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Keep everything simple. Dumb, boring. Complexity will drive you nuts. You want to be a boring pilot of a floating boat, rather than a super hero in a sinking sh

by keyle 4y ago

Keep everything simple. Dumb, boring. Complexity will drive you nuts. You want to be a boring pilot of a floating boat, rather than a super hero in a sinking ship. Keep a solid stack of cash. 6-9 months worth of potato diet (consider fixed costs). Never let bills run out on you. Never trust dynamic pricing. Make systems work for you 24/7, keep measuring, have alerts set, incl. recurring jobs via calendar. Keep a solid log of changes and most recordable things. Offload everything related to accounting and focus on one thing, the tech. Keep your customer's expectations in check. They should know you're not a multinational VC funded grunt cave. Keep it human, keep it real. So that when stuff does go bad, you are on the right foot to answer for it, and the narrative is based around compassion and not SLA's.

buro9 4y ago
I can't emphasise enough the keep things dumb. Sometimes you lose motivation for 6 months... and that business should be able to tick along just fine. In many ways a business of one needs simplicity and over-engineering. Monitoring, alerts, automation... but all really simple. Nothing clever, nothing difficult, composed of entirely standard parts, tech, systems. I say over-engineering as you don't want to need a human (you) to be doing anything for this thing to function. Your job is literally to put yourself out of your job... and for the business to cruise along. Automate everything... and if you cannot do so, make it so simple that toil is virtually nothing.
Loic 4y ago
As an example for the simplicity. I have a small search engine for chemical properties[0] running with a boring go stack, with just a stupid SQLite database (but a custom in memory index for some particular "chemical" search part). It has been humming around for the past 10 years without downtime. The stack is incredibly simple and monolithic. A complete redeploy is made by a simple push on master, simple CI/CD with Woodpecker[1] building Docker images and triggering a refresh of the system with docker compose. Every single step can be down manually if a given step or component is failing, but in the "everyday" scenario, everything is automated. So, keep it as simple as possible with minimal "interconnections" with other services. If possible do not depend on any external services. [0]: https://www.chemeo.com https://www.chemeo.com [1]: https://woodpecker-ci.org/ https://woodpecker-ci.org/

by keyle 4y ago

buro9 4y ago

I can't emphasise enough the keep things dumb. Sometimes you lose motivation for 6 months... and that business should be able to tick along just fine. In many ways a business of one needs simplicity and over-engineering. Monitoring, alerts, automation... but all really simple. Nothing clever, nothing difficult, composed of entirely standard parts, tech, systems. I say over-engineering as you don't want to need a human (you) to be doing anything for this thing to function. Your job is literally to put yourself out of your job... and for the business to cruise along. Automate everything... and if you cannot do so, make it so simple that toil is virtually nothing.

Loic 4y ago

As an example for the simplicity. I have a small search engine for chemical properties[0] running with a boring go stack, with just a stupid SQLite database (but a custom in memory index for some particular "chemical" search part). It has been humming around for the past 10 years without downtime. The stack is incredibly simple and monolithic. A complete redeploy is made by a simple push on master, simple CI/CD with Woodpecker[1] building Docker images and triggering a refresh of the system with docker compose. Every single step can be down manually if a given step or component is failing, but in the "everyday" scenario, everything is automated. So, keep it as simple as possible with minimal "interconnections" with other services. If possible do not depend on any external services. [0]: https://www.chemeo.com https://www.chemeo.com [1]: https://woodpecker-ci.org/ https://woodpecker-ci.org/