The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

Technology is usually just a means to an end. Unless IP is what you are selling, boring is great. I’ve seen SO many teams burn SO much energy on complicated stacks just to drink kool-aid. It’s mind bogglingly frustrating, especially as a contractor. At the end of the day it’s great for me: I get brought into shit shows to clean up the mess. But deep down, I want projects to succeed and clean&#x2F;sound <i>systems</i> architecture is how you do that. Doesn’t matter if it’s PHP, Python or Java.<p>It hurts to see people continue to make mistakes over and over, so I’m working on a new website and series of engineering posts to help share my approach to a lot of these problems.<p>Any product I start building usually begins in Rails. React is great. Vue is great. It’s not necessary, good ol’ request&#x2F;response is just fine. You don’t need a service mesh. You don’t need Kafka. You add that stuff later when it’s required... if it’s required. Rails can’t be beat for startups. I wouldn’t waste any time on a single page app, it’s a completely pointless endeavor unless you have proven traction, users, revenue etc... and can afford to do it correctly.

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn&#x27;t really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you might want to pursue.

Ansible, AWS, SES, React and Cloudflare? Gusto, Notion and 10th of different services and integrations? That&#x27;s boring now?<p>I was expecting something more along the lines of PHP + a single MySQL machine, plus all the accounting is done on a tablet made of actual stone.<p>This is not that.

This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benefit from me fixing problems and adding features. Kudos to what works for you....super great... And, for me at least...it is even more &quot;boring&quot; and awesome.

I love these stories. I&#x27;m a one-person company too: contribsys.com.<p>My production server stack is Apache + some Ruby CGI scripts, to serve static files and handle billing webhooks. I spend less than an hour per week on devops maintenance.<p>KISS is the #1 principle when scaling a solo operation.

I thought I was reading my own blog post :) We use very similar tech stack at my current company:<p>- Ansible for provisioning<p>- Python&#x2F;Django for website&#x2F;api<p>- VueJS for frontend(where needed, some pages are simple Django templates)<p>- Celery for background work<p>- uWSGI and Nginx as servers with AWS Load balancer<p>- Elasticsearch for search<p>- Redis for caching<p>- Postgres with Postgis as main datastore<p>- Datadog for monitoring<p>- Cloudflare for DNS<p>Some differences as I am working with a team:<p>- We do use multiple branches and git tags for releases. Feature branches are also common as multiple devs maybe working on different features.<p>- We use Gitlab-CI a lot for testing and auto-deployment(ansible script can be called from our machine as well)<p>- Terraform for infrastructure provisioning. We have stopped provisioning any AWS service by console. Once the service is provisioned by terraform, ansible takes over.<p>I have tinkered with Docker, Hashicorp Packer but this setup has been dead simple to reason and scale reasonably well.

That&#x27;s awesome and it is a tech stack that I try to mirror and am confident running myself as well!<p>It&#x27;s incredible the amount of knowledge required for a single person tho when you think about it eh? It&#x27;s the full frontend (which I would have more trouble with) + databases + caches + search engine + metrics + deployment + source control + sysadmin all baked in a single person who is also trying to make it a business!<p>Kudos for the effort and making it happen, one day I might be joining the same journey with the same stack! Just gotta figure out what actually motivates me to build a business on top of =)

First, that&#x27;s a great stack and very well written&#x2F;presented.<p>One comment - he dismisses serverless as being <i>overengineering</i>. I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option.<p>One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is <i>less</i> work than running django in uwsgi behind self-managed nginx, and is guaranteed to be more cost-effective for unpredicted load.<p>Same logic applies to the db servers - why not hosted?<p>And last - the inf is a good reminder that prefixing your api routes with <i>&#x2F;v1, &#x2F;v2</i> is always a good habit.

This is where I&#x27;d put a 10x developer :) Complete competency across the whole stack with a solid understanding of a profitable operation.

PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, Django&#x2F;Python3, uWSGI, Celery, Celery Beat, Supervisord, Amazon S3, CloudFront, React, Ansible, Datadog, Rollbar, Slack, Vagrant, VirtualBox, PyCharm, iTerm2, Notion, G Suite, MailChimp, Amazon SES, Gusto, Upwork, Goodle Ads Manager, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Cloudfare, Zapier, Trello, Godaddy, Namecheap, Stripe, Google speech-to-text, Kaiser Permanente, Stripe Atlas, Clerky, Quickbooks, 1password, Brex.<p>Alright. Just make a &quot;boring&quot; website now, it&#x27;s &quot;easy&quot;.<p>If it&#x27;s one thing i really dislike within both the scientific and the technological sphere it&#x27;s this arrogance disguised as common knowledge. Because it&#x27;s not. Articles like this is nothing but bragging. The author, whoever it is, clearly has a very long time working in the field acquiring this knowledge. Be humble.

I&#x27;m a one-person company too ( geocode.xyz ). My tech stack is even more boring than that. (Nginx, MariaDB, Perl on AWS Ec2 Linux instances. I don&#x27;t have an office either.

Picking your stack&#x2F;architecture based on team size is something most engineers miss.<p>Microservices, great for companies with many teams. Not so much when it&#x27;s three people scrambling to create something meaningful. Monolith all the way.

Whoa -- is that a boring stack nowadays? There are many great cutting edge tools in use. Humble fella.

Is this seriously considered as being a boring stack nowadays?

That&#x27;s not boring - it&#x27;s a professional dev techstack.<p>Boring tech would be a million dollar business running on Wordpress.

TBH, this is more inspiring than I thought. I thought this would be some BS article about promoting your company but turns out, it was a fun and inspiring read.<p>My dream is to find a good idea and work solo. It is a little harder as a mobile engineer but you&#x27;re right as you mention in the blog. There are technology nowadays that help me with backend&#x2F;dev tools.<p>Cheers.

This looks like a great service; I just signed up for it and created my own listen later playlist. I spend 6-8h a week on my mountain bike and I use most of that time to listen to podcasts. The challenge with how I do it (using just an Apple Watch) is curating my feed. This is an excellent tool and a far better UI for curating a feed.<p>I also like the different and varied sources of income that you have, from the transcription service to ads to your API. Seems like you&#x27;ve built a great platform that you can use to experiment with different revenue models.<p>One additional question - your product is called Listen NOTES. Are you planning on adding note taking functionality to it at some point? One thing that I&#x27;ve always wanted to do was to jot down some set of notes to myself (typically during one of my bike rides). I always imagined that being some kind of voice activated thing, but I&#x27;d like that note sync&#x27;d to the spot within the podcast that I was listening to (and perhaps transcribed as well). Any thoughts about building something like this?<p>Thanks again for building this service!

&gt; Wait, how about Docker &#x2F; Kubernetes &#x2F; serverless? Nope. As you gain experience, you know when not to over-engineer. I actually did some early Docker work for my previous employer back in 2014, which was good for a mid-sized billion-dollar startup but may be overkill for a one-person tiny startup.<p>I really think the key thing here is familiarity. K8s is a bit different, but certainly in OP&#x27;s position I (personally!) would be more comfortable with an image for each component. Perhaps a machine image rather than docker, if each component is going to be on its own machine as described, but something at least semi-reproducible for sure.<p>When I&#x27;m working on something alone, and particularly if on and off and not for several hours every day I need to be able to come back to it in a sort of self-documented state that doesn&#x27;t leave me scared to touch anything lest it crumble.

A super interesting and refreshing read, especially since I am not very knowledgeable about web technology and most of the talk these days is about the latest fancy framework or database.<p>I am curious though, since I am using Google Cloud (App Engine in particular) for most of my company&#x27;s modest backend needs: Would Google AE be able to handle all these backend requirements as well (but obviously without all the configuration and setup required)? Or asked another way: When is the point when you should move away from something easy and low-hassle such as GAE to something more advanced that requires a bit more manual configuration like setting up your own AWS servers?<p>Not trying to be critical, just honestly trying to learn from folks that know better than I.

