React is &quot;boring&quot; now, too. (And good for it.)

Was interesting to read all the sort of &quot;boring&quot; back end pieces, then see that he went with half-server and half-client rendered React for the front end.  Was expecting Angular or similar, given the pattern of the other picks.

great post, love the solo entrepreneur mindset

This was the most inspiring piece of text I&#x27;ve read for a long while. Such clarity of thinking and focus.

I use Lisntenotes API for my podcast app and Wenbin is an amazing dev to work with. Highly recommended.

This was really informative and delight to read. It&#x27;s great to see developers making a go at the bizdev side and actually being really successful at it. Light on the heavy technical, light on the buzzwords, just the right amount of information to say, &quot;here, if you even use half my stack you&#x27;re well on the way to a viable product.&quot;

TBH, this is more inspiring than I thought. I thought this would be some BS article about promoting your company but turns out, it was a fun and inspiring read.My dream is to find a good idea and work solo. It is a little harder as a mobile engineer but you&#x27;re right as you mention in the blog. There are technology nowadays that help me with backend&#x2F;dev tools.Cheers.

Why would that indicate he is making money?

I&#x27;m going to go out on a limb here and confidently say he&#x27;s doing fine. As he mentioned, he rented an expensive one person WeWork office in SF (when he doesn&#x27;t even have to).

I respectfully disagree. HN is very much about the -business- of tech. Telling us how you made your mousetrap is all well and good... Having us ask how many mice it has captured is absolutely relevant. Germane even.

Actually it&#x27;s not the missing info... because it&#x27;s none of your business. It&#x27;s a technical post about his solo founder and operator DevOps practice.

Cool! When you say &quot;making some money,&quot; is that over-and-above paying yourself a salary?

Glad to know it now can support you as a full-time job.Just curious, is your company still one-person?

What are the pros and cons of charging a fee to transcribe someone else&#x27;s audio content? Does ListenNotes need a lawyer to deal with contracts or problems related to original content creators?

When you started working on this full time was there enough profit to pay yourself anything? How did you come to make the decision to work full time on it?

I&#x27;m wenbin, the author of this blog post &amp; I built Listen Notes.
Thanks for bringing up this question :)Yes, Listen Notes is making some money - not a lot, but enough to cover all the cost and bring in a bit profit as of today.The basic idea is that Listen Notes should be free to 99% of users, while making some money from 1% of super users.We run ads (obviously) on the website and we provide API: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a> And I&#x27;ve been experimenting some paid features that are needed for PR&#x2F;marketing&#x2F;journalists to do their job, e.g., <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;datasets&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;datasets&#x2F;</a>And today is special, because on Sep 16, 2017 (Exactly 2 years ago today), I started to work on Listen Notes full-time!

He says that he uses Stripe to get money from his users, specifically noting the API as a source of income.Here is the pricing page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>

Same question I had. Startup = Money generator, so it&#x27;s important to ask.Looks like it&#x27;s an ad-driven revenue model, and it looks like it gets ~ 1m views&#x2F;month: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.similarweb.com&#x2F;website&#x2F;listennotes.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.similarweb.com&#x2F;website&#x2F;listennotes.com</a>Assuming $1 per 1,000 impressions, we get $1,000 &#x2F; month.That&#x27;s purely the website. I can&#x27;t speculate on the API side of his business though.

And does it make enough money to cover the time when it wasn&#x27;t making money? As in: was the time spent bootstrapping worthwhile? The concept of a one-person company is extremely appealing in its simplicity and apparent lack of risk; however, the devil is in the details.

key missing info though: does it make money?  I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.

Yeah, I worked in start ups and that&#x27;s where I got the fast pace and I think that allowed me to rise to high ranks very fast at bigger companies as I have a solid understanding of all the stack.In bigger companies traditionally they had a person &#x2F; department more specialized per part of the stack, I think is a lot about the &quot;devops&quot; culture.

And the thing is, generalists do better work. They do less work overall because there are fewer of them, but compare a typical enterprise 50 person team to the output of a team of 5 generalists, hands down the generalists will make a better product every time because there&#x27;s no buck passing or shoulder shrugging about problems.

You&#x27;re right. That&#x27;s been my experience, as well. But... the crème de la crème from FANG are different beasts altogether.I must also point out that what FANG employees do get in abundance is the ability to learn from highly scalable systems that others build, cutting edge tech others work on, experiment on company&#x27;s dime, pursue an eng&#x2F;mgmt tract more in line with their personal interests, and job stability.It also affords them an opportunity to be part of a team that one day builds a groundbreaking tech and pushes the envelope forward not just for the company but the entire industry.

Having been the CTO of a startup and then a SWE at a FAANG company for 8 years, I disagree.  Being at a startup does indeed require a broad technical skillset, but being effective inside a large company requires a lot of skills (both technical and not) that early startup employees may not have or need.  I&#x27;ve grown a lot from both environments.

It might take Alice 10 hours to do the sysadmin, 5 for the database, and 15 for the devops.
Bob however can do the devops in 2 hours, sysadmin in 3 hours and database in 4 hours.
Bob is of course more productive, but if you let Alice do all the DBA, then Bob will be even more productive, and the total output of your team will increase.

as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it&#x27;s amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position&#x2F;person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners.I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, understand caching, etc and setup an app... turns out, that is apparently not even remotely expected at most companies. I guess the bigger the company the more narrow the skillset required.

There are people who create consumer products, and there are people who create the products that power those products.  It&#x27;s no different to when id Software sold licences of their engines to other game developers.  Perhaps you can turn your infrastructure into a business of its own.

