HN user
No No No, start building websites with Claude Code, even if you don't know the basics of coding that's going to give you a better and more secure website.
WordPress was a good idea over a decade ago if you were doing affiliate marketing and couldn't code. But now everyone can code.
Brother Laser B&W
Soc-2 Type 2 is a lot of work for solo-ent. and you might have issues meeting some of the compliance with only one employee there won't be checks and balances. We worked with a local firm and their fee was around $15k but there is ongoing verification. Also there is a process you have to follow moving forward that's probably the largest cost.
I'm not sure SOC-2 is even valuable for most smaller apps. As it's compliance is more aligned for financial apps.
It might be more valuable for you to have a security audit instead of SOC-2.
I started DJ'ing last year I'd almost start there with a FLX4 just to get in to the music more.
I just started with Ableton recently working on remixing tracks I like. Actually working on a remix of Ella Langley's Be Her just because I thought it was a cool genre bending remix.
After you do some remixes creating your own from scratch will be easier.
Mimicing songs and artists you like is a good recommendation, you can also cut up and remix parts of songs you like.
I shared the one week trial links with my team and everyone is picking it up and getting productive. We share tips and tricks, best practices in a slack channel.
YES, now is the best time in history to build a software startup.
Copying isn't your biggest worry.
'French military victories'
Project Hail Mary, I laughed out loud and mocked the premise of the book but it was a great read, one of my best reads ever. Very well done.
Everyone has their typical 'work day' so you just get used to everyone's schedule and planned zooms around that and use slack for general communication. Occasionally I would msg or zoom outside of my core hours but we also had flex time so it worked out well. We generally always scheduled meetings through google calendar so timezones were handled there for coordination. If we mentioned a time in slack or on a zoom it was always given as NYC. It was a non-issue, motivation, sleep, food aren't related to this. Some team members worked later in the day in their local time zone by choose to overlap more with NYC.
They look and feel similar to the user, I still think native is better but React Native looks and feels pro so I'm cool with it.
I've been fully remote since 2012, you'll get the hang of it.
My teams have used a lot of slack msgs and slack huddles, lots of zoom meetings so everyone feels pretty connected.
It's great if you can meet up together at least once a year, work out of an office together and go out, grab drinks, eat meals together for team building.
You'll need a routine, exercise, taking breaks, leverage flexible hours, take a trip and work remote from somewhere cool and interesting.
Take breaks to cook a meal, laundry, play guitar for 10 minutes, get outside for a quick walk, enjoy your pets, say hi to your family, have lunch with a friend, you won't go stir crazy.
Being remote is one of my favorite things about my career, I love it.
Every team member has a job to do in the software process. Each speciality can leverage AI to perform faster and better moving the whole process forward. I think everyone can expand outward with what they are able to do enhanced by AI but they need to stay around their core expertise where they are bringing the most value. Things still need to be maintainable and secure.
Definitely ...
If anything engineers are doing more with AI and aren't limited to just APIs.
They are building more of the UI/UX, Design, Front/Back + API instead of less and meeting/building product's vision.
Supported by Devops.
Every layer of the process will be enhanced by AI so everyone is doing more that our previous process.
I wouldn't limit any layer, enable everyone and every team to do more and be more productive.
This is not the new normal.
Engineering should be doing the engineering.
Product should be doing product.
DevOps should be providing infra.
If end users want to use a report generator or setup a notification rule that's one thing but duct taping features together never is sustainable.
Killing In the Name Of! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWXazVhlyxQ
If you've been there a while and have some latitude start a 'Labs' initiative.
I've been doing this at every company I work at. Ask for 10% or 20% time to spend building prototypes to leverage technology to solve problems that provide a huge value to your org.
Compile a list of problems and look for the lowest lift and highest value to org.
Build one and if it's a success you'll get full buy in.
You can pick the stack you want to work with and integrate with ServiceNow as needed. Not familiar with service now but there are always things you can do with multiple stacks/services that provide value to the org.