Also running a solo company - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fitloop.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fitloop.co</a><p>I&#x27;m primarily a front-end dev so I keep things pretty simple on the back end side.<p>Stack:<p><pre><code> Meteor, managed hosting on Galaxy MongoDB, hosted on Compose React GraphQL &#x2F; Apollo API</code></pre>

I use Lisntenotes API for my podcast app and Wenbin is an amazing dev to work with. Highly recommended.

Well, I&#x27;m super impressed. I wish I could do half of what this guy can do.<p>But he needs to be careful not to overdo it. It&#x27;s fun and exciting to get all this tech up and running. But at some point, it becomes a drudge. And burnout is right around the corner.<p>I would say that if he can farm out as much as possible and focus on marketing and sales which are the drivers for most company&#x27;s continued success. In a sense, he has by using the cloud but what he&#x27;s doing is way too much for one person.<p>I used to be a laid back kind of guy and would get irritated when I was hurried and clearly there was no impending death. But now I understand that the limit lies within us. At some point, we all give up. There are those that take a long time and there are those that give up relatively fast but giving up is part of the process. So we are in a hurry to get as much done before we decide to stop what has not been successful. By putting so much burden upon your self you make it so much more likely that you will give up before you find success.

Great writeup of the stack and process.<p>To all the people thinking “I couldn’t possibly do this myself” just look at the mention of UpWork towards the bottom. Looks like the author has brought in contractor help at some point.

This was really informative and delight to read. It&#x27;s great to see developers making a go at the bizdev side and actually being really successful at it. Light on the heavy technical, light on the buzzwords, just the right amount of information to say, &quot;here, if you even use half my stack you&#x27;re well on the way to a viable product.&quot;

This is one of the most important post i’ve seen on HN so far.<p>it teaches you that you don’t need all the fancy stuffs, but you may need <i>some</i> of them. That you don’t have to shoot for the unicorn project, that you don’t have to build an A+ people team, etc.<p>It’s intelligent and gives all the interesting details to not give any kind of false impression.

Just because I saw you (wenbin) in this thread I thought I&#x27;d be helpful:<p>On <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a><p>There&#x27;s a typo: &quot;Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts&quot;<p>Instantly -&gt; Instant<p>Really enjoyed the post, thanks for sharing.

Was interesting to read all the sort of &quot;boring&quot; back end pieces, then see that he went with half-server and half-client rendered React for the front end. Was expecting Angular or similar, given the pattern of the other picks.

I really like the idea of monolithic repos but can see some downsides when there is more than one person working on a project. It would be cool if there was a simplified way to have an entire business operate under source control.

An insight I&#x27;ve had recently is that the most <i>efficient</i> way to implement <i>architectural</i> changes that are not <i>additive</i> is to <i>rebuild</i>. Otherwise you&#x27;re trending inexorably towards the lava layer and accumulating tech debt that you cannot track.<p>A useful direction to unpack is to define architecture. You cannot re-architect a building after it has been built, you must only demolish or rebuild elsewhere. This is why all architecture changes must be additive in nature, otherwise you&#x27;re pulling the foundation out from under the building.<p>Software <i>should be</i> modern pyramids.

key missing info though: does it make money? I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.

Wonderful stuff! I&#x27;ve been trying to learn programming and able to code the CRUD apps for almost 6-7 years. <p>I&#x27;ve tried to learn Rails (Ditched learning Rails because JS framework are all the rage). Tried learning Flask&#x2F;Django because it was considered easy. Ditched it too cause internet people said it&#x27;s slow.<p>I tried learning Go, Phoenix and jumping between what&#x27;s considered cool in last few years.<p>And here I am, no confidence to do a basic simple app. It&#x27;s been an interesting journey with no luck because of constant chasing of &#x27;Exciting&#x27; frameworks&#x2F;Tools.