I finally created an account because your comment resonated with me. I have created 95% of my platform by myself which itself was the manifestation of several business ideas. I started out buying servers and starting a dedicated, then vps, then shared hosting farm that requires all of the frontends you mention. I took a different approach, I went all out open-source and spent time creating glue and flashy bootstrap frontends to orchestrate everything reliably.I currently run the remains of my companies as a lab that is spread out to a few datacenters and provides a UX where anyone can request a VM, launch a container, or drop a php&#x2F;java war&#x2F;RoR&#x2F;django&#x2F;etc onto a custom app server of varying security restrictions. You can request a service&#x2F;vm&#x2F;container by API, by chat, or any other host of events through my half-baked event controller and change mgmt database. In a lot of cases, changes are a two-way street. You can modify e.g. a bind zone file and that will reflect upwards in a CMDB or vice-versa and watch the zone file update automagically. The original idea was to allow mixing sysadmin strengths and still maintain a reliable complex system.So now I have a platform that spans multiple datacenters, uses infra as code as you would expect (supporting another cloud provider is simply adding glue to their apis), has loadbalancing and SSO, and it&#x27;s just literally sitting on the sidelines exhausting the remaining budget until I finally get tired and liquidate it all. The motivation of building a business on it is so tiny after years of failed attempts and seeing the shared cloud model completely destroy ROI on holding hardware. I can and have built e.g. fleet tracking services. I have gobs of storage, so I run an object store for giggles. But have no clue how to generate revenue from these ideas when the market is already saturated. My last ditch idea is to create a learning ground for the public. Training on how to build apps that scale, manage systems at scale, and give a real world environment to folks who may otherwise not work at an organization with more than 100 servers. shrug . until then I chop-chop away at my dayjob :)

That&#x27;s awesome and it is a tech stack that I try to mirror and am confident running myself as well!It&#x27;s incredible the amount of knowledge required for a single person tho when you think about it eh? It&#x27;s the full frontend (which I would have more trouble with) + databases + caches + search engine + metrics + deployment + source control + sysadmin all baked in a single person who is also trying to make it a business!Kudos for the effort and making it happen, one day I might be joining the same journey with the same stack! Just gotta figure out what actually motivates me to build a business on top of =)

My thought exactly. I was expecting good ol&#x27;LAMP or something along these lines. I think here &quot;boring&quot; means &quot;has been released for more than a couple of years&quot;.

Whoa -- is that a boring stack nowadays? There are many great cutting edge tools in use. Humble fella.

Everyone should write something like this.

This is exactly the stakc I worked with when contracting for another startup&#x2F;company. The degree of similarity is disturbing.It mostly worked really well though, kudos to whoever figured it out. And you could mock a dev setup right in PyCharm.

Try deploying a simple server (eg a dog API) on Heroku. Then back it with a database. Then add a web or mobile app. Then do it on AWS.

Thank you for the Flask tutorial. I tried getting into it but was having some trouble; the tutorial looks great!

Flask is easy, but it&#x27;s actually better suited to seasoned programmers. Django&#x27;s hand holding actually makes it a better framework for beginners.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;14-pirates-use-flask-the-navy-uses-django" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;14-pirates-use-flask-the-navy-uses...</a>

From a mid-level dev, you’ll learn and I doubt you’ll need to know everything in this article and understand it for your first job.Do you understand what the web, api, and DB servers are doing?If your interested in Python and want to start small I can recommend Flask. Flask is smaller and could be more user friendly than Django.Here’s a great tutorial. You’ll build a blog with Bootstrap, Python, Flask and SQLAlchemy.[1][1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTs4UjLw5MM6OjgkjFeUxCYH" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;playlist?list=PL-osiE80TeTs4UjLw5MM6...</a>

Exactly what I&#x27;d like to tell younger devs and students. You build smaller projects on the side for a bit to familiarize yourself with things until you&#x27;re ready to start something or something comes along by way of the side projects!

Thanks for the info. It&#x27;s an interesting set of tools today, but it&#x27;s helpful to hear that it has evolved to that point in terms of automation and infrastructure.The first version of a web service can be as simple as flask app which you run in a screen session somewhere. Better to start somewhere than get overwhelmed and never do the thing at all.

I appreciate the response!! 
It is wonderful to hear about the evolution of your process, thank you :)

Hello poidos,(I&#x27;m the author of this blog post)I couldn&#x27;t do all these things when I was in school :) I worked in companies for a few years and learned some engineering practices. Then I had basic skills to prototype my own side projects. Then after working on many silly side projects, I started Listen Notes.And initially, Listen Notes was running on 3 tiny DigitalOcean servers ($5&#x2F;month each?). I logged in each server to git pull to &quot;deploy to production&quot;. Then I added things little by little, day by day. It&#x27;s a process. The key is to get started. People say that showing up is 80% (or whatever percentage) of success. I think this is very true. Just get started and you&#x27;ll figure out things along the way.

As a senior dev: it will take years of experience and constant learning to get to this point, but it is attainable. You don&#x27;t have to be a master of each part of the stack and each tech within it - you just need to be able to do enough, and solve the problems you face. You can build a professional SaaS product with a simpler stack as well.You take a project like this one step at a time. Some bits of it are relatively easy - setting up a few postgres servers doesn&#x27;t take much knowledge. ElasticSearch is a little more obscure, but for the most part, things like this are running a few commands, and setting up a few config files with the help of docs and google. Same for Redis, nginx... etc. Which isn&#x27;t to diminish devops - you can dive deep into each of these configurations and develop pretty complex setups, but by the time you actually need to you hope to be making enough money to pay someone else to do it.You won&#x27;t get everything perfect all the time. You&#x27;ll have to revisit parts of the stack and tweak them. But you can take it a day at a time and do what you need to do.

As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don&#x27;t think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.

Fantastic work!! So much knowledge and thanks for sharing with us!

Very cool, I&#x27;m impressed.  This guy knows how to do all the stuff I don&#x27;t know how to do and it actually works well.

Some examples that I used help from contractors:1. Built some reusable ReactJs components.
2. Design &#x2F; illustrations
3. Proofread website copy &#x2F; blog posts
4. Built experimental app like this one <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;just-listen-simple-podcast-app&#x2F;id1444970658?ls=1&amp;mt=8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itunes.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;just-listen-simple-podcast-a...</a>(probably there were other random things... I got to look at the billing history on my upwork :)

Wenbin, amazing article.One question: what all do you use contractors for? How has your experience been in managing them?Thanks

Yep, learning how to run your own business is the only way to convert 10x development aptitude to a 5-10x pay increase. Otherwise you get 1x pay, 10x the expectations, upset colleagues that feel inferior in comparison, and very little promotion chance because the company needs you right where you are.

running many different systems is not development

This is where I&#x27;d put a 10x developer :) Complete competency across the whole stack with a solid understanding of a profitable operation.

They also solve some other problems:- different SLA and scaling requirements per component&#x2F;endpoint- different security domains per component&#x2F;endpoint- different rollout strategies&#x2F;policies per component&#x2F;endpoint (no need to restart your long-lived client TCP sessions in parallel to rolling out a business logic fix)- ...I&#x27;ve been happily developing and deploying microservices for small customers, in teams of 1 to 10 people. But I also don&#x27;t work with customers who just need simple CRUD apps.