Maybe this will scratch your itch and possibly open up a new position/group you could develop inside and run.
You're going to have to embrace some of your director's approaches at least initially, deliver some wins to show him your team can meet his expectations.
Once you have some wins and build trust you can collaborate more on future projects.
The director has a responsibility to implement his vision that's why they hired him. That will be make or break for his success. Your team is responsible for implementing his vision with some collaboration along the way of course but directors have the autonomy to guide their ship.
Forget about best practices and refactoring.
You'll need to duplicate existing code and make it your own or risk adding one piece of new functionality and breaking things that were using that code in 20 unexpected places.
Build new isolated code with best practices.
You'll slowly become familiar with it and get a feel for the best way to make updates and changes safely.
What framework are you using?
SSO is a solved problem in most frameworks and should be easy to implement quickly.
Rails or Laravel it's quick to implement SSO for various flavors.
TailwindUI you still need some design + UI/UX skills but it works great for web apps.
You must hang in the WordPress community.
You really need to check out Herd (Local) and Forge/Vapor (AWS) you'll never say hard to install again.
With Laravel I can go from 0 to new web app in production in 15 Minutes
I can register a new domain, point name servers to CloudFlare.
Setup my local env with Herd from scratch, build a server with Forge, point A record to server IP. Setup SSL cert with Forge/Let's Encrypt.
Start a new laravel project, use jetstream to setup an app with users, auth, 2FA and a dashboard. Create a new GitHub Repo, deploy my code to the new server through Forge.
Create a new user through the UI, Login with 2FA, view Dashboard.
Give me 30 minutes and I can setup a Load Balancer, multiple app and worker servers.
I only know one dev team using Java and they are on a Federal project.
Every tool/framework has it's place and Java is the best choice for that particular team and lots of enterprises.
You should check out the Laravel ecosystem you'd be very surprised how nice it it is to develop with and all the tools and packages that are polished and ready for production.
Laravel Framework Forge (Server Builds/Management) Envoyer (Zero Downtime Deploys) Vapor (Serverless) A Package for almost everything Auth, 2FA out of the box Reverb (websockets) Scout (full text search) Cashier(subs + payments) Dusk (automated browser testing) Herd (Local dev in a box) Horizon (Redis monitoring) Pennant (feature flags) Pint (code style fixer) Pulse (monitoring/performance dashboard) Prompts(beautiful command line apps) Sanctum (API & mobile app auth) Socialite(social auth) Telescope(debug tool) Spark (SaaS in a box) Ray (Debug tool) Debugbar (Debug tool)
I built a funded startup on Laravel we had two developers and one was the CTO so he had limited dev time. We chose the TALL stack (Tailwind UI, Alpine js, Laravel and Livewire). There is no way we could have built it it out fast enough using Java or .net. We passed extensive security audits as it was a platform used by stategovernments, were SOC-2 compliant and built to scale to 500k+ users per state.
A Laravel developer is easily 10x more productive building an MVP and launching it to production than any other framework.
Everything you need in Laravel is fast, easy and pro.
I'm currently leading a team building SPA with react, it's easily 10x more complex and feels even less responsive than the TALL Stack application.
Sure enterprise is more comfortable with java, .net and react but it's always been that way. How many enterprises were building on Rails?
Every tool/framework as a purpose, move outside your comfort zone you might be surprised what's out there.
Stick with your job as long as possible, there isn't any better bootstrap funding than being employed at a software engineer rate. Sounds like a good transition would be to apply to https://tinyseed.com/
One of my friends were in St. Judes in Memphis for cancer treatment. I was there visiting multiple times and would talk to lots of other families whose children were getting treatment and I was stunned by the large percentage who were from New Orleans or Baton Rouge and many with fathers who mentioned they worked at a chemical plant. My friend had stage IV cancer, St. Judes did an amazing job they are still in remission after this initial treatment in the 1990s.
