Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.
[1] https://www.graylog.org/products/open-source [2] https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/
No need to manage extra infrastructure for logging, New Relic works pretty well and also has alerts, and Vector makes it easy to move to a new provider or self-hosted solution without reinstalling agents: just add a new sink to your config file.
That's a typical 2010-era stack.
We're almost in 2022, things have evolved.
PHP, Redis, MariaDB and a makefile to run docker-compose commands.
Nothing wrong with it tbh, it runs on a VPS
All that to say that PHP + MySQL/MariaDB has evolved will get you much further than it did in 2010 without losing its simplicity. Current trends are backed by tech giants working with millions of servers and billions of users, and they push for technologies that fit their use cases. They goal is not to make a one man shop.
It's pretty clear that if you want to shorten time to market, you leverage existing assets - when it's people using React or FLOSS databases, no one bats an eye, but farming out tasks here and there that aren't worth your burn rate (pay someone cheaper who can do it faster), how is that different?
When the government hires contractors they're not considered part of the government workforce (ie, civil servants).
Reminds me of people that call themselves “retired early” when they are effectively entrepreneurs with their own businesses and side hustles.
Kudos to the original poster though for making a business that they own by themselves I assume. However, taking all the credit for themselves despite using contractors to build their company is disingenuous.
I think of it this way: if I'm solo and I hire a CPA to do my taxes or a bookkeeper to balance the books, does that make me a two-person company? That doesn't feel like an accurate description from my perspective.
I ran my company as a single founder with nine contractors working from a few hours a month to maybe 15 hours a week. All little task-based projects like loading up new content from a repo or answer support emails. Technically, letter of the law, we were 10 people. But from a cost/profit perspective (which I would posit is the most important aspect) it was very much a one-person company.
It's interesting to read why he thinks he got rejected.
But small businesses and big businesses are fundamentally different. I come from the restaurant space, and all my favourite restaurants are 'small' and likely can't exist in any place other than where they are. They can't scale. But they're much better qualitatively than restaurants that can scale. Some of the other products and things in my life that I enjoy also come from small artisans and could never scale. And that's OK.
He didn't build a massively scalable business but he did build a (seemingly) good one.
Other than that, I think you are correct he was reading too much into his demographics/education.
I wonder though if the niche search engine market can fetch them enough money to be profitable.
Oh, burn! /s
