3 ms·

My latest job is at a place where we have an extremely 'old-school' Rails app. The vast majority of UI is server-rendered HTML, Javascript (at least that we wro

My latest job is at a place where we have an extremely 'old-school' Rails app. The vast majority of UI is server-rendered HTML, Javascript (at least that we wrote, we do use Turbo) is very, very minimal, and we're just one very large service. The previous place I was at was a microservice heavy (the count of services was almost on par with the number of developers) React and Node based application. I'm orders of magnitude more productive with the Rails app, it's more well regarded by our customers, and using it, there's no obvious telltale signs that it's not using the modern SPA approach.

jack_riminton 5y ago
I'm not surprised. I have a theory that there's a perverse incentive for startups to make their work more expensive and therefore more complicated. It's related to this quote by Paul Graham about funding: "VCs don't invest $x million because that's the amount you need, but because that's the amount the structure of their business requires them to invest. Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more harm than good. Google survived enormous VC funding because it could legitimately absorb large amounts of money. They had to buy a lot of servers and a lot of bandwidth to crawl the whole Web. Less fortunate startups just end up hiring armies of people to sit around having meetings." (from here http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html) For those that aren't VC funded I think that a lot can be explained by cargo-culting; "If startup X is using Node/React/Redux/microservices and they just scored a 20m Series A then we'd better do it too"
- Zababa 5y ago
  > For those that aren't VC funded I think that a lot can be explained by cargo-culting; "If startup X is using Node/React/Redux/microservices and they just scored a 20m Series A then we'd better do it too" Part of it is also from employees: "everyone else is using Node/React/Redux/microservices, if I can push my company to do it I will have more relevant skills for the market". I often hear that for k8s too.
- ryanbrunner 5y ago
  Yeah, I think it helps that we're very intentionally lean (we currently have just 2 engineers servicing about 100,000 paid subscribers, which is a bit too lean for comfort for me, but at least makes us think very hard about introducing complexity).
  - jack_riminton 5y ago
    I’ve often thought that this would be a good constraint i.e instead of hiring a dev ops to migrate to a complicated AWS/k8 setup, it might be better to spend that wage on added Heroku costs to keep things simple
    - ryanbrunner 5y ago
      Even in the AWS world, there's simpler options than k8. We run a pretty basic elastic beanstalk setup that serves us well enough. A big part of that is having a monolithic service though, most of the complexity either disappears or becomes pointless when your stack is just app servers, a DB and redis.

jack_riminton 5y ago

I'm not surprised. I have a theory that there's a perverse incentive for startups to make their work more expensive and therefore more complicated. It's related to this quote by Paul Graham about funding: "VCs don't invest $x million because that's the amount you need, but because that's the amount the structure of their business requires them to invest. Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more harm than good. Google survived enormous VC funding because it could legitimately absorb large amounts of money. They had to buy a lot of servers and a lot of bandwidth to crawl the whole Web. Less fortunate startups just end up hiring armies of people to sit around having meetings." (from here http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html) For those that aren't VC funded I think that a lot can be explained by cargo-culting; "If startup X is using Node/React/Redux/microservices and they just scored a 20m Series A then we'd better do it too"

Zababa 5y ago
> For those that aren't VC funded I think that a lot can be explained by cargo-culting; "If startup X is using Node/React/Redux/microservices and they just scored a 20m Series A then we'd better do it too" Part of it is also from employees: "everyone else is using Node/React/Redux/microservices, if I can push my company to do it I will have more relevant skills for the market". I often hear that for k8s too.
ryanbrunner 5y ago
Yeah, I think it helps that we're very intentionally lean (we currently have just 2 engineers servicing about 100,000 paid subscribers, which is a bit too lean for comfort for me, but at least makes us think very hard about introducing complexity).
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  I’ve often thought that this would be a good constraint i.e instead of hiring a dev ops to migrate to a complicated AWS/k8 setup, it might be better to spend that wage on added Heroku costs to keep things simple
  - ryanbrunner 5y ago
    Even in the AWS world, there's simpler options than k8. We run a pretty basic elastic beanstalk setup that serves us well enough. A big part of that is having a monolithic service though, most of the complexity either disappears or becomes pointless when your stack is just app servers, a DB and redis.