>Doing “DevOps work” is unquestionably the worst part of building a modern application. It’s full of tiny papercuts, indignities we suffer in our toolchains, our feedback loops, and our software. It’s a city of brutalist buildings filled with sharp-edged couches pretending to be comfortable. Think of all the advances in how we interact with tools in other domains - then take a look at the way you build, deploy, and operate your software, at all the crazy gyrations you use to glue it all together - and ask yourself why you accept it.

I dunno, usually I find databases and migrations to be the hard part. At this point, I have enough examples of app deploys that I can have a new app up and running on a pair of VMs with a robust blue/green deploy and backups inside of an hour or two, with deploy by Github Actions responding to pushes to prod branch.

Even if you don't have my company's half-decade worth of example devops, you can do something easier, like a single instance on a Digital Ocean machine with deploy by "ssh -A server 'cd yourapp && git pull && sudo systemctl restart yourapp'". Sure, you'll have a few seconds of downtime, and you'll expose your SSH keys to anyone on that box for those few seconds, but if you know some Linux and nginx, you can get this working inside of an hour from scratch.