Leave Git alone.

Not everyone is making serverless JS web applications!

Most of the time, people need a Linux server they can SSH into.

Cloudflare don't offer this, so I continue to use AWS.

5. Implement infrastructure monitoring.

Assuming you're on something like Ubuntu, the monit program is brilliant.

It's open source and self hosted, configured using plain text files, and can run scripts when thresholds are met.

I personally have it configured to hit a Slack webhook for a monitoring channel. Instant notifications for free!

You'll need to edit files sometimes, and Vim (or Vi) is usually present. I don't think I've seen an install without it.

The basics (opening files, writing, and closing) can be learnt in an hour. It's enough to make simple changes to .conf files.

Old petrol Toyotas and Hondas met your criteria.

And the back catalogue of parts is huge and supported for a long time.

Modern cars aren't built as well.

Maybe the modern non-turbo petrol Mazdas are the best fallback.

But an AI assistant can do so much more damage in a short space of time.

It probably won't go wrong, but when it does go wrong you will feel immense pain.

I will keep low productivity in exchange for never having to deal with the fallout.

I know it's cliche to say it, but most of the tech debt I've seen is on the frontend.

Most backends are relatively simple. Just a DB with lots of code wrapping it. But even the worst backends are relatively simple beasts. Just lots of cronjobs and lots of procedural code. While the code is garbage, it can be understood eventually. The backend is mature... even the tech debt on the backend is a known quantity!

But the frontend... damn the complexity and the over engineering are something unique. I think there is a fetish among frontend developers to make things as complicated as possible. Packages galore and SO MANY COMPONENTS.

As soon as people start inventing their own design system, UI framework, and sub packages I think the frontend is doomed for that project.

Any Linux distro can have MySQL or Postgres installed in less than five minutes and works out of the box

Even a single core VPS can handle lots of queries per second (assuming the tables are indexed properly and the queries aren't trash)

There are mature open source backup solutions which don't require DB downtime (also available in most package managers)

It's trivial to tune a DB using .conf files (there are even scripts that autotune for you!!!)

Your VPS provider will allow you to configure encryption at rest, firewall rules, and whole disk snapshots as well

And neither MySQL or Postgres ever seem to go down, they're super reliable and stable

Plus you have very stable costs each month

Hyperion is a great read for anyone looking for their next scifi book BTW. :)

Because they don't know how to JOIN tables.

Did anyone else ramp up all the settings to try and fill the screen with snow?

I saw a cool "bubbling" effect. Some of the air gaps by the trees would bubble up as the snow pilled on.

I will say I was very cheap though. But I made my money on quantity. I would do two a month on the side of a full time job.

They were very simple websites though. But most of the time that's all people need.

Tell them how much you charge before you start work and ask if they want you to start work. It can only go one of two ways.

The easiest way to convince them is to compare it to sales. If they are an electrician with an average job of $500, that website only needs to earn them two extra jobs per year to break even.

But the easiest way is to be a sociopath and not care. Ask the question and they will either say yes or no. No one is going to assassinate you for pitching a marketing website to them.

If they say yes, do you care where the money has come from? Would it matter if that was their last $1k? If they're loaded would you feel more confident? What if you do a great job and then it turns out that money came from illegal sources?

What about if they say no? Will you stay awake at night worrying that their business is losing work because people think they're weird for not having a website? What if your marketing website lands them a big client because of the "authenticity factor" of having a professional marketing website?

None of these things actually matter. But getting paid $1k feels good, especially if you've done a good job and earned it. :)

Selling ten $1,000 websites to small businesses is easy. It isn't fun or exciting, but it works.

It's 50% sales, 30% chasing people, and 20% building.

Find small local businesses with bad websites, or better yet no website. They honestly do exist.

Resist the urge to make your own anything. Just use Squarespace or Wix!

You don't need to hide SS or Wix from the client. Tell them you just charge for your time to set it all up. If they complain then move onto the next customer, they would likely be a pain anyway.

People will say "small marketing websites are dead with SS or Wix about", but it's not true. Most small businesses just don't want to learn how!

If you cold call all week I bet you can have a couple of deals done by Friday! Good luck.

I'm not certain adding more complexity (which comes with the more powerful solutions you've suggested) will help things right now.

Cron is such a basic tool, it really shouldn't be causing any problems. I think fixing the underlying problems in the scripts themselves is important to do first.

Just my two cents though!

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1. Being sure your cronjobs ran

Use a heartbeat monitoring system like this:

https://uptimerobot.com/cron-job-monitoring/

Append their URL to ping after your cronjob. Like so:

* * * * * * python /home/foo.py && curl https://example.com/heartbeat

If your cronjob doesn't run, or runs and fails, the heartbeat won't get called because of the &&.

---

2. Make sure your scripts return error codes:

Your scripts should return 0 for success, or greater than 0 for errors.

This ties into point number one. Without proper error codes your heartbeat monitoring won't work.

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3. Standardised logging:

Make sure you send/pipe your errors to ONE place. Having to look in multiple places is just asking for trouble.

And then check your logs daily. Better yet, automate the checking... maybe you send the contents of the log to Slack once per day? Or email it to yourself?

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4. More robust scripts:

I'm not trying to be unkind, but your scripts sound like they're erroring a lot!

Maybe they need to be tightened up... don't blindly trust things, check return types, verify the previous step using code, log more information to help you track the problems down

---

If you do all of these things I think you will fix your problems. Good luck :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46645214

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Thinking that everything Google produces might not be positive is NOT jumping into conspiracy theories.

But I have no doubt there is a play happening here.

Probably it will change over time to make gathering data easier?

Or something else that makes Google money.

But almost every company uses GitHub, and changing to Bitbucket isn't usually viable.