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by freewilly1040 2145 days ago
A decent eng will know that there are managed solutions for this problem that you don't have to build yourself.

In 2020, with the number of managed solutions out there for simple CRUD functionality, the default should be just using the managed thing until it doesn't suit you, not just ignoring critical yet non-unique pieces of infrastructure all together.
2 comments
stickfigure 2144 days ago
Reality is nowhere near this rosy. Sure, maybe you can get away with canned auth, but I took that as illustrative.

A more practical example: Start/stop/change subscription plans. Until 12 days ago, Stripe had no customer portal so you had to implement this yourself. You can do it with support email, and "easy to switch plans" is not on any prospective customer's checklist.

"Too many change plan emails" is a good problem to have - deprioritize the feature. And if you're lucky, by the time you really need it, your billing service will have implemented the feature for you.

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rmoriz 2145 days ago
Not necessarily. If you have 0 customers but your MVP already depends on a bunch of external services, you have hard lock-ins or running costs from the beginning. Scaling and putting everything on scalable infra should be reserved for projects that make it past a couple of paying customers (= validation).
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fragmede 2144 days ago
Don't be penny-wise and pound foolish though. Let's pretend I take a month to design, pick, configure, operationalize, and integrate with the project, a pub/sub bus that will cost $0 while it's not running by developing it as VMs on hardware I own. A hypothetical alternative costs $x/month for the first Y billion messages. If I'll never exceed 1,000 messages/month, having a hard rule to avoid running costs would argue for taking a month to build such a system.

A more pragmatic approach involves examining X and Y before deciding not to pay any money. (They're also different for everybody, and it also depends on your financial situation.) If X is less than the cost of 1 coffee from a local coffee shop, I personally would pay for it rather than spend the month building my own $0 monthly unused cost pubsub bus for 1 month.

(Time it takes to implement is a 3rd variable, Z, though I'll note that estimating software project is notoriously difficult to get right.)

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