Ancestors

Toot

Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 12:51

Software scale's like a pyramid. At the tip of the pyramid, you've got your "hyperscale" applications like Google Search and Facebook that require so much hardware that you need complex infrastructure to manage it all.

At the base of the pyramid are the applications that could be handled by a couple of medium-powered servers being managed with a few bash scripts.

For some reason, we all seem to believe we're at the tip of the pyramid.

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Descendants

Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 12:57

A Raspberry PI could cope with a million visitors a week without breaking a sweat.

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 12:59

If you're worried about peak loads, push the boat out and get another Raspberry Pi. Heck, get four! Spare no expense!

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Written by Leszek Ciesielski on 2025-01-30 at 12:59

@jasongorman 1.65 visitors per second, easily - assuming they're uniformly distributed 😆

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 13:05

@skolima Back in the days of the first dotcom boom, we were doing £multi-million marketing launches for sites that ran on 2x dual Pentium II servers with 512 MB of RAM each through a 2 Mb T1 connection.

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Written by samir, a very hard worker on 2025-01-30 at 13:06

@jasongorman Just checked and my Raspberry Pi, which runs this Mastodon instance, handles about 50,000 requests per day. And as you may be aware, ActivityPub is not exactly lightweight.

That’s most of its work, but of course it’s doing other things too.

Currently running at around 10% of max CPU, and RAM is at around 25%.

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 13:11

@samir I vote we start a new movement: "Small Tech"

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 13:35

@jasongorman @samir I was talking to some folk the other day about business ideas and Saas. I told them that I’m mostly interested in simple, boring ideas. They might seem irrelevant for us tech folk, but for the people using them they are heaven sent.

At the same time, you can excel technically when the problem you are solving is simple 😉

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 13:36

@ecomba @samir I think the real genius is in making it simple and keeping it that way. I think we can learn more from, say, Criaglist than from Amazon.

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 13:38

@jasongorman @samir absolutely!

It’s also a case of realistic expectations. Building a business that makes you 10k a month is hard, but attainable to almost anyone. A billion ARR business, well…

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 13:45

@ecomba @samir It's like building a helicopter landing pad in your garden just in case you win the lottery jackpot

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 13:45

@jasongorman @samir who doesn’t want a helicopter landing pad? 😄

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 13:46

@ecomba @samir And I can't help wondering if this obsession over hyperscaling distracts from meeting the needs of users today

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 13:49

@jasongorman @samir that’s not even a debate — of course it does! It feeds the ones who inverted billions. Solving the problems of Pete who runs a small business with Sue isn’t appealing to those investors.

What most don’t realise is that you don’t need investors to bootstrap your company to solve real people’s problems.

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Written by samir, a very hard worker on 2025-01-30 at 13:50

@jasongorman @ecomba Of course it does, that’s the point, isn’t it?

This is the culmination of “software development would be much nicer if we didn’t have to think about those pesky users”.

Just nerds making useless things. Except this time, the nerds are also financing them.

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 13:52

@samir @jasongorman “those pesky users”… you have no idea how allergic I’m to that term (and I don’t mean the pesky part)

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Written by samir, a very hard worker on 2025-01-30 at 13:59

@ecomba @jasongorman It occurs to me that we should be reframing modern tech to see the investors as the “users”, and the growth chart as the “product” (so it can be sold to a larger investor before the bottom drops out).

The software and its users are purely accidental complexity here.

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 14:01

@samir @ecomba If anything, they get in the way.

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Written by samir, a very hard worker on 2025-01-30 at 14:02

@jasongorman @ecomba Bingo. Total waste. Let’s skip all that and just do the money thing.

I think I just invented “stocks”.

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 14:04

@samir @ecomba It's actually true that tech start-ups are encourage not to make a profit until they've reached a massive scale. Because profit is actual data. And actual data is not good for "growth stories".

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 14:06

@samir @ecomba OpenAI aren't value at one hundred and twelvety squillions because of how much money they're making. They're valued at that because of how much money they're losing

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 14:10

@jasongorman @samir and that my friends is why I’m not interested in any of that.

I want to humanise the web

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 14:14

@ecomba @samir I do find it very interesting that, after 16 years running a dev training business, with customers all over the world, I've never once heard so much as a peep out of "Big Tech". Not even a casual enquiry.

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Written by Enrique Comba Riepenhausen ✅ on 2025-01-30 at 14:20

@jasongorman @samir well, it’s kind of obvious, you are the baker at the corner of the street, not the corporation selling bread to the masses…

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Written by Not A Convicted Felon on 2025-01-30 at 14:21

@jasongorman @ecomba @samir Because you are their antithesis.

I gave a presentation on Software Sustainability, which covered all of the bases mentioned so far, and a bunch more.

Lots of "good stuff!", "interesting presentation!".

Then... precisely nothing.

Not even a discussion.

People aren't interested, because there's no money in it (for them).

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Written by samir, a very hard worker on 2025-01-30 at 15:33

@sleepyfox @jasongorman @ecomba Yeah, I tried to sell TDD and keeping things lean to a company in Silicon Valley once. It went about as well as it did for Kent Beck.

They loved the word “lean”, they were using it all the time even before I showed up. It was very much a “you keep using that word” situation though.

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Written by Chris Pitts on 2025-01-30 at 13:49

@jasongorman @ecomba @samir But those helicopter landing pad building skills aren’t going to get onto your CV by themselves! 🙂 #CVStuffing

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Written by Jason Gorman on 2025-01-30 at 14:02

@thirstybear @ecomba @samir It's all in my new book, Acing The Helicopter Landing Pad Interview.

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Written by samir, a very hard worker on 2025-01-30 at 13:38

@jasongorman I don’t understand, how will we give all our money to the big tech companies if we don’t use their stuff?

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Written by John Francis on 2025-01-30 at 13:51

@samir @jasongorman what if we used a low end AI to create our own advertising and data collection that we block and run that all on a raspberry pi in the basement?

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Written by João S. O. Bueno on 2025-01-30 at 17:14

@jasongorman

I'd argue that "ahe applications that could be handled by a couple of medium-powered servers" are at the middle-levels of the Pyramid.

At the base level there is the software that will simply run on a 256MB RAM 0.25vCPU VPS.

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