptime with rolling deploys

* Running a single command to spin up a new staging environment that is completely identical to production

* Easily spinning up identical infrastructure in a different AWS region (Europe, Asia, etc.)

* Easily spinning up infrastructure inside a customer's own AWS or Google Cloud account for on-premise installations

* Automatic SSL certificates for all services. Just define a domain name in your Convox configuration, and it will automatically creates a new SSL certificate in ACM and attach it to your load balancer.

* Automatic log management for all services

* Very easily being able to set up scheduled tasks with a few lines of configuration

* Being able to run some or all of my service on AWS Fargate instead of EC2 with a single command

* Ease of deploying almost any open source application in a few minutes (GitLab, Sentry, Zulip Chat, etc.)

I run a Dockerized monolithic application in ECS, and I'll be switching to Kubernetes soon. I am 100% sold on this approach and will never go back to any deployment methods that I've used in the past (Capistrano, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Saltstack, etc.)

I use Convox [1] which makes everything extremely simple and easy to set up on any Cloud provider. They have some paid options, but their convox/rack [2] project is completely free and open source. I manage everything from the command-line and don't use their web UI. It's just as easy as Heroku:

    convox rack install aws production

    convox apps create my_app

    convox env set FOO=bar

    convox deploy

You can also run a single command to set up a new RDS database, Redis instance, S3 bucket, etc. Convox manages absolutely everything: secure VPC, application load balancer, SSL certificates, logs sent to CloudWatch, etc. You can also set up a private rack where none of your instances have a public IP address, and all traffic is sent through a NAT gateway:

    convox rack params set Private=true

This single command sets up HIPAA and PCI compliant server infrastructure out of the box. Convox automatically creates all the required infrastructure and migrates your containers onto new EC2 instances. All with zero downtime. Now, all you need to do is sign a BAA with AWS and make sure your application and company complies with regulations (access control, encryption, audit logs, company policies, etc.)

I run a simple monolithic application where I build a single Docker image, and I run this in multiple Docker containers across 3+ EC2 instances. This has made it incredibly easy to maintain 100% uptime for over 2 years. There were a few times where I've had to fix some things in CloudFormation or roll back a failed deploy, but I've never had any downtime.

My Docker images would be much smaller and faster if I built my backend server with C++ or Rust instead of Ruby on Rails. But I would absolutely still package a C++ application in a Docker image and use ECS / Kubernetes to manage my infrastructure. I think the main benefit of Docker is that you can build and re-use consistent images across CI, development, staging, and production. So all of my Debian packages are exactly the same version, and now I spend almost zero time trying to debug strange issues that only happen on CI, etc.

So now I already know I want to use Docker because of all these benefits, and the next question is just "How can I run my Docker containers in production?". Kubernetes just happens to be the best option. The next question is "What's the easiest way to set up Docker and Kubernetes?" Convox is the holy grail.

The application language or framework isn't really relevant to the discussion.

[1] https://convox.com

[2] https://github.com/convox/rack

P.S. Things move really fast in this ecosystem, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some other really good options. But Convox has worked really well for me over the last few years.

Sure! I've mainly struggled with decisions for live chat, project management, product analytics, and bookkeeping.

For live chat, I started on Drift, and then I got really tired of their buggy iOS app. I saw that you also mentioned their history of engineering issues in the handbook, and I've personally experienced a lot of these issues. I switched to Intercom, and they've been much better. However, I'm still very disappointed in the iOS app, because I can't tag any messages. This is a critical part of my workflow, because I use a new tool called Savio (http://savio.io) for tracking feature requests and customer feedback, and they have an integration with Intercom that relies on message tagging. Otherwise, Intercom has been great on desktop. (Except for a really annoying issue with Turbolinks, because the Intercom widget "bounces" on each page load. I've reached out to their customer support about this.)

For project management, I was originally using Trello. Then I briefly tried to use Airtable, but that didn't work very well after a while. Then I had a great product management consultation with the founder of Savio (Kareem Mayan - highly recommended by the way! https://www.reemer.com/). He helped me get set up on Clubhouse.io, which has been awesome. I've also really enjoyed having a "feedback triage" layer in Savio, so that I'm not just adding every idea directly into my todo list. My only issue with Clubhouse is that I wish there was an easier way to add a new task directly from each column in the kanban view, similar to Trello's "+ Add another card" button.

