I’m glad this lead to some learning for you! Some of the comments did that for me, which is great.

Broadly speaking, I explicitly wanted to stay in the Coolify world. Coolify is a self-hostable PaaS platform—though I use the Cloud service, as I mentioned—and I really like the abstraction it provides. I haven’t had to SSH into my server for anything since I set it up—I just add repos through the web UI and things deploy and show up in my browser.

Yes, static sites certainly could—and arguably even should—be done way simpler than this. But I have other things I want to deploy on the same infrastructure, things that aren’t static sites, and for which containers make a whole lot more sense. Simplicity can be “each thing is simple in isolation”, but it can also be “all things are consistent with each other”, and in this case I chose the latter.

If this standardization on this kind of abstraction weren’t a priority, this would indeed be a pretty inefficient way of doing this. In fact, I arrived at my current setup by doing what you suggested—setting up a server without containers, building sites directly on it, and serving them from a single reverse proxy instance—and the amount of automation I found myself writing was a bit tedious. The final nail in the coffin for that approach was realizing I’d have to solve web apps with multiple processes in some other way regardless.

    Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
    Remote: Yes, exclusively
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Python, AWS, TypeScript, open to others
    Résumé/CV: https://nkantar.com/resume
    Email: hn@nkantar.com
    More: https://nkantar.com/blog/2023/08/hire-me-v202308/

    Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
    Remote: Yes, exclusively
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Python, AWS, TypeScript, open to others
    Résumé/CV: https://nkantar.com/resume
    Email: hn@nkantar.com
    More: https://nkantar.com/blog/2023/08/hire-me-v202308/

    Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
    Remote: Yes, exclusively
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Python, AWS, TypeScript, open to others
    Résumé/CV: https://nkantar.com/resume
    Email: hn@nkantar.com
    More: https://nkantar.com/blog/2023/08/hire-me-v202308/

    Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
    Remote: Yes, exclusively
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Python, AWS, TypeScript, open to others
    Résumé/CV: https://nkantar.com/resume
    Email: hn@nkantar.com
    More: https://nkantar.com/blog/2023/08/hire-me-v202308/

I recently got an OLKB Planck to see if I like it enough to travel with it, as the ErgoDox is a bit hefty for that use case.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37571146

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

If someone asked me what to use for payments on a new project, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable suggesting Stripe, based solely on what I keep reading about the company on HN. That itself also feels a bit weird, especially without a clear alternative.

I myself have used Stripe for a few tiny things over the years, and have never had an issue, but I’d be surprised if I’ve put more than $100 total through the platform.

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Edit: The comments some have about the legitimacy of the OP’s business may make this particular case a non-issue, to be fair.

I paid for Sublime Text 3 while I was still using it. Even though I switched away (to Vim/Neovim, then Kakoune, then Helix), I don’t regret it at all. It was a fantastic tool I used for about two to three years, and it brought me far more value than the $70 it asked for in return.

In fact, I’ve since bought a ton of other software when it’s proven useful more than the free alternatives. I’m particularly happy when it’s sold by a small team, just like Sublime. Some favorites I currently have installed: Acorn, Fantastical, Ivory, Monodraw, Things, Transmit, and Tweetbot (RIP).

Remote: Yes, exclusively

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, AWS, TypeScript, open to others

Résumé/CV: https://nkantar.com/resume

Email: hn@nkantar.com

More: https://nkantar.com/blog/2023/08/hire-me-v202308/

Fairly low frequency, Python, general tech, and some personal-ish stuff occasionally.

I think I generally have a more skeptical view of HN than most others posting in this thread, but the value and uniqueness of parts of this community isn’t lost on me, especially with that personal experience.

When I was getting divorced a few years ago, I had to wait out the mandatory six month waiting period (aka “cooling off” period). Since I had the actual date the divorce would be finalized, I wrote a script and scheduled it to send me a countdown every morning at 4am. For a few months upon waking up I was greeted by an SMS with the ever decreasing number. I called it my freedom counter and loved watching people I told about it go from curious to mildly uncomfortable to amused.

Years later I repurposed the idea and made a wedding day countdown. This one started counting up after the big day, for continuous joy.

At some point I started building a ridiculously tiny SaaS service around it (and even registered domains undorthe.wedding and dothe.wedding), but never got around to finishing and launching it.

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I’ve been tracking my weight daily since 2019. I used to just add an entry to an Airtable base, but the free plan has a per-base entry limit I’ve long surpassed.

I didn’t want to pay $10/mo just for that one thing, so I built a solution which let me send an SMS with the daily weight to a Twilio number, which then sent a request to an API endpoint I built, which then stored it in a TinyDB file on the server, which I then backed up to Backblaze using restic. The code behind the endpoint also sent me a graph of the last two weeks worth of entries, and the date I last weight that much or less.

I then decided to decommission the server hosting the endpoint, and in order to avoid having to pay for something else rebuilt it as a combination of Airtable and GH Actions. I have a base in which I enter the daily weight, then a GH Action fires a few hours later, and it gets all the entries in the base, reads a TinyDB file from a separate repo, updates relevant records, updates the TinyDB file, and deletes old entries from the Airtable base. This is now costing me $0, which is fun in its own right.

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I started working from home during the pandemic, and my living room worked quite well as a personal office while I was single, living with just a cat. As my wife and I moved in together, there have been some challenges with working from a shared space, and we particularly found a need to communicate when I’m on a video call.

I used the Circuit Playground Express I got at PyCon 2019 as an on-air light. It was plugged into my computer, which exposed it as a USB drive, and it ran an infinite loop that set the LEDs to red if I was on a call and green if I wasn’t. I wrote a script that would detect the presence of a Zoom call process to do that automatically, and then another to manually toggle the flag using xbar.

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EDIT: I thought of one I actually wrote for work! We’re a small team and were discussing making our on-call rotation official some time ago. Since we were starting from scratch, I suggested we try daily rotations (instead of the customary weekly ones), largely based on some things I’d read right here on HN. We don’t yet use any tooling beyond a manually managed Google Calendar, so I wrote a script to generate a fair schedule (e.g., no one gets stuck with all Fridays) and output importable files for both the shared calendar and people’s individual ones. We’ve used it for a few periods of time, and it seems to be good enough for our needs.