Who says only multiple teams need microservices, and who put them in charge of what people find helpful?If the &#x27;app&#x27; has enough different &#x27;bits&#x27; I&#x27;d favour a SOA no matter the team size.Somebody now wants to say that isolation doesn&#x27;t necessitate distinct services; they&#x27;re probably right, but the alternative is great discipline - why not make it easy?It&#x27;s a form of defensive programming isn&#x27;t it? - if widget factory shouldn&#x27;t be using a function from auth helpers, make it impossible!

It&#x27;s funny because microservices are explicitly targeted at solving problems for development with many teams, and lots of single team companies cargo cult them. Did they miss the first paragraph when they were reading up on what microservices are?

Picking your stack&#x2F;architecture based on team size is something most engineers miss.Microservices, great for companies with many teams. Not so much when it&#x27;s three people scrambling to create something meaningful. Monolith all the way.

Great writeup of the stack and process.To all the people thinking “I couldn’t possibly do this myself” just look at the mention of UpWork towards the bottom. Looks like the author has brought in contractor help at some point.

I think, and I&#x27;m replying to both above comments, that there&#x27;s a non-trivial cost reduction + DevOps reduction potential here.Of course, the overarching rule is always &quot;if it works, don&#x27;t touch it&quot;.

Yes, and no. If you already have a lot of experience building apps that run on servers, there&#x27;s a learning curve to switching to serverless. Is it huge? Not really. But there are certainly pitfalls and best practices to learn about. The costs can be harder to predict, especially when starting out. And the tooling is different (and much less mature). So now you have a bunch of stuff to learn about or consider, or you can just go do the same thing you already know how to do with minimal friction. It&#x27;s possible that the cost savings of not overprovisioning servers is worth it, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s that straightforward of an answer, and if your server costs aren&#x27;t massive, you might be better of spending your time building a great product than learning a new way to build.

Not to mention that he might not stick with AWS if he runs the numbers- he might hop ship to a different cloud provider if he gets a better deal. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s appropriate for such a fledgling enterprise to lock in to AWS-isms so they can keep the change provider cost as low as possible.Also, people seem to be dismissing the value of a rock-solid local end-to-end dev stack which with the latest iteration of technology I feel has become very complicated and expensive. The OP can run the same Ansible for his dev stack as well as his prod and his dev stack doesn&#x27;t turn into an AWS bill. Most of the AWS managed tech &amp; services is only reliably testable on AWS at a functional&#x2F;integration level, which is a cost that a company this small shouldn&#x27;t have to absorb.

Depends on what you&#x27;re familiar with. If he already knows Ansible inside and out, why risk getting stuck with some undebuggable AWS failures?As a solo entrepreneur I can say time risk is a crucial thing to be mindful of. I&#x27;ll take 10h +&#x2F;-1h vs 5h +&#x2F;- 15h any day.

Someone who has been doing this for years before serverless existed can set up and manage this infrastructure trivially, using almost no time compared to developing the application and the business. It also provides you with security: you know the pitfalls and the problems with hosting these, serverless is another new technology which can go wrong.

&gt; As team of one, you have to be very judicious with your time. You often have to have a philosophy of &quot;if it ain&#x27;t broke, don&#x27;t fix it&quot;. Yeah they could burn a week or two switching over to lambda and whatnot but is it going to have a higher ROI than all the other things they could be working on?Timeframe has to be considered. If it only takes a week, I&#x27;d strongly suggest biting the bullet. A week&#x27;s budget can be quickly spent troubleshooting issues, scaling servers up and down, installing software updates, hardening systems and whatnot.It will most likely be much cheaper to run too. Which, in a single-man operation, may be worthwhile.

As team of one, you have to be very judicious with your time. You often have to have a philosophy of &quot;if it ain&#x27;t broke, don&#x27;t fix it&quot;. Yeah they could burn a week or two switching over to lambda and whatnot but is it going to have a higher ROI than all the other things they could be working on?As me how I know. When I was a solo dev doing my own thing, I&#x27;d spend way too much time working on things that really wouldn&#x27;t affect the business but were &quot;good engineering things&quot; to do. If I spent more time working on things that would grow the business instead of wasting weeks writing fancy deployment scripts, maybe I&#x27;d still be doing my own thing now!

&gt; Building an api with api-gateway + lambda (...) is guaranteed to be more cost-effective for unpredicted load.Depends on the use case. I run a cron monitoring service on a similar nginx&#x2F;uwsgi&#x2F;django&#x2F;postgres stack [1]. My service needs to handle lots of really small and simple HTTP requests, and almost every request needs to do a (small and quick) database write. I did napkin math – at the current usage levels, Lambda per-request fees alone would use up significant chunk of my current hosting budget.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.healthchecks.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;a-look-at-healthchecks-io-hosting-setup-summer-2019&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.healthchecks.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;08&#x2F;a-look-at-healthchecks-...</a>

I used a bit of serverless Javascript (Firebase functions) in a previous startup, and it actually worked really nicely for small self-contained tasks - saving files to S3, triggering customer emails, triggering notifications or webhooks in other services (and ofc in Firebase, actually doing things with the database, but it&#x27;s not a fit for everything).

Just wanted to add another reason not to use serverless, or at least AWS. For small projects I would rather experience downtime than big invoice. I had a project running on AWS, but it turns out you can&#x27;t limit the budget, the best you can do is make alerts when costs exceed some limits. I have now moved the project to old-skool server and sleep much better since.

&gt; We need to track the API usageThank you for this excellent write-up. Monetizing APIs is always a great topic; did you consider or will you consider using a 3rd party API management service such as RapidAPI or Apigee to keep track and charge for API usage?

Good point! For people who have tons of experience with serverless, serverless is probably a better choice than running servers for some use cases.As a small business owner, there are two types of cost that I need to consider:Time: the time I use to do A is the time I can&#x27;t use to do B. Unfortunately I haven&#x27;t used serverless so far in my professional career -- in this sense, I&#x27;m not full-stack enough :) It takes time for me to learn it, understand it, operate it, and experience various outage scenarios to gain the true learnings. It&#x27;s more costly for me (probably not for others) to use serverless than the things that I already understand. I&#x27;d rather spend more time on other non-engineering things nowadays -- believe it or not, I spend 1&#x2F;3 of my working hours replying emails :)Money: the money I spend on A is the money I can&#x27;t spend on B. I decided not to use api-gateway + lambda &amp; hosted db servers, primarily because of $$$. I actually did the pricing calculation a few times last year. In addition, api-gateway + lambda also require some time for me to learn, which I should use to talk to users, marketing, building new product feature, thinking (yep, thinking also uses some time budget :)...

