Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by qorrect | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

qorrect

Amazon has turned developers into consumers. I like the site, I hate how un-hobbyist-friendly the dev world has become.

View on HN

??? The dev world is probably more hobbyist-friendly than any other world I can think of.

But AWS isn't meant for hobbyists any more than SalesForce is meant as a personal contacts list.

If you want to build a hobby project, use something meant for that, like a $5/mo droplet at Digital Ocean.

It's fine and good for the dev world to have an enterprise-focused part too.

AWS is increasingly a standard that people need to learn to get employment, and the risk of a huge bill because you have misconfigured something somewhere will put off a lot of people, particularly students, from learning it in their spare time in hobby and school projects.

The dev world is friendly toward hobbyists (and small teams) when you use Heroku or DigitalOcean.

It was the plan all along. Open source is free for big business to embrace and extend, and they used it to turn us into renters.

It sounds like the machines plan to abstract human involvement over the long term.... first you change the way they think, then it’s your space of thought to commandeer and command.

You hear horror stories of students/hobbyists playing around with AWS Lambda or some other service and ending up with huge bills. Maybe they get resolved but I certainly don't want to deal with the panic of misconfiguring some setting and losing a chunk of my savings. I'll use this stuff at work if needed but it certainly cools me on playing around with it in my spare time, which is how I best learn new tech.

This happened to me once and AWS entirely reversed the charges no questions asked. And its really something you don't need to worry about. AWS makes more than enough money off of legitimate traffic they don't need to deny someone asking for a refund for a genuine mistake.

And playing around with Serverless is awesome. Things can be created rapidly and very little maintenance. These days I cannot see myself building an application without at least some element of Serverless infrastructure if not the entire solution.

OK, but I'd rather not have to make a panicked call to AWS customer service and throw myself at their mercy just so I can do some coding in my free time, thanks.

And think about how that applies to some student at college or boot camp on a tight budget with rent/bills to pay.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com