4 ms·

There is nothing free about managing and supporting a complex infrastructure component. When you're building out an already sophisticated application, and your

There is nothing free about managing and supporting a complex infrastructure component. When you're building out an already sophisticated application, and your core user value proposition has nothing to do with providing subscribed socket connections then it is suddenly a real joy to pay real money to a competent vendor that takes responsibility for something that is hard to get right. Tech startups are 10% software and 90% running a business. Pusher helps me run my business.

peteforde 15y ago
As an addendum, my investors and board appreciate this thinking. "I can do all of this myself" is a common ego trap that precedes cowboy mentality. Running a socket stack sounds like fun until something goes wrong at 3am.
- daraosn 15y ago
  This took 5 hours of coding and it's been running 2 months without problems, where is the complexity of it?? I agree your point when you talk about really complex stuff, but something that be done in that amount time doesn't worth to be outsourced in my opinion. Also it's good to have alternatives, that's how we make things better.
  - catshirt 15y ago
    how many messages are you sending, to how many clients? likewise, how are you running a public node server for free? how many of these servers are you running? what if... etc, etc. not dismissing your library, but sounds like a case of "i don't know what i don't know". pusher exists as a service for a reason. there's a bit more to it than pushing json around.
  - rlivsey 15y ago
    Pusher costs ~$49/month, my time is worth $1000/hour [1] It took me about 5 minutes to setup Pusher and for that I get private channels, presence, someone to handle the scaling etc... as djb_hackernews already mentioned. We outsource DNS, email, hosting infrastructure, anything I possibly can which isn't core to the product itself. The question shouldn't be why outsource this, the question is why would it be worth our time writing and supporting it ourselves when we can be working on other things? Maybe we'll insource this stuff when we're at a point where we hit the 'enterprise' plan on Pusher, when we have a few more developers and a dedicated sys-admin. I'll cross that bride then, in the meantime I'm happy to have a $49/m hit on my credit card and move onto the next thing! All that aside, it's great to have options so thanks for releasing this! [1] - http://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html
    - mattmanser 15y ago
      Your time really isn't worth $1000/hour. If everyone starts pretending it is it'd be silly to write a single line of code yourself, why would you when you're worth $7-10,000 a day? I still do understand your point, but this is Hacker News after all, not Outsourcing News. This thread reads a little like a couple of suits just came in here to stomp on a hacker's opensource project. I mean replace the words 'subscribed socket connections' in peterforde's original comment with 'web server' and suddenly it looks odd to be paying $19 or $50 a month for something like this in this day and age. Where would we be if there were only IIS out there to use? Or no MySQL/Postgres? I've not used websockets in anger yet and I know it's still kinda ropey, but this is basic programming stuff, paying someone else for it is a bit, well, raise eyebrows time. SMTP is hard because of the configuration problems and dealing with a ton of arcane and opaque problems with major email providers. This is something that's actually fun to muck around with. In the end the solution of Pusher is only marginally less complicated than the original problem. At the moment maybe Pusher's a good solution for a fast moving business to a problem that's not well solved in the open source stack, but it's only a matter of time till there's the equivalent of apache or nginx. And this is perhaps the first step. So kudos to daraosn for putting it out there, also seems the perfect kind of problem to be using node.js for.
      - rlivsey 15y ago
        I was going to put a smiley after that first line as it was kind of tongue in cheek, but HN isn't the place for smilies! People pay Heroku/AWS each month, I don't see any difference with outsourcing this part too. That said, we use Linode boxes because I'm ok with configuring nginx etc... and I don't feel comfortable using IndexTank or MongoHQ etc... for outsourcing our search or database components, so I certainly sympathise with the unease at outsourcing key infrastructure which is easy to manage. Pusher is marginally more complicated, but means I can call the problem solved and move onto other things. I agree it's a very interesting and fun area so it's certainly something I want to play with more in the future, but there are also 100 other interesting things which I need to work on, so I'll tackle those first. Definite kudos to daraosn, just because I use Pusher because it solves my problem doesn't mean I don't think it's an awesome thing to work on as an open source project.
  - taligent 15y ago
    It took me all of 5 minutes to integrate Pusher. And I need something that is going to last 2 years without problems. Sorry but non-differentiated functionality like sending emails, push, analytics etc is exactly the sort of thing to outsource.
- psb217 15y ago
  Precludes seems to be precisely opposite the intended meaning of your second sentence. Perhaps you were looking for precede, presage, or produce?
  - peteforde 15y ago
    Thank you.