One hopes that GraphQL abstractions will enable the decoupling. So if you opt for a database that offers GraphQL natively, it might address the issue. You do have to learn the GraphQL ecosystem (new tools&#x2F;language etc.)

Completely agree. Cloud functions are in many cases a better option than maintaining a server, specially for those background tasks that fire occasionally.The only issue I&#x27;ve found about using serverless is the database. In most cases (Firebase, Fauna, Cosmos, DynamoDB) you have to couple your stack to the DBaaS provider which is not a great idea. AWS recently announced Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless but while it allows you to use regular Postgres tools&#x2F;queries you are again tied to AWS.

The lb, 2 web and 3 api frontends?You&#x27;d also see that 7 of his 8 worker boxes are almost at 100%.

You can go copy&#x2F;paste something like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;circleci.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;deploying-a-serverless-application&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;circleci.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;deploying-a-serverless-application...</a> and get easy lambda deployments in about 10 minutes.

&gt; lambda is less work than running django in uwsgi behind self-managed nginxIf you discount building an AWS-specific deployment process that includes &quot;pip install&quot; from an AWS linux machine image, zipping the project, and putting it in S3.

If serverless were easier, more people would be using it. But it&#x27;s not simple or straightforward. You have to learn new systems and conventions, it has a bunch of weird considerations depending on the use case, and most people just use it when they don&#x27;t want to figure out what instance to run some periodic, one-off job on.It&#x27;s a niche, just like all solutions that aren&#x27;t a single Unix process on a single Unix box. Even CGI scripts are a niche. You pick the niche that you know.

I agree, the key here is that it&#x27;s best to ship with what you know, rather than what is simplest on paper.

I&#x27;ve yet to find someone explain a serverless API based setup that isn&#x27;t more complicated than good old fashioned LAMP or equivalent. Serverless seems to always come out more expensive as well.

I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option.I was all gung-ho about serverless for a while. I wanted to release a demo for my product and thought I&#x27;d cut through all the hassles of managing my own server.I found it bewildering. It was a whole new skillset with new benefits, but also new considerations and headaches. When push came to shove and the clock to release my demo started ticking down, I just went back to a linux server.I use the same linux distro at home and on the server, and there are about 3 technologies I need installed. On retrospect I think I made the right decision, but happy to have my mind changed.

I take (very minor) issue with your first line and the point &quot;well written&quot; (I do agree with well presented).Since the author is reading&#x2F;commenting here, and there was a large amount of space in the original article outlining tools&#x2F;services he uses, can I humbly suggest they use a tool like &quot;Grammarly&quot; or similar to help with the word-choice(s)?Some distracting use of plurals for terms - e.g. &quot;traffics&quot;, &quot;stuffs&quot;, etc - may have been avoided and other spelling and grammar aspects could have helped make this easier to read. That all being said - the &#x27;essence&#x27; of the article is to be commended.

I don&#x27;t know if overprovisioning servers to counter traffic spikes is over engineering, the mental model is pretty simple. May not be as cost effective or infinitely scalable, but it&#x27;s simpler to wrap your head around.

I think the far better consideration is picking the tech stack that requires learning the least amount of new skills.

First, that&#x27;s a great stack and very well written&#x2F;presented.One comment - he dismisses serverless as being overengineering. I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option.One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is less work than running django in uwsgi behind self-managed nginx, and is guaranteed to be more cost-effective for unpredicted load.Same logic applies to the db servers - why not hosted?And last - the inf is a good reminder that prefixing your api routes with &#x2F;v1, &#x2F;v2 is always a good habit.

wenbin, do you find it meaningfully superior to get Slack notifications vs. just an email?Also curious if you have a monitoring&#x2F;recovery strategy for when you go camping or on honeymoon and need to be offline.

This is completely off-topic, but thank you for running geocode.xyz! I&#x27;m a very satisfied user :)

No. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stats.uptimerobot.com&#x2F;00vDQc3O7" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stats.uptimerobot.com&#x2F;00vDQc3O7</a>

I&#x27;m a one-person company too ( geocode.xyz ). My tech stack is even more boring than that. (Nginx, MariaDB, Perl on AWS Ec2 Linux instances. I don&#x27;t have an office either.

The glaring issue would be permissions ie who can see what. Pull requests could get muddied up but that probably wouldn&#x27;t be too much of a problem to overcome. Some foundational git protocols would have to be adjusted, like .gitignore.I think it&#x27;s a great way for start up to manage the business but as more people get hired the organizational complexity might be too much to bear.

This interests me. Can you elaborate on what downsides you see? Even in a small team we&#x27;re often working within the same repo at the same time without any issues.

&gt; It would be cool if there was a simplified way to have an entire business operate under source control.A lot of projects can and do apply CI tooling to achieve this. Every commit to a branch triggers a set of declarative deployment pipelines, simple. IIRC buzzword is &quot;GitOps&quot; if you want to find out more.

I really like the idea of monolithic repos but can see some downsides when there is more than one person working on a project. It would be cool if there was a simplified way to have an entire business operate under source control.

How do you get all the podcasts audio and data?

CGI is just running a program in response to a request. Things about the request are put into environment variables and POST&#x2F;PUT bodies are on stdin. Your program writes HTTP headers, two newlines, and the response body.You don&#x27;t need libraries. If you have reasonably low traffic CGI can get you really far.

CGI is still in the stdlib, and AFAIK there&#x27;s no plan to deprecate it. You might be thinking of a few other methods like URI.escape that have been marked obsolete in favor of CGI equivalents.

&gt; some Ruby CGI scriptsDidn&#x27;t ruby remove its CGI libraries from their standard library somewhat recently. I believe there were mostly helper libs, but I am curious how that works.

Thank you! You are always welcome to open an issue if you want a second opinion.

Hey I thought I recognized that domain, yay sidekiq! Keep up the good work. By the way we&#x27;re seeing issues with contrast security gem and sidekiq, but we&#x27;re pushing on contrast not you.