I run a similar, maybe even more boring stack for my less-than-one-person company [PyDist](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pydist.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pydist.com</a>):<p>- PostgreSQL database<p>- Nginx proxy in front of Django apps for UI and API servers (I use gunicorn instead of uWSGI though)<p>- Cron jobs which invoke django-admin commands to keep the PyPI mirror in sync<p>Perhaps the only place I&#x27;m any fancier than OP is that my deploy script is in Python, not shell, since any time I try to write a shell script with even slightly nontrivial logic it falls over and catches fire :)

Thanks for writing this article @webin. I&#x27;m about to launch a new startup myself and it is VERY boring tech. :p I&#x27;m running Rails with Sidekiq on Heroku, so I think I have you beat in the boring department. I do a lot of fancier stuff at work but I just don&#x27;t need it for this product (at least not yet).<p>I am the only engineer but two non-technical friends (a designer and a lawyer[0]) make up the rest of the company.<p>[0] the original idea was the lawyer&#x27;s. :)

Only question I can think of that I didn’t see an answer for is: is he running one postgres db, which is shared between the web and api services? Multiple services with only one db gets hairy fast with questions like: who owns the migrations? does the migration owning service have to restart the other service so the other service gets the new db column&#x2F;table? etc<p>Unless the web also uses the API service to get its data. Really great article

Are there no load balancer replicas? It looks like a single point of failure for the entire service (<i>and</i> it runs Redis and RabbitMQ - yikes).

Interesting, there seem to be lots of opinions about the chosen stack. But as a designer, I have no idea what to make of it.<p>Recently I rode the Figma API release hype train, and I made a plugin which is quite successful. Almost 10k active installs. It is basically a collection of the most popular viewports and their market share. I also have a server where I store the data. Every other day I run a script which updates the market share and that is about it. To summarize it:<p>- I have a client (react app written in typescript) which has a very simple &quot;caching&quot; mechanism (if you asked the server for new data more then a day ago, ask again) and which shows the data and nothing else. - And I have a server (express js) running on Heroku (where I also have the Postgres DB). The server has a basic REST API and very default admin interface. But most of the time the server is not doing anything.<p>It was something I was able to put together quite fast, but now reading all the comments I&#x27;m thinking whether it isn&#x27;t over-engineered and whether I should go with serverless and possibly reduce the costs.

Your mileage may vary but there’s a real opportunity for the latest technologies to save you work and headache.<p>My own one-man startup Trunk[0] is very infrastructure heavy so I’m super thankful for technologies like Docker. You don’t have to go full-blown Kubernetes but there are various small wins you can still have. Need to upgrade a piece of your stack? Just build a new container a deploy it! Need to bring up all your services in development? `docker-compose up`! And with Docker Swarm, it’s super easy to scale up background job and application processes across multiple cloud instances. I can’t imagine doing this without Docker.<p>When getting a business off the ground, it’s extremely important you do customer development and not new technology development. When running a business however, new technology can become a competitive advantage and help you move faster. Just make sure it’s really doing that.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trunkinventory.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trunkinventory.com</a>

These success stories always pain me a bit. I tried for some time to get my own project going based on personal interest, but it never went anywhere. I have people visit the site but retention and use is a problem. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imetatroll.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imetatroll.com</a><p>- golang, gopherjs, bootstrap, DO, and kubernetes.

Security concerns are always conspicuously lacking from this type of posts and discussions. If you’re a solo dev looking to start a project, please don’t take OP’s stack as a positive example. Use managed services whenever possible, they will at least keep you patched and simplify intrusion detection when configured correctly.

