| I had a good experience doing many of the things the author suggests doing but maybe didn't also as an evening / weekend fun project. I built an app for a business. It was a very simple app - one or two input choices / data but a somewhat complicated process from there (2-3 minute runtime). High business value in the sense that it saved about 15 minutes of staff time per invocation with hundreds of invokes. But I didn't know how to build UI front end or do authentication. So I built the app without any of that, you passed the data in at the command line, then it emitted data out. Great - I would run the app for folks based on the data they sent me by slack. That worked great - happy users who gave me immediate feedback on the results of the app, I was literally in the run cycle. Then I discovered slack had a webhook/websocket system - instead of sending me the data by slack, they could send the data to my app using slack. Perfect, no front end needed AT ALL, AND authentication as already handled - all the slack users in the company should have access. So slack called the CLI, then sent back the result. User count went up, and I deployed to AWS by just doing a git co on the server by hand, picking up requirements.txt, then manually fixing the enviro issues (even with a virtenv) by hand directly on the server and doing a snapshot of the machine. Very happy users - usage goes up. More change requests, and deployment approach not great. Finally I stuck a docker file on my machine because I HAD to, then set up the CLI based deploy into fargate on AWS, which worked great for me - I would develop, test on my machine, then run the three commands AWS gives to push my docker into fargate. This still worked well. THEN one of the integration partners changed, so I had to update things on my setup, and discovered the Slack toolkit had changed and the recommendation was to upgrade, which I did, which started an upgrade cascade. In my busy time working nights and weekends - boom - the app was dead! It was so boring not adding new features and making folks happy, but instead redoing things to the "new better way" which made absolutely no difference to anything I cared about. And every time I messed with one thing another thing needed changing. So I totally get that trying to keep an app up to date with libraries etc might kill your productivity. It killed mine, and I waited as long as I could. |