Mike! Big fan of yours!For the very few people who don&#x27;t know mike or sidekiq, read this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;how-charging-money-for-pro-features-allowed-me-quit-my-job-6e71309457" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;interview&#x2F;how-charging-money-fo...</a>

sidekiq! Interesting wenbin also wrote a task queue system... must be something about that type of engineer that leads to this pragmatic tech strategy.

That should have been the real &quot;boring&quot; stack we&#x27;re talking about here instead of the 20+ technologies mentioned in the OP.

I love these stories. I&#x27;m a one-person company too: contribsys.com.My production server stack is Apache + some Ruby CGI scripts, to serve static files and handle billing webhooks. I spend less than an hour per week on devops maintenance.KISS is the #1 principle when scaling a solo operation.

Technically, you don&#x27;t know that since we don&#x27;t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is. Satoshi Nakamoto could really be 10 people and you nor I, would not know.

Satoshi Nakamoto was one person behind Bitcoin, similarly.

VMRacks (now hipaavault.com). I&#x27;m not affiliated, just a completely satisfied customer. As to setting up the business, I would also recommend a HIPAA auditing&#x2F;hand-holding company. I use Compliancy Group (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;compliancy-group.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;compliancy-group.com</a>).

Do you mind sharing what the managed HIPPA setup is? What vendor do you go with for that?I&#x27;ve always wondered about how easy it would be to setup a SAAS that adheres to HIPPA.

I found the list under miscellaneous to be similarly mind-boggling. There are approximately 56 moving pieces to this &quot;boring&quot; one-person setup.All the things they mentioned:Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch cluster, Redis, RabbitMQ, Django &#x2F; Python3, uWSGI, Nginx, Celery, Celery Beat, Supervisord, React + Redux + Webpack + ES, Amazon S3, Cloudfront, react media player, Ansible, Datadog, PagerDuty, Rollbar, Slack, PyCharm, MacBook Pro, Vagrant + VirtualBox, GitHubWeWork, iTerm2, tmux, Notion, G Suite, MailChimp, Amazon SES, Gusto, Upwork, Google Ads Manager, Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Cloudflare, Zapier, Trello, Medium, GoDaddy, Namecheap, Stripe, Google text-to-speech API, Stripe Atlas, Clerky, Quickbooks, 1password, Brex, Bonvoy Amex card, Capital One Spark

similarly , making half that and using dedicated servers. When you re a solo dev you dont really have time to risk learning unproven tech or tech that doesnt scale. And as a dev i like writing code that does new and interesting things, not learning tools and other people&#x27;s APIs. The amount of services this guy has to manage is mind-boggling, and unfortunately i m simple and stupid. I guess i m a hermit dev but thankfully i ll never need to work for others again.

This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benefit from me fixing problems and adding features. Kudos to what works for you....super great... And, for me at least...it is even more &quot;boring&quot; and awesome.

Likely the web app uses the API to get its data, it hints at it when he says he uses the same APIs the customers do from his frontend.

Only question I can think of that I didn’t see an answer for is: is he running one postgres db, which is shared between the web and api services? Multiple services with only one db gets hairy fast with questions like: who owns the migrations? does the migration owning service have to restart the other service so the other service gets the new db column&#x2F;table? etcUnless the web also uses the API service to get its data. Really great article

Sure - telling me whether you have an api.&lt;domain&gt;.com doesn&#x27;t matter. Anyone can scan and find that. But, if I know your database names (from a screenshot) and your hosting provider, I know that once I&#x27;m past a bastion host, or on your VPN connection - I don&#x27;t have to wait to sniff or hope you connect to datasources. I now have an informed opinion on where to go.

I&#x27;ve often worried about that; in fact its really kept me from blogging about our infrastructure at all. Am I too paranoid? I&#x27;ve often thought if I were to do so that I&#x27;d set up a honeypot; but who has the time for such games?!

That&#x27;s right, any pentester worth anything will know the stack used in a few seconds by looking at cookies or even sometimes just by the login page&#x27;s url. For ex: different frameworks have different session and csrftoken naming, Rails and Django have recognizable url conventions, and there&#x27;s always default error pages that usually give away the framework used.Sharing is caring, be secure not paranoid :)

Pretty sure a blackhat with nmap and a few hours would be a lot more effective than trying to glean something from this blogpost.

As a software SaaS CISO, who also pentests and determines partner risk - I take the approach of not sharing such in depth details. Articles like this are fantastic fingerprinting recon for those that look to compromise sites.

Out of curiosity and please forgive me as I&#x27;m leaning ESL, but shouldn&#x27;t it be either&quot;Instant access to x podcasts&quot;or&quot;Instantly access x podcasts&quot;?

&quot;Instantly access 771,769 podcasts&quot; -&gt; access as a verb, not a typo&quot;Instant access to 771,769 podcasts&quot; -&gt; access as a noun, not a typo&quot;Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts&quot; -&gt; access as a confusion, definitely a typo

That&#x27;s not a typo. They are two different sentences with slightly different meaning.Access as a noun or access as a verb.

Also on that page...&quot;No need credit card&quot; should read &quot;No credit card needed&quot;

Just because I saw you (wenbin) in this thread I thought I&#x27;d be helpful:On <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.listennotes.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>There&#x27;s a typo: &quot;Instantly access to 771,769 podcasts&quot;Instantly -&gt; InstantReally enjoyed the post, thanks for sharing.

Thats a ton of servers!What is your monthly AWS spend?

This is just a big ad for his website with no in-depth knowledge or insights provided. Literally just a list of tech someone uses and 4 or 5 links to his website. Is this what HN has become? I remember the content upvoted on this site being much better a couple years ago.

This dude is my hero. Keeping it simple and functional.

You could use Airpods + Siri + Notes.app for that.

This looks like a great service; I just signed up for it and created my own listen later playlist. I spend 6-8h a week on my mountain bike and I use most of that time to listen to podcasts. The challenge with how I do it (using just an Apple Watch) is curating my feed. This is an excellent tool and a far better UI for curating a feed.I also like the different and varied sources of income that you have, from the transcription service to ads to your API. Seems like you&#x27;ve built a great platform that you can use to experiment with different revenue models.One additional question - your product is called Listen NOTES. Are you planning on adding note taking functionality to it at some point? One thing that I&#x27;ve always wanted to do was to jot down some set of notes to myself (typically during one of my bike rides). I always imagined that being some kind of voice activated thing, but I&#x27;d like that note sync&#x27;d to the spot within the podcast that I was listening to (and perhaps transcribed as well). Any thoughts about building something like this?Thanks again for building this service!

yes, i&#x27;m very interested in how they did health insurance

It&#x27;s pretty straight forward to get a quote, is it not?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;individual-family.kaiserpermanente.org&#x2F;healthinsurance&#x2F;get_a_quote" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;individual-family.kaiserpermanente.org&#x2F;healthinsuran...</a>

Could you perhaps write articles on these? I&#x27;d be super interested as someone looking  to know more about starting a solo company.