TALL stack (tailwind, alpine js, Laravel, Livewire)
(You could also use Larave + Inertia js + React/Vue)
I think Livewire is way faster to develop in and has less bloat/complexity.
Laravel Jetstream gives you scaffold and auth + 2FA out of the box.
TailwindUI is cut and paste LEGO like components (you'll have to Alpine js some of them but it's quick and easy)
Tons of Laravel packages available to do what you need to do.
Laravel Spark if you want a fast SaaS in a box for connecting to Stripe
Laravel Forge (EC2) or Vapor (Serverless) makes spinning up servers and deployment super easy.
Some of these are paid but you can definitley do it without them but all the paid items have crazy ROI.
Planetscale might be a good fit. DM Sam Lambert on twitter.
Use what you know, what you are efficient with, what you like to use.
I would use Laravel
1) Auth
You can create your Laravel app choosing (Vue + Inertia) or (Livewire) and have auth, 2FA and a profile dashboard in a few minutes, with Laravel Socialite package you can quickly add single sign on with Google Auth, GitHub, Octa, dozens of options. Oauth with Laravel Passport.
2) Simple user dashboard with live updates. I prefer Livewire or you can use View + Inertia these would have been installed in the previous step. You can also use Laravel Nova, or Filament to speed things along building a dashboard.
3) Blog I would run this standalone from the app and use Statamic, Next js or just html + tailwind css depending on the complexity
Laravel Ecosystem
Herd - macOS app that makes setting up your local dev environment instant.
Jetstream - Start a new project with auth and team management.
Telescope - debugging and insight UI
Scout - Lightening fast full text search
Echo - WebSockets
Cashier - Stripe and Paddle Subscriptions
Envoyer - Zero Down Time Deployments
Forge - Server creation and management (EC2)
Vapor - Serverless Creation and management
Horizon - Redis Queue Monitoring
Pennant - feature flags
Sail - Local Docker
Socialite - Social Auth Google, Facebook, GitHub (tons of drivers)
Sanctum - API and mobile auth
Pint - Code style fixer
Dusk - Automated browser testing
Inertia - SPA with server side routing
Livewire - Dynamic server side apps. (Similar to Rails/Hotwire)
And those are just some of the first party packages and tools.
There are well maintained Laravel packages for almost everything else you need.
And working with Laravel is the best developer experience.
We homeschooled our son, we planned on only doing it for a year or two to get around a not recommended by other parents 1st grade teacher at a private school he did Kindergarten at. My wife did most of the teaching. They loved it and continued all the way through high school. There are a ton of resources out there. It was a full time job for my wife and she put a ton of effort in to it. He completed High School early and started taking pull time on line university courses his Junior year. He's made straight As, got accepted at all 7 universities he applied at and got accepted at his first choice and invited to their honors/fellowship program. My wife did a great job so part of it is you get out of it what you put in to it. I'd recommend it. My son's friends who were in public school had tons of drama and stories about negative experiences in school. It probably depends on your school district and options and if someone can focus on homeschooling full time. I'd recommend year round schooling. So you can travel while everyone else is in school. Focus on school during the hot summer months and freezing winter months. Take days off for good weather and events around holidays. It's sort of like remote work for kids. Way more flexible. Plus let them study what they are interested in along with the standard core classes. You can always give it a try in the summer to test it out and see if the parent and student can focus on it and accomplish the required work. We did have a neighbor homeschool and the parent wasn't putting any effort in to it and their child was falling behind, that's not a good thing for their future so try it out and see if everyone is on board. Good luck.
Basic version of DocuSign for sales team - Team couldn't get DocuSign to work the way they wanted. Developed in a week over the summer (EdTech).
Dashboards and reporting tools - Easier to build custom.
Reminders and queues for human follow up with inactive users and potential sales - Easier to build custom.
Importing data from api and csv files - Easier to build custom.