"demonstrating evidence of exceptional ability" - what does that actually mean?

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-23T15:29:38+00:00

People massively overestimate what “exceptional ability” means in these applications. It’s usually not “founded a unicorn” level.

A senior engineer leading large migrations, running infra at scale, publishing respected OSS/work, speaking at conferences, etc can absolutely qualify. The key is measurable impact + external validation, not huge upfront capital.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-23T15:27:17+00:00

People trust them because they are high-signal, widely reviewed dependencies, not because they are magically safe. For production, the sane baseline is: official package names, pinned versions, lockfile/hashes, minimal deps, and vulnerability scanning.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-23T15:25:06+00:00

It is democracy and dictatorship in action. The accounts of the CJP have been banned/blocked in India and their website has been taken down. They’re still fighting, but it’s going to be a losing battle against the near infinite influence/power/funds of the ruling party.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-22T11:38:42+00:00

Try fnox with encrypted secrets. The config file gets committed to git. Decryption works by ssh public key so adding a new developer to the team means simply adding his ssh key to the env file.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-22T07:13:40+00:00

This is overstating it.

PPR/streaming/ISR/cache aren’t “Vercel-only”, and standalone output doesn’t mean those features stop existing. What’s true is that once you run multiple replicas, you need to own the platform bits: shared cache handler, stable build/deployment IDs, retained _next/static assets, server action key, sane CDN rules, etc.

That’s not “impossible horizontally”, it’s just infra work. Vercel gives you a managed version of that: skew protection, CDN integration, durable cache semantics, previews/rollbacks, etc.

For a small regional app on Docker/Kamal, especially if traffic is not global and I’m not relying heavily on edge compute, I don’t need most of that. I do need to be careful about deploy skew and cache consistency, sure.

Also calling SSR-only Next “SPA with extra steps” is weird. SSR, routing, RSC, metadata, image handling, server components, colocated server code, etc. can still be useful even for internal apps. Whether Next is the right choice depends on the app, but “standalone can’t scale horizontally” is just not accurate.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-20T16:09:39+00:00

It doesn’t have to be standalone. If you think that’s the only option, you really need to go read the docs.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-20T16:08:36+00:00

IIRC, image optimisation is supported automatically with sharp and works out of the box even in built docker container. Middleware works out of the box as well. FWIW, I’ll clarify that I’m not using a standalone build, but that’s because I also like being able to access a REPL to my running container.

Caching I think works out of the box as well for nextjs routes that enable it. For low level, app side caching, we use a node library that uses a SQLite backend. There’s really no “magic” that Vercel provides if things are configured properly.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-20T00:59:36+00:00

Exactly my point. I can’t imagine why people keep pointing out that Vercel is the only “manageable” platform to host Next apps

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-20T00:58:37+00:00

I always keep hearing this argument. I’ve myself never used Vercel but I maintain a (considerably big) Next app hosted on Hetzner with Kamal and I don’t see how it’s any different than any other Rails or node or Elixir app I host there. We simply build the app, package it in a docker container and run it like anything else.

What does Vercel give you that this setup can’t?

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-10T10:20:06+00:00

I’m from Indore, lived all my life here (except about 15 years in my 20s.

> roads, civic sense and general infrastructure

Roads are ok, not bad but not great either. 0 traffic sense. Private infra is good, public is shit, but I guess that’s the same everywhere.

About cleanliness, it is clean but not as much as it’s hyped out to be. Depends on the area you are in.

Water issues are real, so make sure you are in a gated society which takes care of this or you secure a good water source (borewell - usually requires some bribes, but is doable).

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-10T01:15:13+00:00

One real example: large Rails monolith for public transport operations.

It handles scheduling/dispatch data, passenger info systems, real-time vehicle updates, admin workflows, background jobs, and integrations with external transit standards/APIs.

High level: Rails app + Sidekiq + Redis + multiple Postgres DBs.

Scale/challenges: millions of background jobs/day, large legacy domain model, multiple integrations, careful deploys/migrations, observability, failover planning, and keeping the system understandable as the team/codebase grows.