peteforde 15y ago

As an addendum, my investors and board appreciate this thinking. "I can do all of this myself" is a common ego trap that precedes cowboy mentality. Running a socket stack sounds like fun until something goes wrong at 3am.

daraosn 15y ago
This took 5 hours of coding and it's been running 2 months without problems, where is the complexity of it?? I agree your point when you talk about really complex stuff, but something that be done in that amount time doesn't worth to be outsourced in my opinion. Also it's good to have alternatives, that's how we make things better.
- catshirt 15y ago
  how many messages are you sending, to how many clients? likewise, how are you running a public node server for free? how many of these servers are you running? what if... etc, etc. not dismissing your library, but sounds like a case of "i don't know what i don't know". pusher exists as a service for a reason. there's a bit more to it than pushing json around.
- rlivsey 15y ago
  Pusher costs ~$49/month, my time is worth $1000/hour [1] It took me about 5 minutes to setup Pusher and for that I get private channels, presence, someone to handle the scaling etc... as djb_hackernews already mentioned. We outsource DNS, email, hosting infrastructure, anything I possibly can which isn't core to the product itself. The question shouldn't be why outsource this, the question is why would it be worth our time writing and supporting it ourselves when we can be working on other things? Maybe we'll insource this stuff when we're at a point where we hit the 'enterprise' plan on Pusher, when we have a few more developers and a dedicated sys-admin. I'll cross that bride then, in the meantime I'm happy to have a $49/m hit on my credit card and move onto the next thing! All that aside, it's great to have options so thanks for releasing this! [1] - http://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    Your time really isn't worth $1000/hour. If everyone starts pretending it is it'd be silly to write a single line of code yourself, why would you when you're worth $7-10,000 a day? I still do understand your point, but this is Hacker News after all, not Outsourcing News. This thread reads a little like a couple of suits just came in here to stomp on a hacker's opensource project. I mean replace the words 'subscribed socket connections' in peterforde's original comment with 'web server' and suddenly it looks odd to be paying $19 or $50 a month for something like this in this day and age. Where would we be if there were only IIS out there to use? Or no MySQL/Postgres? I've not used websockets in anger yet and I know it's still kinda ropey, but this is basic programming stuff, paying someone else for it is a bit, well, raise eyebrows time. SMTP is hard because of the configuration problems and dealing with a ton of arcane and opaque problems with major email providers. This is something that's actually fun to muck around with. In the end the solution of Pusher is only marginally less complicated than the original problem. At the moment maybe Pusher's a good solution for a fast moving business to a problem that's not well solved in the open source stack, but it's only a matter of time till there's the equivalent of apache or nginx. And this is perhaps the first step. So kudos to daraosn for putting it out there, also seems the perfect kind of problem to be using node.js for.
    - rlivsey 15y ago
      I was going to put a smiley after that first line as it was kind of tongue in cheek, but HN isn't the place for smilies! People pay Heroku/AWS each month, I don't see any difference with outsourcing this part too. That said, we use Linode boxes because I'm ok with configuring nginx etc... and I don't feel comfortable using IndexTank or MongoHQ etc... for outsourcing our search or database components, so I certainly sympathise with the unease at outsourcing key infrastructure which is easy to manage. Pusher is marginally more complicated, but means I can call the problem solved and move onto other things. I agree it's a very interesting and fun area so it's certainly something I want to play with more in the future, but there are also 100 other interesting things which I need to work on, so I'll tackle those first. Definite kudos to daraosn, just because I use Pusher because it solves my problem doesn't mean I don't think it's an awesome thing to work on as an open source project.
- taligent 15y ago
  It took me all of 5 minutes to integrate Pusher. And I need something that is going to last 2 years without problems. Sorry but non-differentiated functionality like sending emails, push, analytics etc is exactly the sort of thing to outsource.
psb217 15y ago
Precludes seems to be precisely opposite the intended meaning of your second sentence. Perhaps you were looking for precede, presage, or produce?
- peteforde 15y ago
  Thank you.