HN Hall of Fame Weekly email

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

www.listennotes.com Essays & writing Essays & articles Software engineering Candidate

Resurfaced independently across 4 calendar years, with breakout response in 3 of them.

submissions
5
submitters
5
observed span
2020–2024
peak thread · 56 comments
217 pts
latest 20+ return · 2024-02-12
119 pts

Submission timeline

2007–2026

One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.

First comments on top threads

HN comment order

From a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875

LiamPa·217-point thread·

I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.

I have a variation of this as well. Boring is good. Docker for deploying whatever means I can deploy to any docker capable platform, which is typically some kind of set of vms with a load balancer in front of it. Our setup runs in two separate and very different cloud environments. One of our customers insisted on this. Same stuff but provisioned differently. We don't use terraform on purpose because it is overkill to automate something that only comes…

Do you know of similar posts by other solopreneurs or small teams running rather large apps or businesses? Or if you run a service by yourself as well, I would really be interested in knowing what stack you chose across functions and why? Cheers!

r_singh·1-point thread·

The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.

Breakout years
3

100+ points or 50+ comments

Total points
553

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Total comments
118

reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking

Every submission