For product analytics - This is a bit embarrassing, but the option paralysis has been so bad so that I just didn't make any decision at all. I was just using Google Analytics on every page and tracking a few events, but "Evaluate Heap vs Mixpanel vs Amplitude" has been on my roadmap forever, and I would read Quora answers and try to figure out which one I should be using, but then I would just give up. Also everything is extremely expensive! But anyway, thanks to your article, I finally set up Heap analytics! But here's one thing I couldn't find any answers for - should I be adding Heap to all of my pages (including landing page, documentation site, blog, etc.). Or should I just add it inside the application, only for signed-in users? I was thinking that it would be nice to get more visibility into how people are reading the docs, because I'm working on a developer tool where the documentation is a critical part of the onboarding process. And I definitely want to know if someone signs up after reading through the docs. But on the other hand, maybe I don't want to track all anonymous users, because if I blow past their free plan limit then $500/mo is extremely expensive. Oh, so maybe I actually want to use Amplitude!

I already ran into a free plan limit with FullStory recently. I wanted to start tracking a page that was getting a lot of traffic, because there was a bug that was really hard to reproduce. I accidentally blew past the free plan limit and couldn't use them for the rest of the month, because their paid plan started at 5 figures per year.

I started on Bench.co for bookkeeping, and they were great for a year, but I could start to tell that they weren't the best choice for a SaaS business. They also referred me to an accounting service that hasn't been very good. (It's been very hard to get a response from them, and I actually still have no idea if they've even filed my taxes for 2019. I think I might need to sue them soon if I don't hear anything.)

So I moved to Pilot.com this year, and they've been awesome! It's so much nicer to have my books in Quickbooks Online. I'm planning to start using Flightpath Finance at some point (https://www.flightpathfinance.com). I had an initial call with them, and they talked about all the reasons why Bench.co wasn't a great choice, I should be using accrual accounting vs cash accounting, and having my books in Quickbooks makes it much easier to work with accountants and other services, etc. I think I might even fire my current accountant and just use Pilot's tax services this year.

I think that's about it for now, and would be happy to answer any questions!

P.S. I searched everywhere to see if I could find Satchel on Twitter. I think Twitter would be a perfect marketing channel for Satchel, because I would definitely follow an account that regularly tweeted about this topic and shared links to your reviews.

This is really awesome! I've personally experienced optional paralysis multiple times when trying to evaluate different SaaS products. I will be keeping an eye on all of your recommendations!

https://krisp.ai uses machine learning to remove background noise. I've used them with Zoom calls and it works really well. I think they don't currently have an "upload audio" feature for existing recordings, but it would be awesome if they offered this in the future.

Sorry it's not something you can use now, but I just thought I would mention it! I also did a quick Google search but unfortunately I couldn't find any AI noise removal tools that might solve this problem.

> Notice identifies the year of first publication

Oh, I didn't realize this. I always thought I should use the current year as the copyright year. My impression was that using a year in the past makes it look like the website hasn't been updated for a long time, or that the website owner doesn't pay attention to detail.

Should I always be using the first year in the copyright footer on my website, instead of the current year?

I just looked at some very large websites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), and they all use 2020. Maybe it's just better to follow this convention.

There are quite a few services that should be able to solve this problem (turning a PDF into a web form and collecting signatures.) Here's a few of the services I'm aware of:

* https://www.hellosign.com/products/helloworks

* https://www.useanvil.com

* https://www.pandadoc.com

* https://www.pdffiller.com

* https://www.platoforms.com

* JotForm (https://www.jotform.com/help/433-How-to-Add-an-E-Signature-t...)

* https://www.webmerge.me

(I know about all these because I'm working on a PDF generation service for developers called DocSpring [1]. I'm also working on e-signature support [2], but that's still under development, and still won't be a perfect fit for your use-case.)

[1] https://docspring.com

[2] https://docspring.com/docs/data_requests.html

Are you hinting that Oracle Corporation came out of some database code that was developed at Ampex? I couldn't find anything about Ampex or the CIA on Oracle's Wikipedia page [1].

EDIT: The Wikipedia page needs to be updated! [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#History

[2] https://ce399fascism.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/oracle-corp-na...

I strongly agree! I really like the idea of a "finished" product that doesn't keep adding new features and growing the team just because they took too much funding and need to find more ways to grow. This is kind of product I'm trying to build with my startup [1]. (I did take some funding from Earnest Capital, but this was just to help with my personal living expenses and pay for a few larger projects.)

[1] https://docspring.com

[2] https://earnestcapital.com

This is great! I'm using Intercom, but I know it's going to get very expensive over the next few years, so I will keep an eye on this project.

