4 ms·

I feel this. I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, a

by beat 11y ago

I feel this. I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it. Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a general way, and I love that. It makes me feel like I'm doing something that actually matters. Right now, I'm back in the enterprise to make ends meet and building on the side, which sucks and drives me crazy - but at least I see the exit and can keep moving toward it. And I figure I can get five or ten years out of building a company before I'm done with that as well. Once you hit a certain age and a certain level of success, the things you realize you'll never do weigh on you more than the things you haven't done yet. And the things you do look more like impediments than accomplishments. That's when you need to change.

nextos 11y ago
Good luck. Tell us more about your startup someday.
- beat 11y ago
  I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha. The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database. But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point. Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing (an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from unimportant changes that happen daily. The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over, every damned day.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    As someone who has worked on larger enterprise stuff this would be incredibly (like a salary a year incredibly) useful tool. It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
    - beat 11y ago
      It's funny, the reactions I get. A lot of startup programmers who have never worked on large systems don't understand why it's so valuable. But those who have done big enterprise use phrases like "holy grail". But this is a HARD problem. Man, abstracting change in an actionable, readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues and other headaches.
      - noir_lord 11y ago
        I'll bet, it's a truly monumental task to take on (so kudos for giving it a try), stuff I work on these days doesn't need that level of monitoring (We have 4 servers and a bunch of desktops laptops, it's pretty much vanilla small business stuff) but I know a few people who would love that kind of stuff.
  - geggam 11y ago
    opsmatic.com ?
    - beat 11y ago
      A different focus, but same basic idea. ScriptRock, too. I met the founders of both of those companies at a conference last fall, and it was really interesting. The products diverge a lot, but we all see the same fundamental problem.
notacoward 11y ago
Well said. I've also reached the point where my job - or any job - feels more like it gets in the way than anything else. In some ways my current gig is a dream job. I get to work from home, part time, doing stuff that's in some ways the culmination of stuff I've been working toward for a long time. As the tech lead for the next major release, I get to explore the best that the project has to offer. Nonetheless, I can only work up a few rare moments of genuine excitement about the whole thing. Working on a large and old codebase, on an infrastructure that's in even worse shape, still subject to someone else's priorities and schedules, is still more draining than energizing. I look forward more and more to the day when I can toss it all and do my stuff my way on no particular schedule at all, without having to worry about whether it makes me any money. Soon.

by beat 11y ago

nextos 11y ago

Good luck. Tell us more about your startup someday.

beat 11y ago
I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha. The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database. But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point. Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing (an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from unimportant changes that happen daily. The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over, every damned day.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  As someone who has worked on larger enterprise stuff this would be incredibly (like a salary a year incredibly) useful tool. It would do in software what a really good reliability engineer with years of knowledge can do "Foo has broken" "Nah foo is fine, someone changed Bar again without reading the wiki" stuff.
  - beat 11y ago
    It's funny, the reactions I get. A lot of startup programmers who have never worked on large systems don't understand why it's so valuable. But those who have done big enterprise use phrases like "holy grail". But this is a HARD problem. Man, abstracting change in an actionable, readable, efficient way has been difficult. Not to mention the security issues and other headaches.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      I'll bet, it's a truly monumental task to take on (so kudos for giving it a try), stuff I work on these days doesn't need that level of monitoring (We have 4 servers and a bunch of desktops laptops, it's pretty much vanilla small business stuff) but I know a few people who would love that kind of stuff.
- geggam 11y ago
  opsmatic.com ?
  - beat 11y ago
    A different focus, but same basic idea. ScriptRock, too. I met the founders of both of those companies at a conference last fall, and it was really interesting. The products diverge a lot, but we all see the same fundamental problem.

notacoward 11y ago

Well said. I've also reached the point where my job - or any job - feels more like it gets in the way than anything else. In some ways my current gig is a dream job. I get to work from home, part time, doing stuff that's in some ways the culmination of stuff I've been working toward for a long time. As the tech lead for the next major release, I get to explore the best that the project has to offer. Nonetheless, I can only work up a few rare moments of genuine excitement about the whole thing. Working on a large and old codebase, on an infrastructure that's in even worse shape, still subject to someone else's priorities and schedules, is still more draining than energizing. I look forward more and more to the day when I can toss it all and do my stuff my way on no particular schedule at all, without having to worry about whether it makes me any money. Soon.