Not impossible though, I run a directory of open-source alternatives and rarely do you see what Cal.com did. Projects gets abandoned yes, but a pure bait and switch like this really grinds my gears. This is from someone who is self hosting Cal.com right now and now they are going to strip even more features.
I had a perfectly fine iPhone 11 I bought new. The first thing I replaced in it was battery. I had to pay for “genuine” Apple battery + certified laboratory. The price was higher than the price of my iPhone as second hand, but I liked this phone.
Then I sold it, because I ran out of 64GB space. If I could add an sd card, I would probably use this phone longer, instead of contributing to consumerism and creating more e-waste.
I wish that people would think about sustainability and using their devices for longer rather than chasing “new and shiny” every year Apple releases the “best iPhone we ever made”
I just don’t understand how does it work. Like where do you find such people? How do you make them beg you? Isn’t building in a saturated market kind of proves that there is demand?
the begging thing is a bit of a myth imo. what it actually looks like is you describe the problem out loud to someone and they go , god yes that's exactly it - before you've even mentioned a solution. that reaction is the signal. you're not manufacturing demand you're just finding where it already exists. the hardest part is you need to talk to a lot of people before you find that reaction, that was the biggest pitfall i fell into during my first startup. trying hard not to make the same mistake twice, youve to be really mindful
If you cant find the people, may not be the right market for you :) ideally you are exposed to target market directly, and daily. Or you team up with a cofounder who is. Re: building in saturated market - “prove” is a strong word. It’s another signal. And you can judge for yourself how strong :) i dont think anything can replace direct customer feedback
I read the book. It’s more entertainment than useful. I just don’t know how to find the people who have problems. I don’t have specific domain knowledge nor I built a following / circle of people to whom I can sell
Building is not any less important now, AI just highlights this fact. The software I work on is the difference between people getting paid or not, which those people consider very important - I use AI to do that by letting it improve the quality of the software, with less bugs, more performance etc.
The 10000th social media spammming SaaS being built in public is no less important now than it was before AI - we can just see how irrelevant it is now that it can also be built faster, by virtually anybody.
> What’s the F is going on? Is the world gone mad or something?
Yes, it's madness but it doesn't matter that it's mad because you can't stop it. It's a technological gold rush, with all of the mixed connotations that "gold rush" should imply.
Although it's not the world proper, but a very loud and well-paid cohort of shills, astroturfers and spin doctors. Plus the occasional useful idiot and me-too hitchhikers, no doubt.
I don’t have an answer, but sometimes it helps to know that you are not alone. I have almost two decades of experience, and despite people saying stuff along the lines of “we heard that our profession is dead many times, and it’s still fine”, I have never been so lost and depressed in my career ever before.
I understand that I’m in a privileged position as a SWE, and that maybe I have been overpaid for the majority of my career, but the swing is so sharp that it really hits me in the gut badly.
The problem with such advice is that it requires me to go back in time and fix my life. I am not an expert, I started this career when I was barely an adult, and did it for fun because I liked it and the money was good. I wasn't thinking about "building a professional circle" or staying in touch with past colleagues.
So advice like "use your network to find freelance / contracting" is not helpful to me. So there are two options for me: either find a way to make it work now, or accept the fact that I fucked up my life and I just need to wait for the inevitable replacement by AI. I doubt that every successful entrepreneur started to build a professional circle at the age of 21. But I might be wrong.
I really doubt that people who can’t install an ssh key should be able to practice software engineering. Sometimes, I think that software engineering should be a protected profession like other types of engineering. At least it will filter out the people who can’t keep their OS up to date.
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.
This is all trivial, and can and should be automated. Furthermore, all of your arguments can easily be applied to NodeJS version deprecations, React realizing they shipped a massive CVE, etc.
I will die on this hill: parent is correct - the ability to manage a Linux server should be a requirement to work in the industry, even if it has fuck-all to do with your job. It proves some basic level of competence and knowledge about the thing that is running your code.
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.
The answer is to write your server in portable C++, and just rebuild it for whatever new OS you're dealing with.
