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by horsawlarway 604 days ago
So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are.

As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)...

I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data.

I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev... you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of reliability (not that you're getting that from any major cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime - which is absolutely fine for something like this.

2 comments

As DHH said somewhere, it's incredible that the modern cloud stack has managed to get PROGRAMMERS to be scared of COMPUTERS. Seriously, what's with that? That shouldn't even be possible?

If you can understand programming, you can understand Linux. Might take a while to be really confident, but do you need incredible confidence when you have backups? :)

Far too late for the edit window, but the keynote[1] is an absolute must-watch for anyone who does anything related to web development

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cEn_83zRFw

Not just somewhere, but in Rails World 2024 Opening keynote, and it was absolutely hilarious!

Especially with that meme he showed about vercel is laws +500% markup lmaoo

Don't be afraid of computers, don't be the pink elephant!

The problem is that my coworkers are morons who seem incapable of remembering to run a simple `explain analyze` on their queries. They'd rather just write monstrosities that kindasorta work without giving a single damn about performance.

It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.

> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.

"Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away."

Computers keep getting faster (personified as Andy Grove, from Intel), and software keeps getting slower (Bill Gates, from Microsoft).

> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.

And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.

At my last job, we had architects pushing to make everything into microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability (and understanding and maintainability and operations and ability for developers to actually run/test the code). The database can't do anything to help you when you split your queries onto different db instances on different VMs for no reason.

I heard we had a 7 figure annual compute spend, and IIRC we only had a few hundred requests per second peak plus some batch jobs for a few million accounts. A single $160 N100 minipc could probably handle the workload with better reliability than we had if we hadn't gone down that particular road to insanity.

> ... microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability

Heh, remind me of a discussion I had with a coworker roughly 6 month ago. I tried to explain to them that the ability to scale each microservices separately almost never improves the actual performance of the platform as a whole - after all, you still need to have network calls between each service and could've also just started the monolith twice. And that would've most likely even needed less RAM too, even if each instance will likely consume more - after all, you now need less applications running to serve the same request.

This discussion took place in the context of a b2e saas platform with very moderate usage, almost everything being plain CRUD. Like 10-15k simultaneous users making data entries etc.

I'm always unsure how I should feel after such discussions. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure he probably thinks that I'm dumb for not getting microservices. On the other hand... Well... ( ꈍ ᴗ ꈍ )