ccll

> But unfortunately it has been slowly declining for a long time…

That could be a sign of “stability”.

I’m personally using Django since two years ago and have the same feeling as yours, there are nothing exciting happening in this area, but after two years of use I came to the conclusion that it’s features are too stable, so nothing new need to happen in the first place.

It’s a common myth that software should be always updating and introducing new features. No, it’s not, if it can solve the problem great it doesn’t need to change at all.

JS/TS/Rust are still in their exploration phase, new ideas, new exprimentations, new frameworks come and go everyday, and that’ the reason they look vibrant.

Before settle down with Django, for years I’ve used bleeding edge tech like Meteorjs/React/Nextjs/Vue/Nuxtjs/Svelte/SvelteKit/… in real world, or try to rewrite real world app with them, and the biggest problem of all of them is that they all have their quirks and things in JavaScript area are changing too often and too much, I’m so tired to chase all these fancy new ideas.

For 90% web apps Django+Htmx+AlpineJS can serve me good and do all the things that new tech can do easily, at the same time keep incredible stability.

I believe Rails or Laraval are same here, you don’t need to switch in 90% cases, just relex and appreciate the stability they bring.

That’s alright and a very valid point, I too will appreciate it if I’m working for an employer.

But the OP’s context is about creating your own startup, then things work very differently now, and that’s the reason I feel disappointed, because people are not thinking and replying in the OP’s context, but rather in their own, this makes their point pointless, including yours I’m afraid.

Some how I agree with the author.

In the last decade I’ve known and worked with dozens of one-man tech startup founders, they basically fall into two categories, the ‘product’ group and the ‘engineer’ group.

The ‘product’ guys tend to use boring technology like PHP or Python to duct tape their product and ship it ASAP and pivot very quickly if things didn’t work out, they NEVER write a single test.

The ‘engineer’ guys tend to use bleeding edge technology like meteor/nextjs/svelt/cypress/terraform/k8s/nomad/netlify/cloudfunction/(insert a hundred tech here)/… and polish their product alot before launching, including writing a lot tests.

To be honest, the ‘product’ group are way more successful financially than the ‘engineer’ group in my small sample dataset.

I’m in the ‘engineer’ group myself, and I tend to polish a lot, lately I’ve been thinking about the two different mindsets, and I get to the same conclusion with the OP’s article, that code quality and maintenancibility are great ideas, but unfortunately *for a startup* they are not directly related with making money, at least not linearly directly related.

Startup is about exploring undiscovered market opportunities, and it’s full of uncertainties and assumptions, your job is to find out whether the assumptions are true or false, not to write the most stable and easy-to-refactor code.

Guess what? Tests are about certainty, about known rules. In week 1 you write lots of tests to cover your 80% business logic, and in week 2 you find out your original idea does not work and need to change course, and all the written tests are garbage now, then week 3 same thing happen again…and all your precious time are wasted chasing the wrong target.

One thing I disagree though is that you don’t need to be literally rich to begin writing tests, as soon as your business logic and model is proven, like making positive cash flow or user growth is promising, then it’s the right time to write some tests, to improve the code quality and your confidence of future refactoring.

Disappointed to see that most comments here missed the point in the article.

All these comments claim that automated tests make their code stable, fast, easy to refactor, etc.

But the article is not talking about those characters of the code, it’s about pivoting fast and making money. Does your stable, easy-to-refactor code directly make you good money? If yes, then please talk more about it, this is the correct response to the article, please don’t just claim your code is stable and easy-to-refactoring, and in the meanwhile have nothing to do with making money.

This is great example of unit tests, but I don’t think it’s comparable with OP’s scenario. Math laws are ‘fixed’ and well known, you can just write fixed tests to find the discrepancy between the laws and your implentation. Where OP’s point is about ‘startup business logics’, the ‘laws’ here are constantly changing all the time, which means you will constantly throw out most of your tests along the way.

How about solutions like https://hashids.org/ which let you keep auto increment intger PKs and present the IDs to the users in a obfuscated string form?

Haven't updated the installation for month so I just learned the unfortunate news from your comment. Guess I'll continue using it until it breaks, then maybe switch to vanilla VSCode Remote SSH, or try some alternatives like [coder](https://github.com/coder/coder).

I have a standard 42U server rack in my home and 7 2U servers in it now, all of them are retired E5-v3 generation from local datacenters which are so cheap.

All my homelab services run on a single 2U huawei rack server with dual E5-2680 v3, 128GB RAM, Intel P3600 for OS, and 120 TB HDD for storage, with 10Gbps networking, the other servers are used for testing and messing with.

The OS is Debian 10, and I deployed a single node k3s to deploy my services as the management is easier and I may scale them to more nodes in the future.

Major services:

- Ceph (rook-ceph) for managing the 120TB storage, and the CephFS are shared through Samba as the family NAS. It stores family videos and photos (through Nextcloud PV), Blueray movies, old games from the '90s to pre-Steam era, emulator ROMS including MAME, Wii, GBA, PS, XBox, etc. 2-replicas for not-so-important data like games and movies, 3-replicas for personal and family data, 5-replicas for very important data. And I'm so happy with Ceph, it's so stable and easy to extend compared to other solutions like RAID, Longhorn and GlusterFS.

- Nextcloud, I have 3 Nextcloud deployments in the same k8s cluster, one for my personal projects like design documents that can be shared with others, one for the family to view and upload family videos and photos, and one for my personal private data that should not supposed to share with anyone.

- Home Assistant to monitor and control my home.

- Gitlab, stores all my personal project code.

- qbittorrent, for downloading and seeding torrents.

- Gitpod, as my main remote development environment, I can develop wherever I like!

The k3s uses CertManager to issue and renew Let's Encrypt certificates for my services, so I can access my homelab with HTTPS securely from outside.