8 ms·

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining

This is exactly why the more I think about it, the more I just want to git-push-heroku-goodbye and be done with it. I don't care about setting and maintaining AWS instances, docker containers and jenkins. The older I get, the more I realize how precious my time is and now I have very little patience for anyone or anything that wastes it. This is also why I've basically cut off all social medias from my life (except HN occasionally), have always preferred working from home to avoid wasting time in traffic, have cut off people who I don't enjoy spending time with and spend more time with my family instead.

SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
Same. I completely overbuilt a recent side project and ended up scraping the whole thing because it wastes too much time to maintain it. As much as I love building new projects, having children at home reminds me that time is my only true resource and it's better spent with the kiddos (at least at this stage of my life).
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Asking because I feel this way a lot too -- is this the kind of thing that was avoidable (IE if you built it on Rails/Django + Heroku would that have cut down the maintenance), or was there intrinsic complexity to the project that made it unavoidable? More and more, I want to build things that are in the former category if I build them at all outside of work.
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    Depends on what you're building. Rails/django/heroku are web app accelerators. If you are building a web app, then yea they make it super easy and take away a lot of having to think about complex systems, but if you're building anything else not really
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      Are you sure about that? You get a ton from a batteries included framework, but it doesn't prevent from successfully building a complex system, nor does it preclude you from having to reason through the powerful footguns. The way I'd describe it is that /most/ codebases can fit into what you'd call a "web app" including most codebases that include complex systems -- there are, of course, significant exceptions.
  - SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
    In my particular case, I opened the CI/CD can of worms using Docker (which obviously has great use cases). My use case could have fit into a Rails/Django + Heroku model that would have saved me a bunch of time. I thought by investing in the infra early it would save me time later, however later will likely never come. So basically I spent more time debugging issues due to adding infrastructure complexity than developing the actual project. TLDR; Wasn't a total loss as I did learn some, however I would have rather spend more time on developing the actual product (or in retrospect more time with my family).
    - karolist 6y ago
      This tech is great when someone working full time at your company sets up all the scaffolding and you just code your microservice with magic happening around it. Not so great when devs trying to spice up their resume start implementing these ideas to their own personal projects during their free time. I've spent so many hours fighting Basel, gRCP, API gateways, tracing etc etc, just because it's nice at work. But took too much time to replicate something own my own, and it is of course, fragile.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      Yup, I've fallen into this premature optimization path before.
Oras 6y ago
Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.
- nkingsy 6y ago
  Popular open source tools are a poor substitute for standards, but they are better than nothing. Standards matter if you want to show your code to someone else
- paledot 6y ago
  Which is why I open my conversational interviews with, "There's an emergency, sales promised a customer a to-do list app yesterday. It's getting shipped out and forgotten, you're doing it on your own, only thing that matters is it's done fast. What do you use?". And then of course I spring the, "Okay, now it's becoming a flagship product. How do you onboard co-workers? How do you pivot to ongoing maintenance? What problems do you anticipate scaling it out?". But it's always important to have a tool in your toolbox to hack something together in an afternoon, even if it's just to prove a point.
  - ric2b 6y ago
    That would give me a bad impression as a candidate. It's like you're aware of the issue (sales doesn't give two shits about the capacity of the engineering team) but you want someone that is good at wasting a lot of time efficiently instead of improving communication with the sales team.
    - solipsism 6y ago
      And then as a hiring manager I get the impression that this candidate doesn't understand hypotheticals, which is a big red flag. Happily, we will come to mutual agreement on whether you proceed.
dontbeabill 6y ago
it is amazing to me that after 20 years of doing this, and endless river of new “tools” to help, it has become a labyrinth of config files, aws, IAM, deploy complexity and unenjoyable “stuff”. i feel like i used to “build things” to solve problems. now it’s just unwind a bunch of complexity for the sake of complexity
hpcjoe 6y ago
This 1000x. Sadly the extended out of state family seems to like FB, and I try to follow science/math twitter. As you get older, something in you clicks, that you realize that time spent being angry, or combative, reduces the time you have for enjoying things (family, life, etc.). Your time on earth is a zero sum game. Maximize its utility, maximize your enjoyment, minimize your negativity (e.g. outrage of the day on social media). Your life will be better.
- prox 6y ago
  Even better (imo) is going beyond the maximization maxim and realise the “beauty” of the analog, a world you directly see, hear, touch. Just existing without a specific goal, which is indeed similar as a vacation / holiday. However people seem to reserve the “no goal” mindset only on vacation, but you could also integrate it into your life.
  - dkdk8283 6y ago
    I have no goals, it’s great! Absolute freedom. I do as I feel most of the time and I’m very lucky to be able to do so.
  - andrei_says_ 6y ago
    I’ve been practicing no-goal vacations daily and hourly. Like, a 30-min vacation sometime after work and 2-3 minute vacations hourly. The key is to drop all goals and switch to a sense of complete freedom, even for a short period of time.
buffalobuffalo 6y ago
I still use Heroku for almost all my personal projects. I stopped for a while, but they now allow you to dockerize your projects and push them to their registry. They also allow you to have multiple apps with access to shared resources. Those two changes have made it much more flexible than it was back in the early days. You never realize how much configuration of AWS is like pulling teeth until you stop.
- fakedang 6y ago
  I'm going through literally what you mentioned last. I had a very simply API built on lambdas for a side project, that worked perfectly fine till last month. But now, every minor change I make to that code results in some error or the other that I can't figure out for the life of me. It has been so bad that I had to quit the project altogether.
dizzy3gg 6y ago
Ditto, recently moved from AWS to render.com It's like a cheaper Heroku, it's been stable so far. I do use GitHub actions to run a small pipeline on projects but its a far cry from Jenkins.
TranquilMarmot 6y ago
I recently switched all of my personal projects from being self hosted on a linode with a complex nginx setup to just using Netlify... never going back.

SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago

Same. I completely overbuilt a recent side project and ended up scraping the whole thing because it wastes too much time to maintain it. As much as I love building new projects, having children at home reminds me that time is my only true resource and it's better spent with the kiddos (at least at this stage of my life).

yowlingcat 6y ago
Asking because I feel this way a lot too -- is this the kind of thing that was avoidable (IE if you built it on Rails/Django + Heroku would that have cut down the maintenance), or was there intrinsic complexity to the project that made it unavoidable? More and more, I want to build things that are in the former category if I build them at all outside of work.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  Depends on what you're building. Rails/django/heroku are web app accelerators. If you are building a web app, then yea they make it super easy and take away a lot of having to think about complex systems, but if you're building anything else not really
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Are you sure about that? You get a ton from a batteries included framework, but it doesn't prevent from successfully building a complex system, nor does it preclude you from having to reason through the powerful footguns. The way I'd describe it is that /most/ codebases can fit into what you'd call a "web app" including most codebases that include complex systems -- there are, of course, significant exceptions.
- SaltyBackendGuy 6y ago
  In my particular case, I opened the CI/CD can of worms using Docker (which obviously has great use cases). My use case could have fit into a Rails/Django + Heroku model that would have saved me a bunch of time. I thought by investing in the infra early it would save me time later, however later will likely never come. So basically I spent more time debugging issues due to adding infrastructure complexity than developing the actual project. TLDR; Wasn't a total loss as I did learn some, however I would have rather spend more time on developing the actual product (or in retrospect more time with my family).
  - karolist 6y ago
    This tech is great when someone working full time at your company sets up all the scaffolding and you just code your microservice with magic happening around it. Not so great when devs trying to spice up their resume start implementing these ideas to their own personal projects during their free time. I've spent so many hours fighting Basel, gRCP, API gateways, tracing etc etc, just because it's nice at work. But took too much time to replicate something own my own, and it is of course, fragile.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    Yup, I've fallen into this premature optimization path before.

