Hacker News Reader

Comment by quaunaut | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time, it's because of opportunity cost: The time you're spending building a server, learning how to manage repos, setting up redundancy and just trying to get the thing working, you could've spent on whatever product you were trying to produce, and would likely be much further along with if you hadn't done everything the hard way.

That's not to say there isn't educational value, but a common piece of advice I've gotten is "Don't optimize for anything but your life." Or more easily explained: Don't optimize for things you don't need to.

View on HN

The opportunity cost on the front side is often worth it but the long term benefit on the back side is you aren't dependent on that SaaS, are running stuff you know something about and have a lot of flexibility.

I'm from the old school, I use SaaS/PaaS mostly for stuff I know is painful to do yourself (sometimes file storage, nearly always email) but the rest lives on vanilla boxes configured with ansible (frankly ansible is faster to use once you get your head around it than learning 5 different PaaS setups).

Can you suggest a good way to get started with Ansible?

I just installed Ansible on a workstation and started playing with it to configure a server (the server only needs SSH). Or, use this guide:

http://www.ansible.com/get-started

The ansible docs are excellent and walk you through the process, one thing I did (and would suggest) is use vagrant (or similar) with ansible, it has built in support for it and it allows you build/tear-down way faster while you are learning.

Building on the other answers, I think it is more awful for pros. Hobbyists don't have deadlines and spend time on computers because of love, not to pay rent.

That said, you do have a point, and you decide what matters to you as a hobbyist (or whatever you decide to call yourself).

I personally like (and need, most of the time) stuff that "just works", so I totally get your point about optimizing and agree with it.

what's the cost of freedom and independence ?

I'm personally glad to have done things the hard way, sure it took some time to learn but learning sysadmin made me a better developer.

To me, setting up a repository, an issue tracker, a wiki etc. was more about learning about a process than learning "how to make it work on the server".

Process as "how to organise the production of writing software" and this is imho extremely important, I reuse what I learned all the time from web app to mobile app to server backend etc.

Simply put, I see a lot of people who fail to deal with software production simply because they just use the tool "a la mode" like Github, but are completely oblivious to the benefits of using semantic versioning, an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, etc.

When you learn all that by yourself, you can compare different tools and have a feel for what's a "bare minimum", you just know how to manage/organise a project a make it work in production.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com