I'm thinking about starting to run my own tools instead of relying on third-party software, e.g.

* GitLab.com (free, ~$80/mo for CI) => Self-hosted GitLab

* Sentry.io (free) => Self-hosted Sentry

* Slack ($24/mo) => Mattermost

* Google Analytics (free) => Matomo

The main reason would be for GDPR, HIPAA compliance, SOC-2, and PCI certification.

I also don't think I would save any money by running these on AWS. I would probably need a few m5.xlarge instances, and it would cost about $150/mo per instance. And then I have to monitor and upgrade all of the software, debug any problems, etc.

So right now I don't have any big incentives to go down this road, but that might change once I'm ready to look into HIPAA compliance.

Sorry yes I meant I don't have a free tier now, and have been thinking about adding one. Thanks for the suggestions! I've also been thinking about adding a "pay as you go" credit system similar to Twilio, but I'm not 100% sure if it would be a good business model.

I would love to hear your thoughts about adding a free tier for my PDF filling service [1]. What's your first impression about the current pricing?

I experimented with a "pay as you go" plan that starts at $0 and includes some free PDFs, but so far I've earned close $0 from all of these customers. But this might just be because the people who asked about alternative pricing are much more price-sensitive and early-stage, while bigger companies don't think twice about $49/mo.

[1] http://docspring.com

This was really interesting to read, since I'm about to rebrand my own startup. The stakes are a lot lower in my case, but hopefully it doesn't turn out like this.

I'm going to rename FormAPI [1] to DocSpring.com [2]. I'm also launching a new website, and you can see a preview on my staging servers [3]. The main reason for the rebrand is that FormAPI wasn't a very good name. The service is an API for filling out PDF forms, but FormAPI doesn't communicate that clearly. People would often spell it incorrectly, and I got tired of explaining it to people.

I also wanted to move to a decent .com domain. "FormAPI.io" feels like a small side project, and my theory is that "DocSpring.com" will feel a bit more trustworthy. (I'm still a solo founder with a small company, but I recently raised a small round from Earnest Capital [4], and I'm still around after 2 years [5]!)

I think I'll be launching the new site tomorrow, so wish me luck! And please let me know if you have any feedback about the new site (or in general.)

[1] https://formapi.io

[2] https://docspring.com

[3] https://staging.docspring.com

[4] https://earnestcapital.com

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427891

I'm working on FormAPI [1] as a solo founder. I started on Heroku, but Heroku was a bit unreliable and I had some random outages that I couldn't predict or control. (This was even while using dynos in their professional tier.)

I also had a lot of free AWS credits, so I migrated to AWS. I didn't want to write all my terraform templates from scratch, so I spent a lot of time looking for something that already existed, and I found Convox [2].

Convox provides an open source PaaS [3] that you can install into your own AWS account, and it works amazing well. They use a lot of AWS services instead of re-inventing the wheel (CloudFormation, ECS, Fargate, EC2, S3.) It also helps you provision any resources (S3 buckets, RDS, ElastiCache), and everything is set up with production-ready defaults.

I've been able to achieve 100% uptime for over 12 months, and I barely need to think about my infrastructure. There's even been a few failed deployments where I needed to manually go into CloudFormation and roll something back (which were totally my fault), but ECS keeps the old version running without any downtime. Convox is also rolling out support for EKS, so I'm planning to switch from ECS to Kubernetes in the near future (and Convox should make that completely painless, since they handle everything behind the scenes.)

[1] https://formapi.io

[2] https://convox.com

[3] https://github.com/convox/rack

Shameless plug: I’m working on FormAPI [1], which can help you set up the PDF invoice template. We provide a Python client library, so you can add that to your script with a few lines of code.

[1] https://FormAPI.io

Unfortunately I'm not able to disclose the exact details of the offer, but it was a fairly close to the default offer that you will find in their examples and spreadsheets. And so far my experience has been great! The money has been a huge help, but it's also been really great to have access to the mentor network and other founders.

I'm working on FormAPI [1], which helps developers fill out PDF documents. I started working on this around 2 years ago. I was mostly working on it part-time, and I took a few breaks while I was doing freelance work to pay the bills. This year I raised some money from Earnest Capital [2], which has allowed me to go full-time and hire some contractors.

I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and stay very small, but I wasn't able to pull that off. I picked a niche that was too small, and I also didn't have the skills to execute very well (especially in marketing, sales, etc.), so growth has been quite slow. So I've exploring some new features that could increase the number of potential customers, and the new scope is going to be way too much work for one person, so I'm looking forward to building a small team of 5-10 people.

