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Cringe. Solo entrepreneur full-rewrites are almost always churn inducing, feature stagnation, time sucks. I'd advocate working on improvements to the current

Cringe. Solo entrepreneur full-rewrites are almost always churn inducing, feature stagnation, time sucks. I'd advocate working on improvements to the current platform, one-by-one. Focus on features that increase your bottom line until you're at a MRR where losing 30% of your customers will be worth the cost of improvements.

pgeorgi 7y ago
I wouldn't describe in such harsh words (although maybe that helps bring the point across?), but overall I agree. Several of the items look like they could be improved completely isolated from the rest (eg. the email issue). Moving from Wordpress to Laravel means that the basic stack remains the same (PHP). All in all, this looks like something that ought to be possible without a rewrite. I'd start with building a new front router that calls liberally into wordpress as a backend. Once wordpress is only managed (and accessible!) by the front router, one by one hack up wordpress to call into Laravel Spark stuff (eg. the user database) instead of using its own infrastructure. The end result would be that there's no wordpress code being used anymore (so drop it), and the site is completely moved over. But that way every step in between won't be a regression to users, and it's realistic to add the odd emergency feature addition to the platform without having to maintain it twice (in the old platform and the new).
stevekemp 7y ago
Agreed. I've been slowly migrating away from my one-true-love, of Perl, because it is easier to deploy golang binaries. During the course of that I've isolated small sections of my project, and migrated them over a piece at time. Instead of perl "doing stuff" it now writes out data to JSON, and a golang service consumes that and does the actual back-end work. This lets me rewrite the trickiest bits first, and also provides a level of isolation and abstraction I can test thoroughly. Already I'm feeling much more productive, and I have more confidence that I don't need to install specific versions of gems (some ruby stuff too) and "unsupported" perl modules.
dang 7y ago
> Cringe. Please don't do that here. It breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pgeorgi 7y ago

I wouldn't describe in such harsh words (although maybe that helps bring the point across?), but overall I agree. Several of the items look like they could be improved completely isolated from the rest (eg. the email issue). Moving from Wordpress to Laravel means that the basic stack remains the same (PHP). All in all, this looks like something that ought to be possible without a rewrite. I'd start with building a new front router that calls liberally into wordpress as a backend. Once wordpress is only managed (and accessible!) by the front router, one by one hack up wordpress to call into Laravel Spark stuff (eg. the user database) instead of using its own infrastructure. The end result would be that there's no wordpress code being used anymore (so drop it), and the site is completely moved over. But that way every step in between won't be a regression to users, and it's realistic to add the odd emergency feature addition to the platform without having to maintain it twice (in the old platform and the new).

stevekemp 7y ago

Agreed. I've been slowly migrating away from my one-true-love, of Perl, because it is easier to deploy golang binaries. During the course of that I've isolated small sections of my project, and migrated them over a piece at time. Instead of perl "doing stuff" it now writes out data to JSON, and a golang service consumes that and does the actual back-end work. This lets me rewrite the trickiest bits first, and also provides a level of isolation and abstraction I can test thoroughly. Already I'm feeling much more productive, and I have more confidence that I don't need to install specific versions of gems (some ruby stuff too) and "unsupported" perl modules.

dang 7y ago

> Cringe. Please don't do that here. It breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html