The speed. Imagine the performance. There are plenty of mature C++ web server frameworks, it's really not difficult. If you're afraid of C++, you could choose something else. Rust if you're insane, or golang if you're insane but in a different way.
Anyway. Nginx is not going away, so the argument is a bit silly. "What if js went away". Same thing.
If an LTS of an OS replaced nginx with something else, a. it would be announced with great fanfare months in advance b. if you don’t want to do that, add apt / yum / zypper install nginx to your Ansible task, or whatever you’re using.
The things that you just described are not automation, but human activities needed to tackle the new situation by following news and creating new automation. Which kind of proves my point that you cannot prepare for every unexpected situation before it actually happens. Except maybe with AI in the future.
When AWS announces that they’re EOL’ing the Python or NodeJS version in your Lambda, or the version of your RDS cluster, etc. you also are required to take human action. And in fact, at any appreciable scale, you likely want that behavior, so you can control the date and time of the switch, because “zero downtime” is rarely zero downtime.
Yes, and like I mentioned in another comment, I consider this a major painpoint and problem with Node.js based applications. I have high hopes that eventually there will be an "evergreen" WebAssembly based Lambda function runtime.
I keep reading posts like this, but the people who say this never actually seem to enlighten the rest of us troglodytes by, say, writing a comprehensive, all inclusive, guide to doing this.
If it's so easy, surely it's no big undertaking to explain how one self hosts a fully secured server. No shortcuts, no "just use the usual setup" (we don't know what it is!), no skipped or missed bits. Debian to Caddy to Postgres, performant and fully secure, self upgrading and automated, from zero to hero, documenting every command used and the rationale for it (so that we may learn).
The parent I responded to was discussing issuing certs, configuring SSH keys, and updating an OS. Those are all in fact trivial and easily automated.
What you have stated requires more knowledge (especially Postgres). You’re not going to get it from a blog post, and will need to read actual source docs and man pages.
The original claim was "People shouldn't even be in the industry unless they can administer a Linux server, even if that has nothing to do with their role." It is a very significant moving of the goalposts to now suggest this is all about "updating an OS". That's not a good faith claim.
This whole thing is merely cheap online snark masquerading as wisdom. No, not all SWEs know how to maintain Linux servers, and many (most?) SWE roles have all of zero overlap with that kind of work. If businesses could fire all their expensive server admins and replace them with some college kid and a $5 VPS, they would long since have done so.
If this is anything more than poseur snark, put your money where your mouth is and either write a comprehensive resource yourself, or at least compile a list of resources that would suffice for someone to be able to securely run and maintain a live server in production. No, not Hello Worlds, actual prod. Then, when next this comes up, link us to your guide rather than just spraying spittle on the plebs who lack your expertise.
Do something more constructive than low effort snark.
They don't write the guide because by the time they've written the guide to an appropriate level of specification, the result they've produced is an off-the-shelf service provider not unlike the ones they're railing against.
I self host my own server and this isn't something that takes much time per year. You're making it sound like a day job. It's not really. As long as you have a solid initial config you shouldn't have to worry.
Exactly. Also, being that my specialty is writing software and not server maintenance, no matter how much of an effort I put forth there's substantial risk of blind spots where holes can lurk.
I felt more comfortable maintaining a VPS back between 2005 and 2015, but at that point attackers were dramatically less sophisticated and numerous and I was a lot more overconfident/naive. At least for solo operations I'm now inclined to use a PaaS… the exception to that is if said operation is my full time job (giving me ample time to make sure all bases are covered for keeping the VPS secure) or it's grown enough that I can justify hiring somebody to tend to it.
Caddy runs on top of Go's excellent acme library that handles all of the cert acquisition and renewal process automatically.
I get that if you get a problem then it'll take a bit of work to fix, but all of this seems like a lot less work than dealing with support for a platform you don't control.
They shouldn't, that's why self hosted PaaS already do it for you, it's not a differential reason to use cloud services instead just because they do it for you too.
Now you have to maintain the automation. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with building your own server. There is nothing wrong with colocation. There is nothing wrong with driving to the colo to investigate an outage. There is nothing wrong with licensing arm and having TSMC fab your chip. There is nothing wrong with choosing which level of abstraction you prefer!
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