Oras 6y ago

Hear hear! I wish one day the dev community will understand that its never about the tools and more about the delivery. The customer does not give a monkey if the backend is node, go or PHP. You do not impress anyone by using React, redux, amber, angular ... etc. All people care about is a solution to a problem they have. However, from my experience, this is not a popular opinion among developers.

nkingsy 6y ago
Popular open source tools are a poor substitute for standards, but they are better than nothing. Standards matter if you want to show your code to someone else
paledot 6y ago
Which is why I open my conversational interviews with, "There's an emergency, sales promised a customer a to-do list app yesterday. It's getting shipped out and forgotten, you're doing it on your own, only thing that matters is it's done fast. What do you use?". And then of course I spring the, "Okay, now it's becoming a flagship product. How do you onboard co-workers? How do you pivot to ongoing maintenance? What problems do you anticipate scaling it out?". But it's always important to have a tool in your toolbox to hack something together in an afternoon, even if it's just to prove a point.
- ric2b 6y ago
  That would give me a bad impression as a candidate. It's like you're aware of the issue (sales doesn't give two shits about the capacity of the engineering team) but you want someone that is good at wasting a lot of time efficiently instead of improving communication with the sales team.
  - solipsism 6y ago
    And then as a hiring manager I get the impression that this candidate doesn't understand hypotheticals, which is a big red flag. Happily, we will come to mutual agreement on whether you proceed.

dontbeabill 6y ago

it is amazing to me that after 20 years of doing this, and endless river of new “tools” to help, it has become a labyrinth of config files, aws, IAM, deploy complexity and unenjoyable “stuff”. i feel like i used to “build things” to solve problems. now it’s just unwind a bunch of complexity for the sake of complexity

hpcjoe 6y ago

This 1000x. Sadly the extended out of state family seems to like FB, and I try to follow science/math twitter. As you get older, something in you clicks, that you realize that time spent being angry, or combative, reduces the time you have for enjoying things (family, life, etc.). Your time on earth is a zero sum game. Maximize its utility, maximize your enjoyment, minimize your negativity (e.g. outrage of the day on social media). Your life will be better.

prox 6y ago
Even better (imo) is going beyond the maximization maxim and realise the “beauty” of the analog, a world you directly see, hear, touch. Just existing without a specific goal, which is indeed similar as a vacation / holiday. However people seem to reserve the “no goal” mindset only on vacation, but you could also integrate it into your life.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  I have no goals, it’s great! Absolute freedom. I do as I feel most of the time and I’m very lucky to be able to do so.
- andrei_says_ 6y ago
  I’ve been practicing no-goal vacations daily and hourly. Like, a 30-min vacation sometime after work and 2-3 minute vacations hourly. The key is to drop all goals and switch to a sense of complete freedom, even for a short period of time.

buffalobuffalo 6y ago

I still use Heroku for almost all my personal projects. I stopped for a while, but they now allow you to dockerize your projects and push them to their registry. They also allow you to have multiple apps with access to shared resources. Those two changes have made it much more flexible than it was back in the early days. You never realize how much configuration of AWS is like pulling teeth until you stop.

fakedang 6y ago
I'm going through literally what you mentioned last. I had a very simply API built on lambdas for a side project, that worked perfectly fine till last month. But now, every minor change I make to that code results in some error or the other that I can't figure out for the life of me. It has been so bad that I had to quit the project altogether.

dizzy3gg 6y ago

Ditto, recently moved from AWS to render.com It's like a cheaper Heroku, it's been stable so far. I do use GitHub actions to run a small pipeline on projects but its a far cry from Jenkins.

TranquilMarmot 6y ago

I recently switched all of my personal projects from being self hosted on a linode with a complex nginx setup to just using Netlify... never going back.