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[dupe] The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018) (listennotes.com)
217 points by dilly_li on May 15, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 27 comments



Wow, that's hugely impressive for a 1-man operation. You're like a song that you hear on the radio with solid guitar, vocals, drums, etc. and it turns out it's all 1 guy by himself who recorded and mixed those elements together. It may be possible, but it's definitely not common.

Also, to any VC's reading this, this guy will spend $1 better, leaner and farther than any team you can name, and he's already demonstrated he has the chops w/this project.

Finally, thanks for sharing this. This is the kind of quality post that 100% justifies the time I spend on HN.


> Also, to any VC's reading this, this guy will spend $1 better, leaner and farther than any team you can name, and he's already demonstrated he has the chops w/this project.

That's the issue... noone's gonna fund a guy who will spend that $1 better... because who wants to read the news about a guy who's startup can raise $150,000 and have that be a six year runway.


He was actually rejected[0] from YC when he made his original pitch.

[0] https://www.listennotes.com/blog/my-y-combinator-interview-e...


The Tame Impala of the internet?


Ha, today I learned one guy writes, records, performs, and produces all of Tame Impala's music, in the recording studio. So, yes!


Wait, Tame Impala is one person?


Stevie Wonder is surely more widely recognised?... Or Prince.... Dave Grohl also did this for the Foo Fighters first record (not sure on the mixing part though)


Tame Impala is current, all of my friends love his music


I like it too. At least 10 years ago it was good but I haven’t listened recently. Prince and Stevie Wonder are timeless and much larger impact though


This is the most informative article that I read today. No hype, no story, just a plain list of engineering choices, some explanations, and a very useful list of tools.


This gives the confidence to move forward. You made a break through for me. The point you made about over engineering. I found out resently that beautify is in simplicity, and you grow when you have to grow. Not day 1.day 1 is about day 1. But I was stuck at the over engineering bit, in the name of making things simple.

Thank you for this great article I will be waiting for your future blog posts.


Who the hell would consider this stack to be boring? There's so many moving parts for a single person operation, seems pretty insane to me that anyone would consider this boring.


It's boring because it's not new.

This is like the default Django stack with some elastic search for search, which is extremely widespread so not really interesting anymore either.

It's all stuff people developing Django apps have been doing for yearsb basically.

I'm pretty sure he explicitly said as much in the article as

Not trying to diminish his achievement through. Very few people are fluent enough in all these technologies to not only have used them, but actually manage them without help.


Thanks to the author of this, even if it was put up a while back.

I loved the detail of the business service tools used.


A great inspiration for aspiring tech-entrepeneurs, for which the "VC-hockeystick-picthdeck-series-x"-cirkus sounds like a nightmare.

Easily my favorite post this week.

Thank you very much for sharing this.


This is a very useful service. I often search for podcasts on random topics that I want to know more about. Imagine if the web was such that you subscribed to certain pages and only consumed those. Weird.


Why not use more managed services like a managed DB and some PaaS for the backend services and workers?

I imagine that would be both cheaper and less overhead (in ansible yaml) ect.


What managed DB would you suggest? I want to just try them out for learning purposes.


A managed DB is any database that is provided as a service rather than one that runs directly on a VM you are responsible for. You typically pay a bit more for managed databases than VMs, but in exchange you get a highly optimized environment and curated experience so that you have minimal operational overhead to keep it online consistently. Managed database services typically take care of: - minor version patching - automated failover and backup options - some level of security Heroku Postgres is a popular option, as are services from all major cloud providers and database companies.

For reference, a T3.micro VM is $0.0104 / hr vs T3.micro RDS at $0.017 / hr or $7.50 vs $12.25 /mo. Its a high margin service for cloud providers, but also gives a lot of peace of mind around the data's integrity and availability.

Spin one up running your favorite database. You can run any version of most popular databases for the past 7-10 years, including MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL, Oracle, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, Elasticsearch and more. Spin it up, load up some data, make some queries, and throw it away a couple hours later and you'll be out a few pennies. You can also throw down $25 and get an hour with a 128 cpu, 4TB RAM, 25 Gbps monster. In any case, have fun and don't forget to terminate your instances!


Digital Ocean has managed Postgres for $15/mo


Probably amazon rds? Which is basically a rebranded postgres.


RDS is so expensive, cries :_(


Postgres RDS on a t2.micro is $15/mo and afaik eligible for free tier.


Micro on cloud services is basically trash, it has no power at all, you'll quickly run I to problems even with a handful of customers.

It'll have like 1/100th the power of a $5 p/m VPS.


Can you please provide an update if you see this.


> On ListenNotes.com, most web pages are half server-side rendered (Django template) and half client-side rendered (React). The server-side rendered part provides a boilerplate of a web page, and the client-side rendered part is basically an interactive web app.

Imagine now every time you change sever side you need to make sure you don't break client side. These dependencies are a big tech debt.

How come not using docker there is less overhead? Not using docker I need to worry way much than using it. Like do I need to install anything? Versions works? How do I reproduce my env if my machine breaks?.... You'd need to write docs and keep them in sync.




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