Here&#x27;s my boring technology.<p>I&#x27;ve built Libr (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;librapp.com</a>), a full social networking platform designed to fill the void Tumblr left behind.<p>The hosting is serverless for both the front end assets and back end no servers to maintain and infinitely scalable.<p>Libr has a front end progressive web app built with VueJS hosted on S3 with CloudFlare in front.<p>The back end API is hosted on Lambda. By using serverless framework things are portable. I could easily migrate to another serverless provider or even host my own.<p>Both the front and back end use the same programming language, TypeScript.<p>The database is Elasticsearch, just like WordPress.com (they don&#x27;t use MySQL for most things).<p>Each month, I receive a nice little invoice from AWS for under $1 for the hosting. So far CloudFlare is free for me.<p>I built everything by myself, with no team. I have had input from Libr users on feature requests and UI improvements.

&gt; Kaiser Permanente for health insurance.<p>Super important part. Any details about how much it costs for single person company? :-)

At this point, I would add Docker (without Kubernetes) to the &quot;boring&quot; technologies that simplify your life. Having managed my own &quot;server farm&quot; of 20 machines on hetzner, with a very small startup, I found that abstracting away the underlying OS removed a lot of friction.

I&#x27;ve found the tradeoff is in favor of using ECS, Kubernetes or something similar. The docs aren&#x27;t too bad now. It is great to be able to build&#x2F;deploy a docker image and not worry about how it gets out there, and what might go wrong with that system.

&gt; Basically, I have a wrapper script deploy.sh that is run on macOS:<p>I do the same thing on Linux.<p>build.sh, deploy.sh.<p>But, I also use a run.sh which runs tasks that I may not remember to run if I come back to software after a while on a certain machine.<p>Like &#x27;git pull&#x27; or &#x27;bundle install&#x27;. Then .&#x2F;dev-setup.sh or whatever for starting up tasks.<p>I use multiple machines and having these two simple commands saves me so much frustration.<p>You sit down to began work. You just run .&#x2F;run.sh and it will setup a dev instance for you. No sudden alerts that your gem is out of date... or worse... no warnings at all and hard to diagnose sudden bugs that steals half a day from you.

the key for me is a backend-as-a-service platform that i can reuse over and over. i used to be mainly a backend developer, but for more than 5 years now i have barely touched the backend code because it was designed to be reusable.<p>i build SAP applications now because they make it easy to work with a reusable backend.<p>for the rest of my system, i use basic LXC containers. no docker, or other container management system.<p>deployment consists of setting up an instance of the backend, and generate the frontend as static files that can be hosted whereever.<p>saltstack to control it all. done.

This is almost the exact stack (Django&#x2F;React&#x2F;Postgres&#x2F;Redis&#x2F;Ubuntu&#x2F;Ansible&#x2F;...) I use at work, and I love it. It&#x27;s a great stack.

I&#x27;m surprised no one has mentioned Heroku yet. I&#x27;m a one man business too, and 90% of the details in this post I don&#x27;t even have to worry about. Sure I pay a pretty penny for it - at least a thousand a month - but it just works. Rails and all of its beauties, postgres, redis, sidekiq, sendgrid, twilio, Scout, Papertrail, and that&#x27;s about it. Looking to add AppOptics soon for business KPI &#x2F; APM metrics.

I&#x27;m impressed with the profit margins. It looks like one of the main sources of revenue is transcription. From what I can tell the price seems to be about $4&#x2F;hr.<p>OP said they are AWS. If they&#x27;re using Amazon Transcribe, the cost for that is $1.44&#x2F;hr.<p>A 150%+ profit margin is awesome! Well for that one piece of the service. Obviously at least some of the cost of the website and database, etc must be included, but still. Pretty amazing.

Oh wow. This is scaringly close to how we run geocod.io - right down to the ansible provisioning wrapper that I put together :)<p><pre><code> &gt; .&#x2F;provision provision usage: .&#x2F;provision environment role [hostname] This script will provision the given role in the specified environment using Ansible If a hostname is specified, provisioning will be limited to that specific server</code></pre>

I wouldn&#x27;t call that boring, there&#x27;s still a lot of new technology being used in that stack. I&#x27;d also recommend some minor improvements to the workflow (e.g. don&#x27;t do development work on the master branch) that are easy to achieve and provide big benefits. Also - no mention of backups or DR-planning -- I&#x27;d be interested to know what&#x27;s being used in this area?