Earnest Capital has been really awesome, and I still think the SEAL is a good deal [3]. My experience has been similar to an accelerator program, but with a bit less pressure. I've had some really helpful calls with mentors, and the weekly update calls are also great for accountability. So I would recommend Earnest if you want to raise some money while building a sustainable company.

[1] http://formapi.io

[2] http://earnestcapital.com

[3] https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/

I just received my Mercury.co debit card in the mail, and now I'm planning to move all my money from SVB into Mercury and close my SVB account. I already use Brex for corporate credit cards, and they've been awesome. It looks like I will need to "request early access" for Brex Cash (and I probably don't meet their requirements since I'm not VC funded), so I'm not going to wait around for that.

However, Stripe is the very core of my business. They already offers corporate credit cards, but I've never thought about switching or adding new cards, because I'm very happy with Brex. I use Brex virtual cards for everything now, and I recently received a physical card that I can use for flights and hotels.

However, if Stripe ever offers a bank account in the future, then I'll immediately close my Brex and Mercury accounts and just migrate everything into Stripe. Nothing would beat a single login where I have my bank account, debit cards, credit cards, and all of my customer payments. Also Stripe is much bigger and I have much more trust in their security and engineering teams.

Wow, I wonder if this is why I thought the food was so bad in San Francisco after I moved there from New Zealand. We went to a lot great restaurants, but I remember thinking that the restaurants in New Zealand was 100x better. We have an amazing cafe/restaurant scene in NZ, and I never found anything in San Francisco that could come close to a nice brunch in Auckland. (I was trying almost every place that had a good Yelp review over a period of ~2 years.) Maybe this was mostly a subconscious thing related to the mineral content of the ingredients.

Would it be wise for most people to take a daily multivitamin or supplement? I believe we only need trace amounts of these vitamins and minerals, so even with a 90% decline in mineral levels, it sounds like most people are still getting plenty of minerals.

> 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient.

I'm always a bit skeptical of claims like this, and those percentages are huge. I'm wondering why I've never heard about it before (although I'm very ignorant about a lot of things.) Are there any government efforts to make magnesium supplements widely available, or some other way to solve this problem?

I switched to Clubhouse recently, and it's been great! I still use Trello for personal/founder tasks, but Clubhouse is really great for software development projects.

I'm a big fan of the Quartz Daily Brief email newsletter [1]. (Although these are daily emails.)

[1] https://qz.com/emails/

A species doesn't really need to be "useful" in order to survive. It just needs to reproduce or continue living. We haven't stopped reproducing as a species. I can't imagine a future where humans decide to let ourselves die out just because we've built lots of amazing machines that take care of all of our needs.

> Only a few will survive, supported by technology that they no longer understand.

I think the human population might shrink to somewhere around 10-100 million over the next 10,000 years. It's hard to conceptualize, but humans were around 10,000 years ago, and we'll be around 10,000 years from now.

I personally believe that we're heading towards a utopian future, although there will be a lot of serious bumps along the way. Maybe we'll agree to maintain a population of 10 million humans on earth, and there will be many more living on interstellar arks that are slowly heading towards distant planets. We will have achieved immortality, so the birth rate will be very close to zero.

This is very timely advice for me. It sounds very easy in theory, but in practice it's been very difficult when you have lots of customers and leads pulling you in many different directions.

On the other hand, you can always have a distinction between products and companies. Especially when companies acquire other companies, just to add one more product to their portfolio (e.g. Google, Facebook.)

So no-one is saying that a single company can't work on multiple products at the same time. Sometimes it's just not very obvious whether something should be a feature or a separate product with it's own brand, landing page, and pricing.

Wow this looks awesome! I've been using Alpaca.js [1] at FormAPI [2], which is also a JSON Schema form builder. This looks much better, and much easier to customize, since I already use React / Redux / React DnD for other parts of the application. I was also looking at react-jsonschema-form, but agree with all the downsides they mentioned in the talk (hard to customize, requires Bootstrap, hard to use with Redux, etc.)

So I think I will definitely switch to ShapeForm in the future, and I was actually planning to build something like this myself. I'm definitely looking forward to the TypeScript support.

[1] http://www.alpacajs.org

[2] http://formapi.io

I would like to get nathanbroadbent.com one day. The only problem is that the current owner is also named Nathan Broadbent, and they're also a software developer and startup founder. (This has caused some confusion a few times, such as identity verification for a bank, and during an interview with US immigration.)

ndbroadbent.com will do for now!