This was not the case of Joe AI. I joined later in the project, and the foundations where even weaker than what is shown in this newsletter (no API endpoint authentication whatsoever, open bar, for example) and so I had to secure and migrate everything myself when I joined them. This was what the Supabase migration was trying to accomplish. Before I joined, they didn't even have a database but I won't get into the details here.
Before Rankbid, and the other products I've built, I've worked at a B2C startup with millions of users and never caused a big outage there, I've been programming for more than ten years, and I have a double degree in computer science, and while I agree with what "should be done" in theory for production level apps, sometimes, you need to move very fast to build great startups. I've read many technical books in my life such as Designing Data Intensive Applications, High Performance Browser Networking. I know the theory, but sometimes you just don't have the time to do everything perfectly. That's what I try to expose in this blog post. I also wanted to share a humbling experience. Everyone makes mistakes, and I'm not ashamed of making some, even after years of software engineering.
My newsletter is about the intersection of programming and business. You might not find the "business" part interesting which is fine, but I think what you call blogspam has real value for engineers who have never sold before in their life and want to learn the ropes. I spend a lot of time writing each edition, because I try to respect the time of my readers as much as possible to deliver some actual insights (even if there is a bit of fluff or story telling sometimes).
And for Joe AI: it has since become much more secure, and is progressively implementing engineering best practices, so customers don't have to worry.