As soon as he has a bigger team of developers, some of his technology choices might cause trouble. Especially not having a build server will cause chaos very quickly, because nobody will know, who has deployed when and what. A good deployment pipeline with a good test battery using a boring build server like Jenkins can help a lot here.

Okay that guy is just showing off, but rightfully, this is damn impressive. Even if some of that is offloaded to contractors, he still needs to understand most of it.<p>That&#x27;s a proper full stack developer with a business mindset as well. Hope I&#x27;ll improve my backend &#x2F; devops skill to that level at some point.

This was the most inspiring piece of text I&#x27;ve read for a long while. Such clarity of thinking and focus.

Very inspiring article. And thanks for sharing a detailed tech stack write up. Very inspiring for me as I am also a single person running a tech news aggregator website but probably even more boring setup on AWS (php MySQL Apache and some python ) embit.ca , running it alone but never lonely.

The stack can be much boring, simple and easy to maintain. Golang helps a lot for that.<p>For example <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newreleases.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newreleases.io&#x2F;</a><p>- Go with embedded databases for web services<p>- Vue.js for frontend<p>- Nginx just as there are other sites on the server<p>- Prometheus&#x2F;Grafana for monitoring<p>- Gitea for code hosting and some automation<p>- Bind9 for DNS<p>- Debian

Well, on frontend he uses React&#x2F;Redux&#x2F;Webpack, which is more of trendy, latest&#x2F;greatest. If he used Django templates + jQuery, that would have been staid&#x2F;boring tech. Great post though, aspirational for those of us who wish to found their own startup one day.

How did you get started doing this? Did you have a lot of money saved up and just decide to go for it for a certain length of time?<p>I&#x27;ve had an idea that I&#x27;ve been working on part-time but it really needs some full-time love. At what point do you decide to go for it full-time?

Wenbin, amazing article.<p>One question: what all do you use contractors for? How has your experience been in managing them?<p>Thanks

Great post - I&#x27;m running almost the same exact thing - Flask instead of Django, Saltstack instead of Ansible, rq instead of celery - supervisord, postgres, redis, ubuntu, nginx, aws (actually multicloud, BigQuery for data).<p>It&#x27;s very good stuff!

I like your Ansible &#x2F; deploy script &#x2F; &quot;no fancy CI tools&quot; combo. This is exactly what I do too. Deploying is so painless and consistent.<p>To quote a line from an Elixir talk I recently watched: &quot;it feels like cheating&quot;.

This is exactly the stakc I worked with when contracting for another startup&#x2F;company. The degree of similarity is disturbing.<p>It mostly worked really well though, kudos to whoever figured it out. And you could mock a dev setup right in PyCharm.

Great article. Are you using DataDog Synthetics for the DataDog response time graph?

Very inspiring. As a coding newbie &#x2F; wannabe entrepreneur, I will need some time to understand what each part of your technology does though. I will start using Listen Notes later today. Keep up the good work!

&gt; It’s absolutely okay to use the boring technology and start something simple (even ugly), as long as you actually solve problems.<p>Thank you! Let us solve problems and not chase ultra competitive expertise for its own sake.

I&#x27;d love to know how you&#x27;re running Django and React together. I&#x27;ve been trying to figure out how to make that combo work in a mono-repo, and I&#x27;m definitely missing something. Any advice?

wenbin, do you find it meaningfully superior to get Slack notifications vs. just an email?<p>Also curious if you have a monitoring&#x2F;recovery strategy for when you go camping or on honeymoon and need to be offline.

Listen Notes is a nice service. I don&#x27;t quite <i>understand</i> how it works -- do podcasts pay to be included in search results? It&#x27;s a nice thing for the listener, that is for sure.

As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don&#x27;t think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.

