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Just 6 days ago you published what was a pretty great writeup on message queues, now this thorough dive on connections & pools; what's your writing schedule lik

Just 6 days ago you published what was a pretty great writeup on message queues, now this thorough dive on connections & pools; what's your writing schedule like? At some 12k words of fairly accurate and precise technical content I'm kind of blown away by your pace.

sudhirj 6y ago
I had a few paragraphs written earlier (maybe half) over the course of the pandemic. I spent a lot of the pandemic procrastinating by trying to build my own blogging software, a more efficient version of Ghost, but it’s too much duplicated effort given what I learned at AWS reinvent. So I decided to just set up and start publishing. I write for about two hours a day, maybe four days or writing and two of editing for each article. I’d like to publish once a week, but don’t want to set that kind of goal because then I’ll write even if I have nothing interesting to say. But maybe that’s the best process anyway? Will tell you what’s working if you ask again in a couple of months :-/
- johnonolan 6y ago
  Founder of Ghost here - would love to hear what parts you were hoping to make more efficient / if you have any suggestions :)
  - sudhirj 6y ago
    I was trying to make it multi tenant, move it a serverless database like DynamoDB, and rewrite the server in Go. I’m trying to make a Ghost hosting service that’s free / $5 a month for personal use. I’ve figured out a way to make the economics work with the existing 500MB disk + 1GB RAM requirements, but it would have been a lot easier with Go and Dynamo. Thanks a ton to you and the team for the work you’re doing. I think you’re making a fantastic system, and want to make it available to more people as a personal blogging platform. I just wish it could run multi tenant or with lower memory needs. I don’t suppose making it easier for others to compete with the official Ghost revenue model is a priority, so I doubt this is anything you’ll want to take up. But I’m happy to share revenues on this - I just think Ghost should be a lot more accessible to individuals around the world.
    - johnonolan 6y ago
      Not clear how those changes would make it more accessible or what problem you're actually trying to solve? There are lots of things we're working on improving but I promise you changing the programming language of any of those components wouldn't make any difference to the end experience of the software. A lot of blogging platforms (including Ghost) start out at $5/mo targeting personal use -- but the ones that survive never stay there. Probably some worthwhile takeaways from that :)
      - sudhirj 6y ago
        Yeah, the Go decision was more because of familiarity and some tooling I have available for Dynamo. The real problem I was tackling is zero marginal cost multi tenancy. Right now a new Ghost installation costs 500MB on a disk and 1GB in RAM, and I would like to to cost one row in an existing database instead. And yeah, don’t think the $5 / month is sustainable for a company, but for a solo founder it might work. Of course, that might be a classic case of this time it’s different.

sudhirj 6y ago

I had a few paragraphs written earlier (maybe half) over the course of the pandemic. I spent a lot of the pandemic procrastinating by trying to build my own blogging software, a more efficient version of Ghost, but it’s too much duplicated effort given what I learned at AWS reinvent. So I decided to just set up and start publishing. I write for about two hours a day, maybe four days or writing and two of editing for each article. I’d like to publish once a week, but don’t want to set that kind of goal because then I’ll write even if I have nothing interesting to say. But maybe that’s the best process anyway? Will tell you what’s working if you ask again in a couple of months :-/

johnonolan 6y ago
Founder of Ghost here - would love to hear what parts you were hoping to make more efficient / if you have any suggestions :)
- sudhirj 6y ago
  I was trying to make it multi tenant, move it a serverless database like DynamoDB, and rewrite the server in Go. I’m trying to make a Ghost hosting service that’s free / $5 a month for personal use. I’ve figured out a way to make the economics work with the existing 500MB disk + 1GB RAM requirements, but it would have been a lot easier with Go and Dynamo. Thanks a ton to you and the team for the work you’re doing. I think you’re making a fantastic system, and want to make it available to more people as a personal blogging platform. I just wish it could run multi tenant or with lower memory needs. I don’t suppose making it easier for others to compete with the official Ghost revenue model is a priority, so I doubt this is anything you’ll want to take up. But I’m happy to share revenues on this - I just think Ghost should be a lot more accessible to individuals around the world.
  - johnonolan 6y ago
    Not clear how those changes would make it more accessible or what problem you're actually trying to solve? There are lots of things we're working on improving but I promise you changing the programming language of any of those components wouldn't make any difference to the end experience of the software. A lot of blogging platforms (including Ghost) start out at $5/mo targeting personal use -- but the ones that survive never stay there. Probably some worthwhile takeaways from that :)
    - sudhirj 6y ago
      Yeah, the Go decision was more because of familiarity and some tooling I have available for Dynamo. The real problem I was tackling is zero marginal cost multi tenancy. Right now a new Ghost installation costs 500MB on a disk and 1GB in RAM, and I would like to to cost one row in an existing database instead. And yeah, don’t think the $5 / month is sustainable for a company, but for a solo founder it might work. Of course, that might be a classic case of this time it’s different.