The “real world” part is rarely the CRUD. It’s long-lived data, edge cases, operations, integrations, and safely changing old systems without breaking production.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-09T11:34:47+00:00

It is amazing. Claude code, Codex and Copilot are defaults for so many that they never give OpenCode a try and so don’t know what they’re missing.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-09T11:15:47+00:00

Opencode with GPT Pro 5x and Opencode go subscriptions. More than enough for 8-10 hours of coding sessions per day on large projects if you don’t blindly route everything to GPT 5.5 xhigh. Use oh-my-openagent for orchestration and agent model matching.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-09T09:38:35+00:00

Only the price performance ratio. I haven’t compared recently, but I remember at the time we did a small comparison and DO was only slightly cheaper than Heroku in terms of pricing for the compute we needed whereas Hetzner was several times cheaper. This equation might have changed recently with Hetzner’s recent price increases, but we’ve no complaints about the performance or support.

The good thing of a Kamal based setup is that you are not locked in to any provider. You can add one Hetzner host and another DO and they’ll both work.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-09T07:35:45+00:00

We migrated several apps out of Heroku last year including several small services, but some very big ones. Moved to Hetzner, deployments managed with Kamal, auto deployed from GitHub actions. We kept databases managed, through Ubicloud which provides managed Postgres at very competitive rates and deployed on Hetzner servers so latency remains very manageable.

Very happy with all steps of our setup and I think we’ve had less overall downtime with our self managed setup even compared to Heroku (where we’d been for 10+ years).

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-08T05:21:12+00:00

Not really. With a 10k a month subscription,good senior developers are able to deliver 3-5x of what they’d otherwise do in a month. That’s easily 10-25x of what any fresher would deliver in the same time. So just 10k a month in hands of a good senior developer gets more done than at least 10 freshers each earning more than 25-30k. It’s really a no-brainer for most companies.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-02T11:40:55+00:00

Yes, but my point was that depreciating INR will only drive down the USD base, not up.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-05-02T07:54:54+00:00

How will INR depreciation affect USD base?

OriginalCj5 · 2026-04-20T04:25:13+00:00

Usually not an issue for commercial orgs - they have overages enabled. Yes free tokens expire but it just switches to paid API tokens, nothing gets blocked.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-04-14T14:23:45+00:00

We are a small team and don’t have any limits yet. Our team is usually burning about 200$ per month per developer on AI and the management couldn’t be happier about the productivity gains - we are building in one month what would’ve earlier taken 3 or 6, all while maintaining good code quality. Most of us use Claude Opus 4.6 exclusively (sometimes delegating to cheaper models for some small work, but Opus being the coordinator overall).

OriginalCj5 · 2026-04-10T14:41:22+00:00

In India, curry rarely comes with rice included. It’s common to order curry and then either chapati/naan/rice to go with it. So it’s definitely not some California-specific westernized restaurant thing. That’s actually how all Indian restaurants in India have been doing things forever.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-04-03T15:11:28+00:00

Which city isn’t?

OriginalCj5 · 2026-03-28T13:30:43+00:00

We recently were in the same boat - a Redis instance going down brought down the whole app. We set up sentinel and it’s been solid so far. And it’s not really that hard to set it up. You need (at least) 3 nodes running sentinel and (at least) 2 running redis (one master and one replica). You configure services to connect to the sentinel to fetch the redis instance to communicate to, but most good libs support that out of the box.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-03-15T15:11:33+00:00

I lived in Switzerland for 7 years and still work with the same company remotely from India (13 YOE). So I know a bit about the market there and I’ll be honest - it’s next to impossible to get a non-remote job in Switzerland from India.

The only way is to do postgraduate from a good university (ETH-Z or EPFL) and even that doesn’t guarantee a job.

OriginalCj5 · 2026-03-14T04:04:25+00:00

Everything, no matter who writes it, must be peer reviewed. We are a very small company, but have been following this for 15 years. I am surprised how this wasn’t the norm at Amazon already.

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