It seems wenbin is also the lead developer on ndkale, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Nextdoor&#x2F;ndkale&#x2F;graphs&#x2F;contributors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Nextdoor&#x2F;ndkale&#x2F;graphs&#x2F;contributors</a> so he would certainly be capable of using a more esoteric stack.<p>I wonder when developers are working for themselves &#x2F; very early stage, if one automatically becomes more conservative? If someone else is paying for your time, it&#x27;s nice to experiment and grow personally. When it&#x27;s your own buck, the focus is on pragmatic shipping and getting revenue coming in.

Sad to hear that PyCharm is considered old school these days.

@wenbin - What would also be helpful is a P&amp;L report on all of these expenses - as that will also tell us a great story.. and it would make a nice Part Deux ;-)

People who upvoted this, what made you up vote it? It&#x27;s much more popular than I would&#x27;ve guessed when I first saw it on the homepage

Very cool, I&#x27;m impressed. This guy knows how to do all the stuff I don&#x27;t know how to do and it actually works well.

I bumped into listennotes about 6 months ago, because I was looking to solve the same problem of discovering podcasts.

That&#x27;s not boring. That&#x27;s sane.

Thats a ton of servers!<p>What is your monthly AWS spend?

This is awesome.<p>Does the Google speech-to-text API work well for your needs? How often do you use it?

Having experience in both realms, it seems kind of interesting that Docker is considered overengineering while React + Redux + Webpack + ES is considered natural and simple. I guess 50% of &quot;overengineering&quot; is really just &quot;I&#x27;m not familiar or comfortable with ths&quot;.

I listened to an interview with DHH the other day and he was calling out that one of the advantages of frameworks over libraries is that everything comes wired up ready for production instead of you spending all your time writing glue code and arguing about conventions.<p>I&#x27;m still not exactly certain where I fall on this topic. What I do know is that I don&#x27;t like frameworks that conceal the plumbing and leave you with declarative bits that require memorization. Lack of discoverability is a huge barrier to mastery. The best code invites you to determine why something is happening.<p>What I&#x27;ve been thinking about lately that this article drew out for me again was that it&#x27;s a shame that so many tools and libraries come not ready for production by default.<p>It would be nice to have some curated base file sets where insecure defaults were overridden, and all of the metrics and logging logic were wired up. You get the turn-key solution but you still have code that is more discoverable, and you can veto a few choices without too much effort.

@wenbin<p>What AWS EC2 instance types are you using? Can you please expand about your AWS stack?

Ok but look in 2012 they were running Java and still did key changes

Is this YouTube but for podcasts? Sounds like a good idea actually.

Fantastic work!! So much knowledge and thanks for sharing with us!

He says boring I say cool. I love the product so much.

How do you get all the podcasts audio and data?

great post, love the solo entrepreneur mindset

Such an inspirational post! Love Listennotes.

what&#x27;s monthly revenue?

great read , say is your revenue is from ads only ?

Boring is better.

This dude is my hero. Keeping it simple and functional.

This is great! Thanks for sharing.

Lots of stuff can stick a web form in front of Elastic&#x2F;Postgres or similar. Certainly nothing wrong with that.<p>Also doesn&#x27;t mean that something quite so simple will work in every case. Not everyone is wasting their employer&#x27;s money to build their resume.

Everyone should write something like this.

Satoshi Nakamoto was one person behind Bitcoin, similarly.

When my website (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aedaily.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aedaily.net</a>) has a million of record, I had migrated Postgres to Mongodb because performance issues. I&#x27;m using Django template to easy maintain, development and SEO.

As a software SaaS CISO, who also pentests and determines partner risk - I take the approach of not sharing such in depth details. Articles like this are fantastic fingerprinting recon for those that look to compromise sites.

This is just a big ad for his website with no in-depth knowledge or insights provided. Literally just a list of tech someone uses and 4 or 5 links to his website. Is this what HN has become? I remember the content upvoted on this site being much better a couple years ago.