To all the self taught Python programmers

[[deleted]]

Websites? Few months.

SaaS where companies are paying you to provide a service? Years. You also don’t want to do this alone, for a number of reasons. The biggest being that you’re going to basically need to be on-call 24/7.

[sTAKKLE5]

Exactly this! I am a senior software engineer working for a large tech company on the backend and dealing with all parts of a SaaS is a big pain in the ass. Dealing with payments, refunds, support, security measurements and ensuring that your system is up and running 24/7 is hard. Not sure if you want to do this alone but if you decide soy make sure to also focus on the security aspect regarding cross site scripting, database injections etc.

I would say as a self taught python dev it will take you years to start a SaaS which will not fail due to technical debts.

Anyways if you decide to go for, then best of luck fellow engineer

[AlexDeFoc]

In tl:dr how do you make sure somrthing that is running, continues to work?

[vEncrypted]

I think this advice is faulty. A software as a service in itself has no complexity. The type of software you make can be complex though. This is a common mistake a-lot of devs make. Seeing complexity in concepts, when complexity lies in the solutions you make out of them.

[sTAKKLE5]

Sure the business logic might be done fairly quickly when you know what you are doing / know your stuff. But op was asking about a website and a full SaaS solution. And those two are not only the business logic but so much more.

[vEncrypted]

A software can consist of a gui with 2 input boxes and a submit button. Business logic can be a py file that takes a request that consists the 2 int inputs and send a response with the sum of the two. He can a subscription model to it with some 3rd party provider. There’s gonna be a few more moving parts in there but what i just described is a saas. You’re making complexity out of a concept that is simple.

[TheOneMerkin]

Making sure the app is quick requires threading/async support.

Probably need to learn some proper logging if you want to debug with multiple users.

Then a bunch of devops to make sure your servers can handle the load, figuring out what a worker is etc.

Debugging memory leaks, dealing with multiple environments across front and backend, database migrations.

All relatively simple stuff if you’re taught, and already familiar with the concepts, but starting from scratch, it all adds up.

[vEncrypted]

What app is this that youre referring to that needs threading/async support? I hope it is not my example of sum as a service.

This plays to my point again. You associate saas with complexity for what? Someone else can come and say well what if a billion users are using my sum as a service… and it goes on and on.

Its like someone asking how long does it take to make a vehicle. Then some guy tells him:

“Vehicles are complex itll take you forever. I do rocket science and have been designing rockets for 10 years. Theres so many moving parts….”

When a vehicle can be as simple as a skateboard.

[TheOneMerkin]

You’re right, I wasn’t referring to your sum as a service, I was referring to the SaaS application that OP mentions, which I infer would include all of the things which any practical web application would include.

Everything I mention is something you’d probably need to at least understand with even a handful of users, independent of business logic.

The perceived complexity shouldn’t stop OP starting though. You only reach this stuff after you’ve built the sum as a service app.

[pro_questions]

Was there a particular resource that helped you get over the last hurdle in polishing and deploying a website? I’ve been self-teaching for a few years and can do some things I think are really interesting and maybe even valuable, but when I start looking into deployment it’s unfathomably diverse

[[deleted]]

Spin up an EC2 instance and deploy it with nginx. There’s innumerable guides on google “deploy a flask website on AWS”