Sure. It&#x27;s around $700&#x2F;month for me + my wife.I wish I could&#x27;ve known more practical info about starting a company before I quit my day job, e.g., how much for insurance, what company credit card to use, how to pay tax, where to find lawyers... Online articles &#x2F; advices are mostly focused on big picture or very abstract concepts or fortune cookie type words :(

&gt; Kaiser Permanente for health insurance.Super important part. Any details about how much it costs for single person company? :-)

Lots of stuff can stick a web form in front of Elastic&#x2F;Postgres or similar. Certainly nothing wrong with that.Also doesn&#x27;t mean that something quite so simple will work in every case. Not everyone is wasting their employer&#x27;s money to build their resume.

Great article. Are you using DataDog Synthetics for the DataDog response time graph?

Paul Jarvis, author of &quot;Company of One&quot; has a private academy&#x2F;community group.[1] I&#x27;m not a member, but plan to consider it after I finish the book.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ofone.co&#x2F;learn&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ofone.co&#x2F;learn&#x2F;</a>

are there any groups out there for the small technology business owner?  i&#x27;m extremely hesitant of asking about this because it&#x27;s a fine line between brainstorming technology problems with like-minds and getting owners who want you to problem-solve for them.

What can help with this is to start building little systems and solve these problems in general.Dedicate a given day of the month or week for all your meetings so scheduling is simpler.Chase invoices on the same date every month, chase all invoices that are overdue by some threshold you have set. Just follow the rule, and chase using a template. Perhaps even code the first few chases into an automated system.Try to avoid customized proposals, use templates for many things. I agree this one is hard.Managing employees, you have to consider each employee is a force multiplier. The idea here is to invest a day to get a week or similar.Overall, you need to just invest a limited time into each decision. After that time, go with what feels best even if it isn&#x27;t perfect and move on. I find the same thing hard myself.

Yes, the worst thing is the huge amount of decision making even over very minor details that has to be done all the time. Coding and maintaining the servers isn&#x27;t even that difficult. It&#x27;s all the little stuff like scheduling with clients&#x2F;vendors suppliers, wondering when is a good time to chase that invoice, which words to change in your proposal for this client, and so all. If you have employees, how to manage them, how to review their work, how to mentor them. It really is death by a thousand paper cuts.

Agreed. Part of a two person team, but the other is mainly on the business development front and I&#x27;m the main designer&#x2F;coder.It&#x27;s so hard sometimes. No one to really bounce ideas off of, every little thing you have to do yourself. Staying inspired to work is sometimes difficult, because you are literally doing everything yourself it just gets so overwhelming.

I know a few people who have entrepreneur Marco Polo support groups- asynchronous but still seeing actual faces and human expressions.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.bootstrapped.fm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuss.bootstrapped.fm</a>

There’s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;barnacl.es&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;barnacl.es&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;</a>

Years ago Joel Spolsky on his site &quot;Joel on Software&quot; had a &quot;Business of Software&quot; forum where a lot of very small ISVs hung out and discussed items of mutual interest.  Anyone know where those kinds of folks hang out now to discuss things?

Hey, thanks for building LN. I was actually admiring the site design just yesterday while I scrolled through some episodes. &quot;Dang, I hope I can build something like this one day.&quot;You managed to pull me away from my previous preference, player.fm. Good job!

Was it hard to come up with the idea and believe in it enough to pursuit it to where you are today? I think self doubt must be a challenge, especially when you are alone and still far from a proven concept and nothing so show to customers. Was this idea the only one you evaluated before you chose it or did you also have other ideas, of which this one you liked best?

Why did you choose to have ec2s with postgres rather than using RDS? I&#x27;ve found it saves me a ton of time dealing with upgrades worrying about backups etc to have RDS handle it.

Interesting to hear that your WeWork building isn&#x27;t an especially social space. I know you talk about why you picked a dedicated office in a coworking space over coffee shops etc., but why did you pick WeWork in particular?

Hey wenbin (and any others pursuing indie-hacking), I run a virtual meetup about once a month you might find fulfilling for meeting like minded people.We just made a Twitter recently, but it has all the links: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ih_worldwide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;ih_worldwide</a>

At the 4 year in make building a professional services firm in Shanghai, old school work, but looking constantly for online B2C and B2B opportunities, I love IH for the community aspect.  Although I find one has to be careful with balancing the amount of work allocated to seeing what others are doing and the hard but inevitably more important grinding out of one&#x27;s own business aspirations.  Great conversation!

(author of this blog post here)The hardest part of building this business is to keep motivated for a relatively long period of time. I&#x27;m still early in this startup journey. This is only the 2nd year of me working full-time on Listen Notes.I think it would be helpful to surround yourself with like-minded people (online or offline) -- we are social animals. Indie Hackers is pretty good: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com&#x2F;</a>I live in San Francisco and I used to work for companies, so at least I can often hang out with some friends&#x2F;former coworkers who are doing startups or working in tiny startups.In my coworker space, people from different companies rarely talk to each other...

You have described exactly the kind if work&#x2F;life balance i desire! I do enjoy a lot working alone since i&#x27;ve got family with little children too. I won&#x27;t add any value with my comment, i just wanted to thank you since it feels just a little bit easier to know somebody else is having what i want: one day i may have it too.

You&#x27;re living my dream. I&#x27;ve been working on a side project all year but struggle to find the energy and build momentum while working a full time job.Did you quit work to start this, or did you manage to work around your day job?

For how long? I kind of was at your place (no kids, just my girlfriend) for a few years and then I needed a change

What product&#x2F;service does your company sell if you don&#x27;t mind me asking?

What is your current company about? How are you able to restrict your working hours?

I&#x27;m not criticizing your preferences at all, but I think it&#x27;s really strange for you to describe them as loneliness. I would say you work alone, but you&#x27;re not lonely, because you have a bunch of other social connections in your life that for some people are replaced by coworkers. If anything, your comment reflects a kind of strange default on HN where work consumes so much of your life that coworkers are your &quot;friends&quot; and working alone is the same as being lonely.

