Hacker News: kennu

New comment by kennu in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

kennu — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:31:32 +0000

I'm curious about this trivial automation. Let's say the new OS LTS version no longer includes nginx, because it was replaced by a new product with different config. How does the automation figure out what the new server package is and migrate your old Nginx config to the new format?

I agree with Node.js version deprecations being a huge problem and personally advocate for an evergreen WebAssembly platform for running apps. Apps should run forever even if the underlying platform completely changes, and only require updating if the app itself contains something that needs updating.

New comment by kennu in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

kennu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:51:35 +0000

This is not about how easy or difficult it is to issue TLS certificates, to configure SSH keys or to update the OS. It's about having to actively maintain them yourself in every possible situation until eternity, like when TLS versions are deprecated, SSH key algorithms are quantum-hacked, backward-incompatible new OS LTS versions are released, and so on. You will always have new stuff come up that you need to take care of.

New comment by kennu in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

kennu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:41:39 +0000

When buying the infrastructure as a managed cloud service, yes, I trust that they've got people handling it better than I could myself. The value proposition is that I don't even see the underlying infrastructure below a certain level, and they take care of it.

New comment by kennu in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

kennu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:39:06 +0000

You might be right. I've been mostly using serverless / managed cloud services such as AWS Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB for the past 10+ years. When I've needed to respond, it's been because I myself deployed a bad update and needed to roll it back, or a third party integration broke. The cloud platform itself has been very stable, and during the couple of bigger incidents that have happened, I've just waited for AWS to fix it and for things to start working again.

New comment by kennu in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

kennu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:28:00 +0000

Maybe you're right - I've never tried dokploy, but from documentation it sounds like mostly a deployment, monitoring and alerting tool. For me the problem has always been that once you get the alert (or something just stops working), a human needs to react to it and make things work again. In cloud services you mostly pay for them providing the human, and in self-hosting you're the human.

I can see though that today's AI models could eventually replace the human in the loop and truly automatically fix every possible situation.

New comment by kennu in "We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2"

kennu — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:59:27 +0000

It means you take responsibility of maintaining the server forever, i.e. dealing with TLS certificates, SSH keys, security updates, OS/package updates, monitoring, reboots when stuck, redeploy when VPS retired, etc. Usually things work fine for a year or two and then stuff starts to get old and need attention and eat your time.

New comment by kennu in "The future of Terraform CDK"

kennu — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:55:16 +0000

Thanks, will definitely look into it. I first used Pulumi when it was just a cloud platform but seems it is a more general devops tool now.

New comment by kennu in "The future of Terraform CDK"

kennu — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:13:12 +0000

Sad to see it go. The philosophy of CDK has been to offer a shared ecosystem between IaC, backend code and frontend code, allowing to share configuration, data structures and libraries between all of them. It has made development more unified and have less redundancy and manual work. Personally I don't want to repeat some stuff in a special Terraform language, if I can find a way to manage the whole application in TypeScript.

New comment by kennu in "Skills I Was Missing as a MongoDB User"

kennu — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 19:32:47 +0000

I feel the opposite about SQL: It is often being shoehorned into use cases that don't fit the relative/transactional database model at all. My own default database is AWS DynamoDB, because it fits 90% of my own use cases quite well and offers a fast approach for iterative development. Recently I've been evaluating how to find the same level of abstraction in open source databases, and MongoDB feels like the closest match. Postgres with JSONB comes second, but manipulating JSON with SQL is not very comfortable and tends to result in subtle problems e.g. when something is NULL.

New comment by kennu in "If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)"

kennu — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:30:16 +0000

Scrolling with mouse scroll wheel a few hundred thousand kilometers at a time is so much work that I gave up :-(

New comment by kennu in "Porn sites go dark in France over new age verification rules"

kennu — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:41:19 +0000

At minimum, the government gets a "ping" when identified citizens visit adult sites requiring the age check, so they can keep a record. In worse scenarios, maybe some identifier leaks through that can also identify which site they visited. And of course, the identification apps can be hacked through supply chain attacks etc.

New comment by kennu in "Why I Use a Dumbphone in 2025 (and Why You Should Too)"

kennu — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 11:06:19 +0000

I don't really know what to do with a dumbphone, since I don't get any phone calls or text messages any more. Everything goes through apps, email or web nowadays.

New comment by kennu in "As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook"

kennu — Wed, 28 May 2025 14:36:51 +0000

I guess there's many cases where you don't really know how complicated or simple the solution will end up to be, and start drawing it while thinking about it.. I must admit that those are usually the most interesting parts of the work.

New comment by kennu in "As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook"

kennu — Wed, 28 May 2025 08:36:58 +0000

I understand the sentiment, but I don't get how you could draw more complex software plans by hand. I usually use Draw.io/Diagrams.net, and the drawings get pretty large and need reorganizing dozens of boxes several times while planning the architecture.

OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.

New comment by kennu in "Switch to EU"

kennu — Sat, 17 May 2025 17:44:20 +0000

My main issue in the EU is that cloud platform services are not very mature compared to AWS, Azure, GCP. They have some of the basic stuff like VMs and storage, but almost nobody has FaaS and the smaller services like SQS, SNS, scalable pay-per-request database like DynamoDB, etc. I hope these things become available so that it becomes possible to build scalable serverless apps here. Ultimately these services should be standardized like S3 did for storage.

New comment by kennu in "Cursor hits $9B valuation"

kennu — Mon, 05 May 2025 20:34:21 +0000

Cursor is not about vibe coding. Vibe coding means you don't care about the AI's code output as long as it works. Cursor is all about efficiently reviewing the AI-proposed changes and hitting Tab only when you approve them. Much of the editing process is hitting Esc because the proposed change is not good.

New comment by kennu in "Why Lotus Domino? (2024)"

kennu — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:12:12 +0000

I got my first fixed IP address and always-on Internet connection in 1995 and I don't particularly miss the dial-up times before that. I prefer to have everything connected and online all the time, but also with proper security.

New comment by kennu in "Why Lotus Domino? (2024)"

kennu — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 07:34:18 +0000

It's funny how back in the 1990s the concept of software was different. You might buy an actual shrink wrapped package with an install disc and be happy with it for years. Nowadays it would be unthinkable to use software without getting regular updates (at least security updates) and always being able to install the latest version.

New comment by kennu in "I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud"

kennu — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 02:29:32 +0000

I'm really happy with my Bosch washing machine's WiFi. Getting a notification to the phone when the wash cycle is complete is something I wouldn't give up now, since I don't hear the beeping to upstairs. I also wish I'd get notifications from the dish washer, but it's an old model that still works and it's hard to justify replacing it yet.

I also have no clue what all the physical buttons on the washing machine's control panel do, but it's easy to configure the wash program using the phone app whenever something special is needed. I wish I had the same kind of remote control for the dish washer, since its buttons are also pretty much undecipherable.

The actual Home Connect Android app is not great though. Could be simplified and cleaned up of unnecessary cruft.

New comment by kennu in "Writing small docs is a game changer"

kennu — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:23:44 +0000

I disagree with smaller docs being easier to write. Quite the opposite, it is easy to write longer text, which then requires more effort from the reader to understand it.

To write shorter text, you must put in the effort beforehand to compact, crystallize and organize the ideas. Each reader then doesn't have to do that themselves in their heads.