How do you make money?  I didn&#x27;t think farming spiders would pay that well, unless they&#x27;re really rare spiders.

Super broad question here but how do you guys do it? I mean, how do you go from knowing how to build a basic webpage to knowing that you need e.g. Elasticsearch for search queries. It seems like there is so much specialized tech to learn but no obvious learning progression path.

This feels like bragging but I also run a one man company and the loneliness is what I enjoy most. Granted, I only work from 08:45 to 14:30 and some hours in the evening, because I bring my kids to school and I pick them up in the afternoon, but the hours when I’m alone, I am 100% productive. When the kids are at home I mostly do some kind of manual labor to get some sort of exercise. Right now I’m building a shed. Last year I built my home office&#x2F;guest house.To make up for the missing social interaction I play football with friends, do some consultancy jobs on the side and I help where I can with my son’s football club.This really is my dream job and I enjoy it thoroughly. I have no problems staying motivated and every day I have loads of inspiration.The moment I lose motivation will be a sign for me to sell everything and start something new. I ran an online marketing company before this and that was really exhausting for an introvert like me. Selling that company was the best decision I ever made, apart from marrying my wife.

I&#x27;m kind of experencing this right now, a remote worker whose working on a thing solo. Feel like I need to dip back into a team for a while

Some people enjoy being alone, others don&#x27;t. You don&#x27;t know in which group you are until you experience it. 
Unlike you, I wasn&#x27;t running my own business, I was just working remotely for a company where the HQ was on a +12h timezone. I felt the exact same way, even if I was working from a coworking space.

I have found that running a twitter account is helping for this. I have &lt;20 people following and their encouragement that my stuff is not total rubbish really helps.

The lonely aspect is incredibly difficult, especially if you&#x27;re an extroverted person that draws their energy from collaborating with others. I also find the lack of accountability to others as hard. I know there are services that cater to this type of founder&#x2F;freelancer.

Dude, I would love more insights on this.  I have trouble finding assistants for the most rudimentary stuff and am constantly looking for IT solutions.  Please, please, please.  Maybe an HN post?

This type of life sounds like only a few steps away from a Black Mirror episode

My company&#x27;s Slack is just me and ~12 Slack bots all doing various things (reporting subscription changes, feedback, bug reports, error alerting, CI status, etc). It&#x27;s amazing to look at and functions immaculately, but occasionally does have the grim reminder of just how alone it is being on your own.Especially when you think &quot;this all works great, but would still work equally great with another human or two here.&quot;

I used to do this with a friend, for me thinking about his problems was refreshing. We worked in different domains, so it felt like a challenge not work related.

The part that I find the loneliest is making all the core technical and business decisions by myself. I really miss being able to bounce ideas of a partner.Sure, you can do it with friends etc. But at some point you just become menace asking them to think about your stuff so much.

you don&#x27;t have to do it that way. i run a company, and i don&#x27;t get my family to help me. as long as i earn enough money to cover the family expenses, i don&#x27;t need to work crazy hours.
i get to take time off whenever i want, or whenever the family needs it, and not when my boss allows it.

&quot;I ran a small company&quot;, what happened? Why did you stop or did it get stopped? What was the reason?One man show &#x2F; sole proprietorship is great, but its bad for family life. It&#x27;s 24x7. Atleast thats how I saw my dad, dining room was the company meeting room and we all are unpaid company &quot;helps&quot;,assisting our Dad support the family. This is the main thing that holds me back from being an entrepreneur (sole proprietorship 2.0).

it depends on the co-working space. at a wework place i found everyone stuck in their little offices, and hardly any opportunity for interaction.at another space i find people are more social. they organize events, coding workshops, even cooking classes, occasionally they cook meals. there is a fully stocked kitchen that everyone can use whenever they like. just pay for materials used. people often go out for meals together. etc...when you are working, people will leave you alone, but if you know who else is there and what they do, you can talk to them and help each other. it helps that many are freelancers and not secretive startups hustling for investment money.

Mind expanding on the coworking bit? I always think about hitting up a coworking just to have some human contact when I&#x27;m working on a project.  I&#x27;ve yet to actually do it however.

artists and farmers have lived like that for centuries. i dont think it s so uncommon that we have to start warning people about it

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn&#x27;t really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you might want to pursue.

There&#x27;s also 1 person who is the whole company, a single point of failure comes with the territory.

I am all for simplicity, but if that results in a service outage whenever you deploy new code, apply a security patch or reboot your VM, you need to rethink the architecture.

The author can just run an Ansible job and recreate it instantly. It&#x27;s a stateless ec2 node. If they wanted to be super duper fancy they could make an autoscaling group to destroy and recreate it if it went down. No need for a replica. This probably isn&#x27;t a lose-100K$-every-5-minutes-of-downtime business.

Are there no load balancer replicas? It looks like a single point of failure for the entire service (and it runs Redis and RabbitMQ - yikes).

I&#x27;m guessing the $4&#x2F;hr price estimation is based on an average of the prices ListenNotes actually charges to transcribe a podcast, as shown on ListenNotes.com for various individual episodes.

The post mentions using Google speech-to-text for transcription which seems to be even cheaper?I&#x27;m not sure where you got the $4&#x2F;hr price, but indeed kudos to OP for building a business around reselling cloud services for profit.

I&#x27;m impressed with the profit margins. It looks like one of the main sources of revenue is transcription. From what I can tell the price seems to be about $4&#x2F;hr.OP said they are AWS. If they&#x27;re using Amazon Transcribe, the cost for that is $1.44&#x2F;hr.A 150%+ profit margin is awesome! Well for that one piece of the service. Obviously at least some of the cost of the website and database, etc must be included, but still. Pretty amazing.

This is one of the most important post i’ve seen on HN so far.it teaches you that you don’t need all the fancy stuffs, but you may need some of them. That you don’t have to shoot for the unicorn project, that you don’t have to build an A+ people team, etc.It’s intelligent and gives all the interesting details to not give any kind of false impression.

I listened to an interview with DHH the other day and he was calling out that one of the advantages of frameworks over libraries is that everything comes wired up ready for production instead of you spending all your time writing glue code and arguing about conventions.I&#x27;m still not exactly certain where I fall on this topic. What I do know is that I don&#x27;t like frameworks that conceal the plumbing and leave you with declarative bits that require memorization. Lack of discoverability is a huge barrier to mastery. The best code invites you to determine why something is happening.What I&#x27;ve been thinking about lately that this article drew out for me again was that it&#x27;s a shame that so many tools and libraries come not ready for production by default.It would be nice to have some curated base file sets where insecure defaults were overridden, and all of the metrics and logging logic were wired up. You get the turn-key solution but you still have code that is more discoverable, and you can veto a few choices without too much effort.

This is almost the exact stack (Django&#x2F;React&#x2F;Postgres&#x2F;Redis&#x2F;Ubuntu&#x2F;Ansible&#x2F;...) I use at work, and I love it. It&#x27;s a great stack.

How did you get started doing this? Did you have a lot of money saved up and just decide to go for it for a certain length of time?I&#x27;ve had an idea that I&#x27;ve been working on part-time but it really needs some full-time love. At what point do you decide to go for it full-time?

Is this YouTube but for podcasts? Sounds like a good idea actually.

Not OP, however it is fine. I worked in a similar stack as OP with a small team (however it used Ruby&#x2F;Hanami instead of Python&#x2F;Django, and of course the difference between both stacks). The code had ~100k LOC for the main service (we also had some other services that had dozen of thousands LOC) and it was completely fine to maintain. Most errors we had wouldn&#x27;t be avoided by static typed since they&#x27;re logic errors, not programming errors.Sure I prefer static languages nowadays since I work in a much bigger company, however I think the benefits of static languages is overhyped.

Right - I&#x27;m totally on board with the overarching goal of keeping the stack as simple as possible, but at the app level, for the best maintenance story, I would want types.

For us, we follow a very tight convention around how we write code. This has helped us in maintaining the codebase. Of-course some tools help a lot too:- We use standard tools like flake8, isort, black for code linting.- We are not following TDD, but we do write tests for all features. Pytest helps here- Proper code reviews. I cannot stress this enough. As a Tech-Lead I have pushed for code reviews even when working on (supposedly) tight deadlines.- We are also exploring to use type hints introduced in Python3.7.PS Shout-out to Poetry(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poetry.eustace.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;poetry.eustace.io&#x2F;</a>) to make our dependency management easier than ever. Updating third party libs is a lot easier now.

Python supports optional static typing annotations now.There are four popular typecheckers that I&#x27;m aware of (mypy [1], pyre [2], pyright [3], pytype [4]), which is a little confusing, but any of the four will catch a lot of type issues that typical statically typed language compilers would catch. It&#x27;s not as robust as true static typing - there are sometimes false positives and false negatives - but I find it helpful.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;python&#x2F;mypy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;python&#x2F;mypy</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;pyre-check" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;pyre-check</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;pyright" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;microsoft&#x2F;pyright</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;pytype" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;pytype</a>

I don&#x27;t think typing is the problem you make it out to be. You can specify types in Python, and mypy will type check for you. And nothing about Python means you&#x27;ll have an unwieldy code base, I can only imagine you&#x27;d have the same problems in Java.The real reason to switch would be performance. The interpreted nature of Python that makes things like Django and PyUnit possible also makes it kinda slow. Some places choose to parcel out a few key services in a faster language (C, Rust, Go) and use bindings to call out as needed.

Automated testing; with any dynamic typed language you have to unit test every single thing possible and it becomes not so bad to work with.

How do you feel about using a dynamically typed language like Python for all your backend code? Whenever I had a codebase that grew past several thousand LOC it became pretty unwieldy pretty quickly for me personally. I&#x27;m curious if there&#x27;s a conscious tradeoff for people using Python&#x2F;Django to start because it&#x27;s really fast to get up and running with (for existing or new devs).

I am curious, do you use Django Rest Framework on top of Django for your API?

Ours is (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.analyticsvidhya.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.analyticsvidhya.com&#x2F;</a>). We cater to Data science community. You can contact me through my profile info.Also, I am a long time user of wakatime. Awesome product :)

What&#x27;s your website? Mine&#x27;s also on the same stack (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wakatime.com</a>). Would love to trade notes sometime.

Did you do the entire stack yourself, I&#x27;m planning on using almost identical stack, but need some help, do you have some kind of blog on howto or recommend oneIf you create a course on udemy&#x2F;YouTube on how to setup a production full stack, there are many basic setup videos or tutorials, but none on production full stack with load balancing, replication, caching, etc

I thought I was reading my own blog post :) We use very similar tech stack at my current company:- Ansible for provisioning- Python&#x2F;Django for website&#x2F;api- VueJS for frontend(where needed, some pages are simple Django templates)- Celery for background work- uWSGI and Nginx as servers with AWS Load balancer- Elasticsearch for search- Redis for caching- Postgres with Postgis as main datastore- Datadog for monitoring- Cloudflare for DNSSome differences as I am working with a team:- We do use multiple branches and git tags for releases. Feature branches are also common as multiple devs maybe working on different features.- We use Gitlab-CI a lot for testing and auto-deployment(ansible script can be called from our machine as well)- Terraform for infrastructure provisioning. We have stopped provisioning any AWS service by console. Once the service is provisioned by terraform, ansible takes over.I have tinkered with Docker, Hashicorp Packer but this setup has been dead simple to reason and scale reasonably well.

was honestly expecting a stack along the line of yours - the one in the article is actually fairly complex and not-boring.

How big is your team? Mind disclosing what the SaaS is? I&#x27;d love to learn more.

I run multiple SASSes for clients for myself and clients on far more &quot;boring&quot; stacks than this. One of them still has significant bits of VB.Net!This post seems like a sea of trendy buzzwords to me. Maybe he thinks it&#x27;s not trendy because it&#x27;s not docker&#x2F;serverless, but to me that stack is mainly a load of fads. React&#x2F;Redux&#x2F;Webpack are &quot;standard&quot;, damn, 4 years ago you could have replaced that with a plethora of alternatives, as you probably will be able to in 4 years time.

Yea I feel like an actual boring stack would be LAMP w&#x2F; JQuery &amp; bootstrap on some hosting provider (and the blog would be written on wordpress).The stack described in the OP is a fairly modern stack...

Thanks, for all of your comments so far on this site. I don&#x27;t know what you do specifically but what I can glean from them is inspiring to say the least... even the secrets you keep reinforce what I feel is the right way to act.Just wanted to say it.

Is this seriously considered as being a boring stack nowadays?

I bumped into listennotes about 6 months ago, because I was looking to solve the same problem of discovering podcasts.

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)